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Transcript Episode 76: Where language names come from and why they change

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Where language names come from and why they change’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Gretchen: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about language names. But first, we’re doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow for 2023. The liveshow will once again be on the Lingthusiasm Patreon Discord, and it will be on the 18th or 19th of February, depending on your time zone.

Gretchen: We’re really excited to be returning to one of fan favourite topics and answering your questions about language and gender with a returning special guest, Dr. Kirby Conrod, who you may remember from the very popular episode about the grammar of “singular they.” We’re bringing them back for more informal discussion, which you can participate in. If you’re a Lingthusiasm patron, you can ask questions or share your examples and anecdotes about gender in various languages via Patreon or in the AMA questions channel on Discord. We might mention some of them in the episode. Or bring your questions and comments along to the liveshow itself.

Lauren: The Lingthusiasm Discord is available for all patrons at the Lingthusiast tier and above. You can join the Lingthusiasm Patreon by visiting lingthusiasm.com/patreon. That tier also allows you access to our monthly bonus episodes.

Gretchen: The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, which is a fringe festival-like program of independently organised online linguistics events running in February 2023.

Lauren: If you’re listening in the future and want to find out about these events as they’re happening, you can follow us on various social media @lingthusiasm. Our most recent bonus episode for patrons was outtakes and deleted scenes from some of the interviews we’ve done recently. If you wanna hear more from our guests – Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe – you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to that, a whole bunch of other bonus episodes, and our upcoming liveshow.

[Music]

Gretchen: There’s this really fun group activity that you sometimes see in linguistics classes or when linguists are hanging out which is collaboratively brainstorming all of the languages that people in the group can think of.

Lauren: Ooo, yeah.

Gretchen: Especially if you don’t allow Google or Wikipedia, it’s just which languages have you heard of or do you know at least a word or phrase in and can you put them on a whiteboard or in a notebook.

Lauren: Hmm, I’m already finding this a little bit complicated because I never know what name to give some of the languages that I know or know of or work with.

Gretchen: What’s an example of that?

Lauren: Okay. I wrote my PhD thesis about some parts of the grammar of a language called “Yolmo.” I worked with a variety that’s spoken in an area of Nepal called Lamjung, so that’s known as “Lamjung Yolmo.” The other variety is just called “Yolmo” because that’s where the Lamjung people migrated from. But it’s also known thanks to some savvy branding in the ’70s as “Helambu Sherpa.” It’s not related to the Sherpa near Everest at all, directly, but they wanted to get associated with the trekking tourism, so they took that name as an outside name for a while. That’s already, like, three names for what is really one language.

Gretchen: And you’ve also worked on a language called “Syuba.”

Lauren: Well, that’s true. But Syuba is actually closely related to these varieties of Yolmo. It’s spoken in an area called “Ramechhap,” but it’s not called “Ramechhap Yolmo.” They’ve only just returned to asking people to call them “Syuba.” Before, they were called “Kagate,” which is seen as a little bit of an unpleasant name. They don’t like it anymore. It’s like the Nepali word/name for them. Again, there’s two or three different possible names for this group of people who speak this particular language.

Gretchen: These are all names that’re used for them in English. Do they call themselves these names in the language itself?

Lauren: Syuba speakers call themselves “Syuba.” They’ve asked other people to. But actually, when you talk to people, and you’re talking about language, they just refer to it as “tam,” which is the word for “language.” In fact, it’s the word for “language” in a lot of different Tibetan varieties. A lot of people will just refer to what they speak as “tam” or “language.” Just another name to potentially throw in there.

Gretchen: I remember when I was first reading about the different language work that you were doing on your blog being like, “Wait, how many languages does this person speak?” because I think the language names were in the process of changing, and so it looked like you had written something about Kagate and also something about Syuba, but those were actually the same language.

Lauren: It’s a constantly evolving situation. I will always, always defer to the communities I work with as to what they wish to be called but also keeping track of this history is really interesting as you see the relationship between different groups of people evolve and change. We’re kind of at one or two languages, and I’ve already got six or eight names going on here. Our whiteboard is gonna get very complicated very quickly.

Gretchen: Well, that’s the interesting level of complexity because, like how humans sometimes have multiple names on different types of pieces of identification or at different periods of their lives, languages can also go through several different names. It’s even more complicated because there are generally multiple members of the community; sometimes they’ll have different opinions.

Lauren: Sometimes, those opinions are tied up with really interesting or really complicated or really difficult histories. We can’t just pin a single label to a group of people that speak a particular language.

Gretchen: Another thing that can make language-naming complicated is, depending on how one tries to draw the boundaries between, okay, these two communities are speaking the same language, they’re speaking varieties of one language, or they’re speaking languages that we’re gonna call “different,” which also factors into a lot of political- and community-level and linguistic decision making.

Lauren: We have a very Western perspective on what we think a group of people or a collection of language-speakers should be. There’s this really great paper that was recently published about language-naming practices in Indigenous Australia from Jill Vaughan, Ruth Singer, and Murray Garde. They looked at how the social attitudes towards language and ownership of language and relationships between peoples creates this really different approach to how to think about names of languages. In Australia, what is really important is the connection between language and a particular land and the geographic relationship that exists there, and therefore, who has the right to speak a language, who has the right to speak a language in a particular place or at a particular time, is a very different attitude to what we might have as, say, “I’m an English speaker. You can be an English speaker, too. We all speak English wherever we go.”

Gretchen: Both of us live in countries that have this history of colonisation where English isn’t originally tied to either of the lands that we’re occupying.

