Rules for what are groups of people called?

[Peelee]

So New Yorkers are only from New York city, while people from other parts of the state of New York are...?

I wish there was a difference, but people from Washington State and people from Washington, DC are both called "Washingtonians."

You just have to infer from context. In fact, in the state of Washington people frequently say they are from "Washington State" to make things clear. Whereas people from Oregon of course don't say, "I'm from Oregon State."

I don't suppose it would make sense to insist that people from Washington DC call themselves Columbians!

Maybe they should be Capitolists.

[paddyfool]

Maybe they should be Capitolists.

Hillists? DeeCeesians?

[Fyraltari]

So New Yorkers are only from New York city, while people from other parts of the state of New York are...?

How about new Yorkers and New Yorkians as well as Washingtoners and Washingtonians?

[Rynjin]

Maybe they should be Capitolists.

In my experience people who actually have to live in DC just call themselves "miserable".

[Peelee]

In my experience people who actually have to live in DC just call themselves "miserable".

Maybe they would be happier if they were able to have roads instead of a lot of interconnected lines of potholes.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

How about new Yorkers and New Yorkians as well as Washingtoners and Washingtonians?

Since they were amongst the first to legalize certain recreational drug in the US, maybe the appropriate name should be Washingstoners.
I'll see myself out
GW

[Rockphed]

Maybe they would be happier if they were able to have roads instead of a lot of interconnected lines of potholes.

They just need to be introduced to Detroit roads. Everything seems better when you have something horrible to compare it to.

Speaking of DC, I find that now that I live in relative proximity thereto that I confuse people when I mention that my wife is from "north west Washington". Seems that the north-west side of the capitol district is rather a crime ridden slum. I think I have stared a half dozen people down in confusion over this.

[Peelee]

They just need to be introduced to Detroit roads. Everything seems better when you have something horrible to compare it to.

Speaking of DC, I find that now that I live in relative proximity thereto that I confuse people when I mention that my wife is from "north west Washington". Seems that the north-west side of the capitol district is rather a crime ridden slum. I think I have stared a half dozen people down in confusion over this.

Maybe try a different route. Something like "Southern Canada. Really southern."

[Rockphed]

Maybe try a different route. Something like "Southern Canada. Really southern."

I mean I could change to saying "the Puget sound", but I feel like continuing to confuse people.

[Scarlet Knight]

How about new Yorkers and New Yorkians as well as Washingtoners and Washingtonians?

We prefer New Yorkers while the city prefers New Yaw-kas.

[Grey Watcher]

Hmm; as a New Yorker living outside the city I don't find that in my region. Are you from Long Island?

Plus you have me thinking about how NYC people often like to refer to themselves by borough : Brooklynite, Staten Islander, Manhattanite. Funny how people from Queens & the Bronx refer to themselves as "Queens residents" and "from da Bronx" respectively.

Well, we "Queenian" or "Queenite" sounds dumb and if we just call ourselves "Queens", that implies something else entirely.

But seriously, at least for Queens in particular, we often think of ourselves as being from particular neighborhoods: Astoria, Jackson Heights, Forest Hills, Rego Park, etc. Even on our mail, we write "Astoria, NY" not "Queens, NY" (unlike Brooklynites or are more likely to just put "Brooklyn, NY"). So we are more likely to use group names that reflect that (eg "Astorian"). Can't speak for how they do it in the Bronx.

So New Yorkers are only from New York city, while people from other parts of the state of New York are...?

Not to be discussed unless absolutely necessary.

Though I suppose, again, people mostly identify with a region or town in that case, like Albanite or... what would call someone from Buffalo anyway? Buffalonian?

Though it doesn't get too much worse than the nickname people from my home state of Massachusetts got stuck with....

[TexasSkiandFish]

People from Bozeman, montana are called bozos.

[Peelee]

People from Bozeman, montana are called bozos.

That's no way to talk about Zefram Cochrane!

[truemane]

Though it doesn't get too much worse than the nickname people from my home state of Massachusetts got stuck with....

Matt Damon?

That's no way to talk about Zefram Cochrane!

"Don't try to be a Bozeman. Just be a bozo. And let history decide."

[Aedilred]

Some of my favourites:

Savoy -> Savoyard
Manchester -> Mancunian
Monaco -> Monégasque
Barbados -> Bajan
Netherlands -> Dutch
East London -> Cockney

Spoiler: Etymologies

Show

The "-ard" onn "Savoyard" is just a marginally unusual ending, comparable to "Lombard"

Mancunian is a fairly modern coinage from the supposed Roman name for the town, Mancunium. "Manchester" itself purports at a Roman origin, as all -chester, -cester or -caster towns and cities do (being Anglicised versions of caestrum, a Roman army camp.

