Why are ethnonyms and nationalities proper nouns?

September 11, 2022 1:08 AM

Everywhere I look on the internet, ethnonyms and nationalities (Turk, Serb, Pole, etc) are considered proper nouns. Same for members of a religious group (Jew, Christian, etc). This doesn't seem to fit with the definition of a proper noun. Why is this?

Wikipedia says a proper noun "identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity", as opposed to a common noun, which "refers to a class of entities […] and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class".

It seems pretty clear to me that "Turk", for instance, is not a single entity, but refers to a instance (a single person) of a class (people who are Turkish).

This book seems to point to the same idea, writing on page three:

Proper names are written with a capital initial letter. This property does not perfectly distinguish proper nouns from common nouns, since not all nouns beginning with a capital letter are proper nouns. For instance, in English, ethnic or national adjectives (African, Canadian) are written with a capital initial letter but they are not proper names (see Quirk et al., 1985)

I can also draw comparisons to other names for individuals who are part of a particular class which are not proper nouns — for instance "golfer" is a common noun, but grammatically, it seems like it should operate in the same way as a ethnonym (I don't mean this comparison to minimize ethnic identity or imply that these are the same — I just don't see why they'd be different for the purposes of being considered a proper noun, given the definitions of "proper noun" that I've seen).

This seems like it should be a common question, but I haven't found anything written about it. Is there a good explanation of why this is, or a definition of a proper noun that makes this clear?

posted by wesleyac to Writing & Language (35 answers total)

Demonymns are always capitalized in English.
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 1:38 AM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Yes, I'm aware that they're always capitalized, but I don't think the definition of a proper noun is a noun that is capitalized. I'm curious about why they're considered to be proper nouns.
posted by wesleyac at 1:41 AM on September 11, 2022

They aren't proper nouns. I believe the rule to look at is specifically what is prescribed for ethnonyms and demonyms.
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 1:44 AM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Demonyms are capitalised because they mean "of [place]". So a Pole is someone "of Poland", an African is someone "of Africa", etc. As countries and continents are capitalised, so are their demonyms.
posted by underclocked at 1:49 AM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Sunflowers Beneath the Snow, I guess then the question is, why are so many websites wrong about this? For instance: Turk on wordtype.org, Jew on jewishunpacked.com; study.com; answers.com, American on socratic.org, etc.

Again, the question is not "why are they capitalized?" it's "why are they proper nouns?"

If the answer to "why are they proper nouns?" is "because they're capitalized", I would like a source for that.

If the answer to "why are they proper nouns?" is "they aren't", I would like to know why everyone on the internet seems to say otherwise.

(I will try to make this the last of the threadsitting, sorry!)
posted by wesleyac at 1:55 AM on September 11, 2022

But they are not capitalised in other European languages
Je suis français; Ich bin deutsch, Sono italiano; Soy español. so the explanation that they mean of a country/region does not apply in those languages but does in English.
posted by TheRaven at 2:11 AM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

If the answer to "why are they proper nouns?" is "they aren't", I would like to know why everyone on the internet seems to say otherwise.

Maybe they assume that since the words are derived from proper nouns they must be proper nouns too, not realising the specifics of the definition of "proper noun". This wouldn't be the first time that a lot of people on the internet are wrong about something.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:12 AM on September 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

the question is not "why are they capitalized?" it's "why are they proper nouns?"

Countries and continents have names; names are proper nouns and are therefore capitalised; demonyms are a version of those names and are therefore capitalised.

(also, remember that language and grammar is organic, there often is no ultimate "why" other than convention)
posted by underclocked at 2:24 AM on September 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

Again, the question is not "why are they capitalized?" it's "why are they proper nouns?"

They're not. They're ethonyms and demonyms.

If the answer to "why are they proper nouns?" is "they aren't", I would like to know why everyone on the internet seems to say otherwise.

Confirmation bias. I'm on the internet and I don't say they're proper nouns.

I guess then the question is, why are so many websites wrong about this?

Because most people wouldn't know what an ethonym or demonym was if it bit them on the leg, and what most people use the idea of "proper noun" for is deciding whether or not to capitalize the word concerned.

Loads of websites are wrong about loads of stuff. The one that annoys me most is sites that refer to "kilowatts per hour" when they mean either "kilowatt hours" or "kilowatts", depending on which particular level of horrible misunderstanding they have about how energy, power and time relate to each other, but that's because my background is in engineering rather than linguistics. Information from the Web always needs cross-checking and taking with a grain of salt. People treating it as gospel is how we end up with QAnon and fucknuckles storming the Capitol.
posted by flabdablet at 2:28 AM on September 11, 2022 [8 favorites]

Je suis français; Ich bin deutsch, Sono italiano; Soy español.

