Why does English have different suffixes for languages (-ese, -ish, -an)?

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Why does English have different suffixes for languages (-ese, -ish, -an)?

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3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The “true” English demonym suffix is -ish, e.g. Spanish, Turkish, Welsh, Swedish.

However sometime in the last few centuries English speakers stopped applying that suffix, and instead started borrowing existing demonyms from other languages, mostly French.

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