Monegasque is from the name for the town in the old native Romance language, translated into French.

Bajan derives from Barbados by a series of successive shortenings and then affricating the middle consonant.

"Dutch" simply means "the people" in that language (as in German). More of the issue here is that the modern Netherlands neither contains the whole of the Dutch-speaking people, nor the whole of the Netherlands. Like the USA, it's a collection of states which owes its unity to historic political factors more than anything else. So neither name is really all that satisfactory for it, but there's also not a lot else. ("Holland" is commonly used in English instead, which is at least geographically specific, but a bit like calling the USA "New York").

No idea where "Cockney" comes from. Though true Cockneys are increasingly an endangered species in any case.

[SirKazum]

No idea where "Cockney" comes from. Though true Cockneys are increasingly an endangered species in any case.

I've read somewhere that "cockney" comes through a circuitous route from some 1600's slang or something like that, where people from "the big cities" were called "cockled eggs" because they were too soft or something.

[Vizzerdrix]

I am from Maine, and to us, their are two types of people. Mainers, being obviously people from Maine, and From Away, being everyone else.

[Peelee]

I am from Maine, and to us, their are two types of people. Mainers, being obviously people from Maine, and From Away, being everyone else.

Fun fact! The rest of the US has a different way to call people from Maine. Specifically, they are called "wait, people live in Maine? What, like, 10 people? More? REALLY?!"

[Fyraltari]

Fun fact! The rest of the US has a different way to call people from Maine. Specifically, they are called "wait, people live in Maine? What, like, 10 people? More? REALLY?!"

See, these ten are the main Mainers, they're mainly there to manage the mainland.

[Vizzerdrix]

Fun fact! The rest of the US has a different way to call people from Maine. Specifically, they are called "wait, people live in Maine? What, like, 10 people? More? REALLY?!"

See, these ten are the main Mainers, they're mainly there to manage the mainland.

http://gph.is/1Us4pat

[Eldan]

See, these ten are the main Mainers, they're mainly there to manage the mainland.

And if they rent a place in Maine, are they Maine Tenants?

[Scarlet Knight]

And if they rent a place in Maine, are they Maine Tenants?

Only if the workers who take care of their rentals are Maine Tenants men.

[Wraith]

As BrotherOni remarked on the previous page, how different groups choose to label themselves is as much a matter of culture as it is language; the way that a group defines "Us" versus "Them" and whether or not that distinction is a close one, impersonal one, antagonist one, etc.

The example he gave in regards to Japan's label for the Chinese - "China People". Not "The People" or "Other People", but a strict definition of "You are from there, I am from here, and that is different".

And as I think about that, I realise how the same thing occurs in English and why what I call myself isn't just a fad or a quirky turn of phrase, but was decided by something that happened millennia ago.

The apocryphal story that brought this thought into focus was President John F. Kennedy's address to the people of Berlin in 1963, when he publicly declared himself to be a brand of jam doughnut; "Ich bin ein Berliner" being an inadvertent pun for a brand of confectionary and a grammatically appropriate way of saying, "I am a citizen of Berlin" in support of the West German resistance against the Soviet East. Everyone in the crowd knew what he meant, they all cheered, and tabloid journalists had their fun - no harm done.

An there's the thing; they recognised what he wanted to say because the way that German works means that the suffix of -er is appropriate to mean 'belongs to' whereas in English we don't have a single unifying equivalent, and it's because of the French. Kind of.

As an example; the biggest city near to where I live is Nottingham - yes it's real, yes we have a castle, yes there is a real Sherwood Forest. Despite the medieval folklore, the name of the city goes back a thousand years before that to our Viking ancestors and the supposed-founder of the town, a guy named Snot who was a thane (a minor noble, for those non-Skyrim players) and needed a place to call his own. Snot-thane-hame - "Snot-the-Thane's-Home".
Then in 1066, Britain was conquered by the French Baron from Normandy led by William the Conqueror who became King William I of England, and he ordered a census to find out exactly while kind of crummy, backwater island he had gotten himself into. It apparently turned out that native speakers of medieval French didn't have to deal with the sn- combination very often and struggled with it, so in a stroke of pure bureaucracy they decided that they just wouldn't bother and shortened it down - welcome to Not-tan-ham. Nottingham.