Careful: ‘français’, ‘deutsch’, ‘italiano’ and ‘español’ are adjectives there, not nouns.
posted by kyten at 3:18 AM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

If the answer to "why are they proper nouns?" is "they aren't", I would like to know why everyone on the internet seems to say otherwise.

flabdablet's right: tons of stuff you come across online is wrong. With respect to things like grammar, which people kind of sort of remember from school (where they might also have been taught by teachers who were less than 100% well-informed), it often feels like they have a tendency to just confidently assert what they remember, without double- or triple-checking first.
posted by trig at 4:11 AM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

You will need a historical linguist to explain the history of capitalization in written English, especially how English sometimes uses capitalization to Emphasize the Importance of Something, and how it relates to proper nouns and things nearby to proper nouns. I am not one of those.

But

for instance "golfer" is a common noun, but grammatically, it seems like it should operate in the same way as a ethnonym

Golfer is derived from golf, which is a common noun, while Turk is derived from Turkey, which is a proper noun. in statistics, some people are "frequentists" but others are "Bayesians" because the first wasn't named for Jebediah Frequency.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:23 AM on September 11, 2022 [24 favorites]

Careful: ‘français’, ‘deutsch’, ‘italiano’ and ‘español’ are adjectives there, not nouns.

But in English, the adjectives would be capitalized as well. Whatever the rules, they seem to apply to demonyms-as-adjectives as well as demonyms-as-nouns. That scraps my original hypothesis that it’s somehow related to German capitalization of nouns.

If you really want to get frustrated, why are “dutch oven” and “french fries” usually lower case, but “English muffin” and “Swedish meatballs” are capitalized?
posted by kevinbelt at 6:25 AM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Proper nouns have capitals and are names; these demonyms have capitals and are names, so it makes sense that they are commonly if incorrectly thought of as proper nouns.

(As for ‘what’s a name’…)
posted by lokta at 6:35 AM on September 11, 2022

I'm a professional copy editor and I'd like to gently suggest that the internet sources you cite are not websites I turn to for authoritative guidance on language issues.
posted by BlahLaLa at 6:50 AM on September 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

Response by poster:

Golfer is derived from golf, which is a common noun, while Turk is derived from Turkey, which is a proper noun. in statistics, some people are "frequentists" but others are "Bayesians" because the first wasn't named for Jebediah Frequency.

Is "frequentist" a common noun but "Bayesian" a proper noun? That sounds wrong to me but I could be wrong.

If the reason one is a proper noun and the other isn't is because one is derived from a proper noun and the other is derived from a common noun, that would make some sense, I guess, but I'd like to see some sort of authoritative definition that talks about this transitive property of properness.

I'm a professional copy editor and I'd like to gently suggest that the internet sources you cite are not websites I turn to for authoritative guidance on language issues.

Yes, I understand this. I'm curious what source you would turn to for this. The online edition of the Merriam-Webster, for instance, does not distinguish between proper nouns and common nouns (I think, given that Knight of the Round Table, which is really like a proper noun phrase or something, is just referred to as a "noun").

I also think, though, that for the example of "Jew", for instance, this is a extraordinarily common claim, and I have literally never seen any claim that it's not a proper noun. For instance, "Jew" was removed from the Scrabble dictionary on the basis that the noun form was a proper noun (thus not a valid Scrabble word), and the verb form is a slur. Did no one in this process point out that it's not a proper noun? Shouldn't the people who are in charge of making the Scrabble dictionary know what a proper noun is? And if they aren't, shouldn't at least one Scrabble player have known this and told them?
posted by wesleyac at 7:45 AM on September 11, 2022

Shouldn't the people who are in charge of making the Scrabble dictionary know what a proper noun is? And if they aren't, shouldn't at least one Scrabble player have known this and told them?

Scrabble player (and Jew!) here. The larger issue in that case was one of offensiveness/slurdom. In the article you link to, the word gets challenged because the woman in the game believes it to be a proper noun but the word that is actually in the dictionary is a verb and a slur. So I think this is of-a-kind with the general assertion that "people don't know what a proper noun is" generally. The Scrabble Players Dictionary writers did, they included the word because of a different sense of it. And removed it for that sense. Other people interpreted those decisions differently.

