Category talk:en:Nationalities

RFM discussion: August 2014–January 2015
This category, as well as the equivalents in other languages, contain many terms that are not strictly nationalities as they are not associated with actual countries. Instead, these seem to be more generally "place-name adjectives". So I think we should rename this category. —CodeCat 21:59, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Nationalities don't have to be associated with actual countries- they can be ethnicities as well. Besides, there are cases such as Inuit where there's no place name involved. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:39, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * But I'm pretty sure that when someone says "my nationality is Inuit", that it will give some raised eyebrows. —CodeCat 22:42, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Umm... no. In fact Inuits are one of the so-called "First Nations", so the word "nationality" naturally applies. While I agree that "nationality" is not the best term for the category, I think your proposed name is worse. --WikiTiki89 22:50, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I've been looking for another possible term for this, but I'm struggling to find anything. Do you have any ideas? We can't use "ethnicities" because state-level nationality is not necessarily an ethnicity. Maybe we should really have two categories: one for place names and one for ethnicities that are not associated with place names. —CodeCat 22:56, 22 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Oppose this proposal to turn a topical category into a curious lexical category. Also see and  for the relative rarity of that designation. And indeed, nationalities are not restricted to relations to countries. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:53, 22 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I think a nationality does have to be an association with a country. But it doesn't mean we should rename this category, move out the bad entries and put them in Category:en:Demonyms. Renard Migrant (talk) 11:06, 28 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Don't rename. I agree with Chuck's comment. Not all nationality designations are derived from placename designations; "Inuit" and "Crow" are examples, but "Dutch" and "Drukpa" are also examples, aren't they? "Dutch" isn't etymologically connected to any placename that is still in use in English; it's semantically associated with "Netherlands", but then, "Crow" is semantically associated with "Crow Nation" / "Crow Reservation", "Inuit" with "Inuit territory", etc. I don't think it would make sense to label either "Crow" or "Dutch" a "place-name adjective". (Notably both "Crow Nation" and the etymological placename relative of "Dutch", the archaic "Dutchland", seem to be derived from their corresponding nationality terms.) Terms that are not nationalities in any sense can be moved to the Demonyms category as Renard suggestions. - -sche (discuss) 18:58, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * The demonyms category is for nouns for individual people. The proposed category is for adjectives. In English, the adjectives can normally be used as collective nouns for the people, but this doesn't apply to other languages of course. Compare Dutch and . —CodeCat 19:14, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I just noticed that according to both Wiktionary and Wikipedia, a demonym is the name of an inhabitant or native of a specific place. So it is not appropriate to place terms like "Inuit" there. In fact, it appears that we currently have no category at all where that word belongs. We should find a solution for this. —CodeCat 19:21, 28 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Oh, I had thought "demonym" meant any "term for a people" (because "democide" is generic systematic "killing of people"). You're right in your second comment that it seems to actually be limited to people from a specific place. Well, there are several possibilities for ethnic-group names, e.g. "ethnonyms", "ethnicities", "ethnic groups". If the Inuit are deemed to not even form one ethnic group (and hence one ethnonym), then WP's definition ("a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples") suggests we don't need to categorize that term at all, any more than other "cultural groups" like "Goths" (the black-clad ones, not the ones that wrote like 𐌰𐌱𐌲). - -sche (discuss) 23:59, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Ethnicities can form a tree though. For example, Poles are a subset of Slavs. Often ethnic and linguistic trees coincide, but certainly not always. I'd say that the Inuit are a larger group even if they have smaller subgroups. The question then becomes whether "ethnonym" is suitable for a term like "Londoner" or even for "Russian". Ethnic Russians are quite different from people who live in Russia. —CodeCat 00:44, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Good point re trees. So, "Inuit" can still be an ethnonym. "Russian" is both an ethnonym (in sense 2, "a member of the East Slavic ethnic group which constitutes the majority of the population of Russia") and a nationality (in sense 1, "a person from the Russian Federation"), with 'nationality' being a subcategory of 'demonym'. Likewise many nationalities: "German" (=nationality, =ethnicity), "Brazilian", "Nepali", etc. In some analyses, "Haida" is also both an ethnonym and a nationality, but unlike "Russian" where one sense is the nationality and another sense is the ethnonym, "Haida" has a single sense that is both at once. "Londoner" is exclusively a demonym and not an ethnonym, right? Likewise most city designations. - -sche (discuss) 02:51, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
 * How is Haida a nationality though? I don't know of any country called that. —CodeCat 10:44, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
 * "Country" and "nation" are two different things. ("State" is another different thing.) Indeed, the first usex of the first sense of [[nation]] is "the Roma are a nation without a country", and the second is "the Kurdish people constitute a nation in the Middle East"; I've just added some similar citations from literature to Citations:nation. The Haida are a First Nation. Like the Kurds are associated with Kurdistan and the Ukrainians are associated with Ukraine, the Haida are associated with the / . Notably, neither the Kurds / Kurdistan nor the Haida / Haida Gwaii nor the Ukrainians / Ukraine have always been a nation in sense 2 of that word, which raises a question: even if one argued that Category:Nationalities should be restricted to sense-2 nations to the exclusion of sense-1 nations, would it be only for entities that are at present sovereign states, or would it also include things which historically constituted such, e.g. would "Czechoslovak" go in the category? Most entities which are nations in sense 1 have at some point also been nations in sense 2 — including the Haida, who regardless of their status in the current period were the sovereign governors of a territory in the period before and shortly after European contact. - -sche (discuss) 17:31, 31 August 2014 (UTC)
 * That's a good point. But in the end the question remains: if "nationality" is not appropriate or is too misleading, what term should we use? And what can we do to ensure that only adjectives end up in the category? Including "adjectives" in the name would make it no longer a topical category, despite DCDuring's misgivings. —CodeCat 10:45, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

We can put ethnonyms like sense 2,, ,  etc. in Category:en:Ethnicity. Or even better, we can rename the latter to Category:en:Ethnonyms. --Vahag (talk) 21:06, 1 January 2015 (UTC)
 * Closed as not moved: No consensus to move. Pur ple back pack 89  22:30, 2 January 2015 (UTC)