Demonyms aren’t about demons, but they can be in Table Topics questions for Toastmasters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might guess that demonyms are about demons, but you would be wrong. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a demonym as:   

 

“a word (such as Nevadan or Sooner) used to denote a person who inhabits or is native to a particular place.”

 

The place might be a city, county, state, country, or continent. There also is a Wikipedia page with a set of lists. The word demonym comes from a rather obscure 160-page 1990 book by Paul Dixon titled What Do You Call a Person From...? A Dictionary of Resident Names. Neither my local public library, nor the Boise State University Library has a copy. But the topic also is discussed in a December 2010 Master of Arts thesis by Michael Roberts at the University of New England, titled The Lexical Semantics of Social Categories: Demonyms and Occupation Words in English. Mr. Roberts adds that there are two categories of demonyms - endonyms (or autonyms) which are words used by people of that place to refer to people from a place, and exonyms which are words used by people who are not of that place to refer to people from a place.

 

I blogged about demonyms for cities in a post on September 2, 2013 titled What should we call residents of that city? and on March 26, 2017 in a second post titled Table Topics – What should we call people who live in that city? In southwest Idaho we have demonyms for city residents like Boiseans, Meridianites, Nampans, and Caldwellers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But Boiseans could either refer to residents of Boise city (the state capital in Ada County), or the adjacent Boise county, as shown above.  

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says demonym was first used in 1990, but the Oxford English Dictionary says the current 1990 meaning:

 

“A proper name by which a native or resident of a specific place is known”

 

supersedes two other obsolete meanings:

 

“A general descriptive name used by a writer as a pen name, e. g. ‘An Amateur’, ‘An English Gentleman’, etc.” [first used in 1867]

 

and

 

“A personal name derived from the name of a place from which a person comes.” [first used in 1895]

 

Back on June 26, 1963 President John F. Kennedy famously gave his Ich bin ein Berliner speech, which the Wikipedia page notes led to an urban legend that he’d called himself a jelly doughnut (Berliner). But people in Berlin would call that food a Pfannkuchen. Two other meaty German names for city residents are Frankfurter and Hamburger.

 

Wikipedia has a List of demonyms for US states and territories which shows Hoosiers rather than Indianans, but otherwise mostly shows forming the demonyms using +ns, +ians, +ers, +ites, +ders, and +rs (preceded by appropriate subtractions). Residents of Connecticut are Connecticuters; those carrying knives should be Connecticutters. But Hawaiians is reserved for people of Native Hawaiian descent and the rest just are awkwardly known as Hawaii residents.  

 

Images of a demon logo and Idaho counties map were adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

 

UPDATE

The Pearls Before Swine cartoon on February 25, 2023 is about talking to a Hamburger and a Frankfurter.