That said, if you'd asked me, I would have said Jew (not the slur) was a proper noun because in English proper nouns just feel like ones that are capitalized. That's wrong, of course, but I think it's a fairly commonly held belief. In English I feel that it's a bit like math, if you arrive at the right conclusion, people rarely care how you get there. And because the language isn't changing that rapidly in terms of demonyms it's not a part of the language that needs testing often.

Is "frequentist" a common noun but "Bayesian" a proper noun?

Bayes was a guy, so it's a demonym.
posted by jessamyn at 8:04 AM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

Response by poster:

they included the word because of a different sense of it. And removed it for that sense

Yeah. But I don't understand why "Jew", if it's a common noun, would be excluded from the Scrabble dictionary. So my expectation, if my understanding of proper nouns based on the definitions I've seen is correct, would be for the resolution to that complaint to be removing the verb form, but replacing it with the noun form, since it's a common noun and thus should be allowed. Given the amount of tension that removing "Jew" from the Scrabble dictionary seemed to cause, I figure the only reason they wouldn't do that is because "Jew" is actually a proper noun (for some reason I don't understand, but would like to).

Bayes was a guy, so it's a demonym.

I don't think Bayesian is a demonym? Wikipedia says a demonym is "a word that identifies a group of people (inhabitants, residents, natives) in relation to a particular place", which Bayesians are not, since Bayes is not a place. But also, I think a single word can be both a demonym and a noun, so I don't think "it's a demonym" implies "it's not a proper noun"
posted by wesleyac at 8:17 AM on September 11, 2022

Jew was removed along with other slurs in the third edition of the Scrabble dictionary. There is no common noun sense of Jew that isn't a slur. The hand-wavey description from Scrabble dictionary folks is "no proper nouns" but they basically mean "no capitalized words that don't have a non-capitalized sense" So you can play the word CATHOLIC because it has a common noun non-capitalized sense, but you can't play the word CHRISTIAN because it doesn't.

I don't think Bayesian is a demonym?

Sorry, I meant eponym. Maybe it would be helpful to look at Wiktionary's description of proper nouns in English where it says "the term proper noun pertains to a word's grammatical properties rather than to its meaning."
posted by jessamyn at 8:44 AM on September 11, 2022

Grammar is fun because while at first English looks like a bunch of randomly cobbled together bullshit, when you go deeper you find all sorts of rules, conventions, and structure. Then you go still deeper and it turns out it really is just a bunch of randomly cobbled together bullshit after all.
posted by rikschell at 9:02 AM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

Response by poster:

Maybe it would be helpful to look at Wiktionary's description of proper nouns in English where it says "the term proper noun pertains to a word's grammatical properties rather than to its meaning."

This says:

In particular, proper nouns cannot normally be used with an article (as in *“a France” or *“the India”) or other determiner (as in *“that England” or even *“much Senegal”, though “this England” and “much of Senegal” are fine), and are not normally found in the plural (as in *“Germanys” or *“Australias”).

But "a Jew", "that Jew" and "Jews" are all valid and normal, I think. Doesn't this mean that grammatically, "Jew" is not a proper noun?
posted by wesleyac at 9:06 AM on September 11, 2022

Wikipedia's article on proper nouns is also pretty decent, and includes the following key observation:

The detailed definition of the term is problematic and, to an extent, governed by convention.

The general answer to the question of why any feature of any language is as it is is not to be found in books of rules, but by paying attention to how that language's users actually use it. Languages are huge self-causing systems, internal consistency is more often accidental than not, and rules of grammar are always and everywhere post facto rationalizations.
posted by flabdablet at 9:07 AM on September 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Not to derail the conversation, but can we please get away from the idea that there "is no common noun sense of Jew that isn't a slur"? I am a Jew, I am Jewish, and being one of "the Jews" is not a slur but a source of pride and identity.

Other people may use nouns, verb, or adjectives related to us as slurs, but that's on them. Perhaps to focus on the OP's question we could use "Christian" or "Hindu" as examples instead, rather than raising questions about the offensiveness or not of being called a Jew?
posted by underclocked at 9:08 AM on September 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

wesleyac, as long as we're looking at internet sources, the Wikipedia article on proper nouns actually states pretty clearly that words like Baptist and Londoner are not proper nouns (link goes to relevant section of the article).

In statistics, some people are "frequentists" but others are "Bayesians" because the first wasn't named for Jebediah Frequency.