I don't know how much of that is true (from what I know of local history though, it seems highly plausible) but nonetheless it got me to thinking: In Nottingham, we wouldn't have cheered for JFK and would instead of just looked at each other, confused.
"Nottingham-er" just doesn't work. I know what he's implying, but words no good speak bad with. In fact, there isn't another equivalent, to my knowledge - no Nottinghamite, no Nottinger, and Nottinghamionian is just nonsense and part of that is because we generally don't think of ourselves as coming from "Snot's Home". I come from My Home.

It's not unique to the city. Someone above mentioned that people from East London were Cockneys, which strictly speaking is only partially true - to be an actual Cockney you need to have been born in a particular parish, traditionally within earshot of the bells of a particular church. The accent gets about a bit, but genuine cockneys are, more or less, a village within a city that still defines itself as 'other' to those who live on the other side of an imaginary boundary, because that's where their ancestors lived in 500AD.

And then in the 1600's you guys picked up all of our nonsensical linguistic baggage, added a generous dose of Puritanistic allegory and metaphor, and shipped it with you to the new world where it crashed headlong into a thousand native languages, a not-insignificant swathe of Dutch, and Spanish besides.

The point that I am laboriously getting around to is, we have had 1500 years and 5 separate languages in which to argue about this sort of thing and we still get it wrong - don't ask me how you get "Geordie" from "person who lives in the city named Newcastle". The important thing is, you guys in the US have barely had 300 years to work on it and that's hardly enough time to reach consensus. You'll get there in the end, and I promise it will make as little sense as possible to anyone who doesn't live there.

[Scarlet Knight]

Wraith; I don't care if the story is true or not; it is too good a story to not accept as true!

[Rockphed]

Having looked at census records, I believe that petty bureaucrats would just drop letters that they did not have orthography for. There is a reason that the us government invented soundex.

[Ajustusdaniel]

Designating where someone is from also varies based on the location and origin of the speaker. I mean, there's obvious language differences, but beyond that, in a small town in a hilly region with a large seasonal tourist population, the latter might be "Summer People," or "Flatlanders." There's a large swathe of New York State where describing anyone as "from the city," means New York City, regardless of the existence of other, perhaps nearby cities in New York. Contrariwise, from experience, telling people from outside the United States that I'm a New Yorker leads to the assumption that I'm from NYC.

[DavidSh]

Having looked at census records, I believe that petty bureaucrats would just drop letters that they did not have orthography for. There is a reason that the us government invented soundex.

And you also get misreading of hand-writing. Thus, when I look up some of my ancestors in transcribed census records, I sometimes see "c" mis-transcribed as "e".

[Rockphed]

And you also get misreading of hand-writing. Thus, when I look up some of my ancestors in transcribed census records, I sometimes see "c" mis-transcribed as "e".

I have done some transcribing. It is really hard to read some handwriting.

[Fyraltari]

Then in 1066, Britain was conquered by the French Baron from Normandy led by William the Conqueror who became King William I of England

William was duke of Normandy, not baron.

and he ordered a census to find out exactly while kind of crummy, backwater island he had gotten himself into. It apparently turned out that native speakers of medieval French didn't have to deal with the sn- combination very often and struggled with it, so in a stroke of pure bureaucracy they decided that they just wouldn't bother and shortened it down - welcome to Not-tan-ham. Nottingham.

I can't find a single modern french word with a "sn" sound even. It can pronounced fairly easily by any French speaker but we don't have any reason to, it would seem.

I don't know how much of that is true (from what I know of local history though, it seems highly plausible)

That's definitely a thing French bureaucrats would do.

but nonetheless it got me to thinking: In Nottingham, we wouldn't have cheered for JFK and would instead of just looked at each other, confused."Nottingham-er" just doesn't work. I know what he's implying, but words no good speak bad with. In fact, there isn't another equivalent, to my knowledge - no Nottinghamite, no Nottinger, and Nottinghamionian is just nonsense and part of that is because we generally don't think of ourselves as coming from "Snot's Home". I come from My Home.

That's interesting. French cities and towns all have an associated demonym. Generally something obscure and related to the latin etymology of the places' name that you need to go on Wikipedia to know.

Anyhoo, here's Wikipedia's list of English demonyms.

[Vinyadan]

French seems to have something against s+consonant in particular. See the various fenêtre* (<fenestra), épaule** (<spathula), etc.

* window **shoulder

One name edit I enjoy is that of Scorsese. Martin Scorsese's ancestors were actually Italians with the surname Scozzese = "Scotsman".