This is a nice observation, but the implied rule has lots of exceptions; in mathematics, we also have "abelian groups", "noetherian rings", etc. These are eponyms that have lost their capital letters in 90% of writing. "Hamiltonian circuit" is probably closer to 50/50. "Jacobian" is probably 80/20 in favor of the capital letter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's interesting to try to codify capitalization of nouns in English, and "Adjectives derived from proper names are capitalized" is probably right more often than it is wrong. But I suspect a healthy number of cases are basically just conventionalized at the single-word level.
posted by aws17576 at 9:13 AM on September 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

but a source of pride and identity.

Sorry, was just referring to the Scrabble description and wesleyac's questions about it. Of course the word isn't offensive when used in its non-verb sense. It's just also not what wesleyac was referring to as a common noun, but this is because language is a problem and not for any other reason, sorry for conflating things that shouldn't be.
posted by jessamyn at 9:15 AM on September 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

underclocked, people are saying the *lower case* version is a slur. As far as I'm aware, there's no common/historical use of "hindu".
posted by sagc at 9:16 AM on September 11, 2022

I'm not sure that repeatedly expressing dissatisfaction with the idea that ethnonyms, demonyms, eponyms and various other kinds of noun that are frequently capitalized in English are not proper nouns actually counts as clarification of the question for the purposes of AskMe threadsitting get-out-of-jail-free cards.

people are saying the *lower case* version is a slur

because the lower-case version isn't a noun, it's a verb that denotes the act of screwing somebody on a deal, and using the name of an ethnic group to identify that kind of behaviour is a slur against that group.
posted by flabdablet at 9:24 AM on September 11, 2022

To circle back around to the original question, the guide I use is the Chicago Manual of Style, which is appropriate to my work for Reasons. Also, language is a living, breathing, changing thing, and sometimes the legit answer is "it depends" or "historically this is how we've done it."
posted by BlahLaLa at 9:42 AM on September 11, 2022

Response by poster:

I'm not sure that repeatedly expressing dissatisfaction with the idea that ethnonyms, demonyms, eponyms and various other kinds of noun that are frequently capitalized in English are not proper nouns actually counts as clarification of the question for the purposes of AskMe threadsitting get-out-of-jail-free cards.

I don't think any of my comments are expressing dissatisfaction about this — they certainly are not intended to. I am dissatisfied that I cannot find a authoritative source explaining why they are not proper nouns — if someone could point me to one, that would definitely answer the question.

The hand-wavey description from Scrabble dictionary folks is "no proper nouns" but they basically mean "no capitalized words that don't have a non-capitalized sense"

This is actually very helpful and explains why the Scrabble folks made the decision they did, thank you! And I can find a source for it — this article quotes the Scrabble rules as "Any words found in a standard dictionary are permitted except those capitalized, those designated as foreign words, abbreviations and words requiring apostrophes or hyphens"
posted by wesleyac at 9:44 AM on September 11, 2022

Careful: ‘français’, ‘deutsch’, ‘italiano’ and ‘español’ are adjectives there, not nouns.

Indeed but we say I am French not I am french, I am German und so weiter
posted by TheRaven at 11:48 AM on September 11, 2022

Awfully hung up on rules regarding proper nouns here. Unlike German, English doesn't always follow its rules; there's always an exception. I taught ESL for 15 years and (unlike count and non-count nouns) the subject never came up.
posted by Rash at 11:52 AM on September 11, 2022

Maybe this will help, from my Grammar textbook (which is more focused on article use than capitalization):

With plural or collective nouns, the definite article signals a sense of generic collectivity:

• The Germans now realize that reunification has come with probems. (plural)
• The clergy are divided on that issue. (collective).

posted by Rash at 12:14 PM on September 11, 2022

Best answer: I am dissatisfied that I cannot find a authoritative source explaining why they are not proper nouns

I just went through the sources generally considered authoritative that are most easily available for free legally online -- i.e., the major dictionaries -- and they all define a proper noun as the name of a particular person, place, thing, or, in some sources, organization. A word like "Turk", for example, is not the name of a particular person, place, thing, or organization, so it doesn't meet the dictionary definition of a proper noun.

That's a very basic definition; it defines proper nouns in terms of the things they can denote, but doesn't say anything about how they behave in a sentence. The grammar note on dictionary.com adds that "Proper nouns are not normally preceded by an article or other limiting modifier, as any or some. Nor are they usually pluralized", which provides some more criteria: you can precede "Turk" with an article ("a Turk", "the Turk") and pluralize it ("some Turks"), so not only does it not match the semantic characteristics of proper nouns but it also doesn't match their behavioral characteristics.

Of course nothing's ever completely black or white with language, and there also seems to be a ton of variation in how people use and define linguistic terminology in particular. That grammar note, which is pretty decent, goes on to say:

But the language allows for exceptions. Proper nouns may occasionally have a definite article as part of the name, as in the case of some ships, organizations, and hotels, as The Titanic, The Humane Society, and The Plaza. An indefinite article is appropriate when you use a name as an exemplar: She looks like a young Elizabeth Taylor! And there is sometimes a reason for treating a name as if it were a generic: There are four Devons in my class. Proper nouns, usually capitalized in English, are arbitrary, in that a name can be given to someone or something without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may otherwise have.

In other words, sometimes a word that belongs to one category (like proper nouns) can take on the behavior of another category (like common nouns). You see the same thing when people "verb" nouns or "noun" verbs. In the sentence "I love it when people verb nouns", is the word "verb" a verb or a noun? The dictionary would say it's a noun, and in general it is, but it's taking on the role of a verb in that particular sentence. Linguistic categories can have permeable borders.

Then you have resources like the APA style guide, which seems to go out of its way to muddy the waters:

Capitalize proper nouns in APA Style.

- Proper nouns include the specific names of people, places, and things.
- Names of racial and ethnic groups are treated as [emphasis mine] proper nouns, which means they are capitalized (e.g., African American, Asian American, Black, European American, First Nations, Hispanic, Native American, Latinx, White).
- Capitalize trade names (e.g., brand names of medications). However, do not capitalize general names or generic brands. Likewise, capitalize a job title or position when the title precedes a name, but not when the title is used alone or after a name.

Personally I think the APA is being needlessly confusing: it's not saying that names of racial and ethnic groups are proper nouns but that they should be treated as if they were, which is also a bullshit, imprecise guideline because if you were really treating them as proper nouns you wouldn't just capitalize them, you also would treat them as definite and not countable.

tl;dr: As an overall definition, the consensus seems to be that in terms of meaning, proper nouns are names of single, specific entities or locations, and in terms of behavior, they are inherently definite, aren't countable, and are generally supposed to be capitalized in writing. Specific usages might bend these guidelines. If you want something more in-depth, maybe you'd be interested in linguistic research on the question of what properness really is (though the existence of such research again implies that it's not a cut and dried question). Here's a really basic Google Scholar search - I haven't checked how many of those articles are easily accessible.
posted by trig at 12:23 PM on September 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

It's convention, really. It could have been different, and it is in other European languages. As noted above, place adjectives aren't capitalized in French and Spanish (la cuisine française, la cocina francesa)— but place nouns referring to a person are capitalized in French (Un Français est entré dans un bar...) but not in Spanish (un francés entró en un bar). The real rule is "do what your editor says."

From a linguistic point of view, online sources are prone to simplistic and wrong statements. It may be a teaching strategy— provide an easily graspable idea first, deal with complications later— but I think it's ultimately confusing. E.g. David Crystal, an actual linguist, defines "proper noun" as "a noun that labels a unique place, person, animal, etc."; but in his discussion rather than his glossary admits that "there are several arbitrary conventions and points of uncertainty."

These quick definitions apply to prototypes— the most obvious situations. E.g. "France" is certainly a unique thing and has a unique name— so, proper noun. Yet it's perfectly grammatical to say something like "There are two Frances, that of the cities and that of the villages." Or to treat it as a common noun allowing articles: "That's not the France I know." "Can we dream of a better France?" Or: "Pope Francis" is at this time unique, but "Francis" certainly is not— there are a plethora of Francises.
posted by zompist at 4:47 PM on September 11, 2022

Something I can't figure out myself, is how e.g. Saudi Arabia works. The demonym is "Saudi" - that makes sense. There are Saudi people, there are Saudi customs, there is Saudi territory. But if you read UK news reporting they will say things like they "Here in Saudi, things are ..."- it's strange. It's like they'll use the demonym (ethnonym?) as a place name. Americans don't seem to do that. It seems like only "in Saudi Arabia" should be appropriate. Like American Samoa. You don't say "here in American" - if anything you should shorten to "in Samoa" or "in Arabia".
posted by Sunflowers Beneath the Snow at 1:09 PM on September 12, 2022