Lauren: The authors in this paper spend a lot of time talking through the example of “Bininj Kunwok,” which is a language from the northern part of Australia, which exists as a language name. It’s a language name people recognise. There’s a grammar and a dictionary. The name itself is, in these languages, the word for “person,” “bininj,” and “kunwok,” “speech,” so a bit like Yolmo with “tam” – similar elements coming into the language name there.

Gretchen: This is like, “the people’s language,” or something like that?

Lauren: Yeah. “The people who speak this language” kind of thing. People are very happy to use this term and come together as a group to work, say, on a dictionary project or some language materials, but actually, there’re many, many groups within that cluster of Bininj Kunwok that have their own name for their own variety of the language, who have names for all the other varieties, who don’t see themselves as necessarily speaking the same language because they’re not necessarily from the same part of the country. This creates this different relationship to where the language boundary is in the name compared to, say, English, where we see ourselves as all speaking just English.

Gretchen: So, this is sort of language name as a political alliance or federation of languages. I mean, actually, now that I’m saying this, I don’t know how dissimilar this is to using English to refer to all of the different varieties of English around the world in the sense that they have certain alliances when it comes to, especially, written material but also a lot of local differences on the ground that sometimes get erased by thinking of them all as having a common, standardised written form.

Lauren: Absolutely. I think the situation when we zoom in on any particular context is always more nuanced. This paper really goes into a lot of the context and the nuance of how we’ve come to have these language groups and these language names in Australia that can sometimes simplify a really complex social dynamic or a social history.

Gretchen: One of the other things I enjoyed about this paper was from the references portion at the beginning talking about how a language often gains wider public acknowledgement through “artefactualisation,” such as the creation of a dictionary or grammar, that makes for sort of a birth certificate of a language, as distinct from the language itself. Like, here it’s got its driver’s license. We’re using this driver’s license as a form of quote-unquote “neutral” ID to prove that a person exists when, actually, not all humans have equal access to documentation like driver’s licenses and birth certificates. There’re other things that a driver’s license, especially, signify in addition to being an ID marker. Not everyone can drive or is gonna be able to learn to drive or is physically able to drive. The idea that dictionaries and grammars get treated as evidence that a language exists, even when they have these very different relationships to different groups of language speakers or language signers, that’s a metaphor that carries through.

Lauren: Again, we’re trying to use language names as a way to pin things down, but when we actually zoom in, the situation is always a lot more nuanced. Just like we can get distracted sometimes by the fact that people share a name, not all languages that appear to have very similar names are necessarily part of the same family of languages. One that always tricked me up when I started working in Nepal is that we have “Nepali Bhasa” and “Nepal Bhasa.”

Gretchen: As someone who doesn’t know anything about Nepal, this really sounds very similar, yes. “Nepali Bhasa” and “Nepal Bhasa.”

Lauren: “Nepali Bhasa” is the Indo-Aryan language that’s the national language of Nepal. It’s very closely related to Hindi. “Nepal Bhasa” is the Newar languages that are the original languages of the Kathmandu Valley, so that’s the capital of Nepal.

Gretchen: So, they’re not part of this broader Indo-European language family that Hindi and Nepal belong to?

Lauren: No, they’re actually part of the Tibeto-Burman family. They’re part of a completely different family. They were in the Kathmandu Valley before the Indo-Aryan speakers came in to make it the capital of an even bigger country, which is what we now know as the country of Nepal today.

Gretchen: “Bhasa” sort of sounds like another language term, which is “Bhasa Indonesia,” the Indonesian language, or “Bahasa Malaya,” the Malay language.

Lauren: Yeah, that /basa/ or /bhasa/ is an old Sanskrit word for “language,” and so it pops up all over the place even for languages that aren’t related to each other.

Gretchen: This is great. I just learned a word that means “language” in a whole bunch of languages that’ve been influenced by Sanskrit.

Lauren: Yeah, we’re definitely collecting words for “language” in this episode as much as we’re collecting language names. It comes part and parcel with the territory.

Gretchen: This does tell us something about the relationships of these languages to each other which is, I guess, they were all influenced by Sanskrit at some level even if they have many other differences between them.

Lauren: Indeed.

Gretchen: Another group of languages with very similar names that have a shared history even if not necessarily a shared linguistic trajectory is the group of creole languages.

Lauren: Oh, yeah.

Gretchen: When I say, “creole,” what’s the first creole language that you think of?

Lauren: Um, “Kriol,” spelt K-R-I-O-L, which is a language of Australia, especially up across the Northern Territory in Western Australia, heading towards Bininj Kunwok country. It’s a creole of the English that came in but also from across the local languages around there, around the Roper River area, but it’s also spread to other parts of Australia as well. That’s the first creole that comes to mind for me. What about for you?

Gretchen: I think the first creole language that I think of is Haitian Creole, which is also often referred to just as “Kreyòl,” but in this case spelled K-R-E-Y-O-L with an accent on the O. This is the language of Haiti which is descended from French. It’s also spoken in the context of displacement and colonisation and having a bunch of people losing some connections with their linguistic roots, but they don’t have a common ancestor except insofar as English and French have a common ancestor. They just have this common history of being this contact language in terms of what “creole” refers to.

Lauren: I find it so fascinating that this word “creole” has this long history and in certain places has become attached to particular languages that arise in these situations. And in other places it refers to maybe the people or the food from the area. “Creole” pops up in a lot of places where you’ve seen French or English colonisation.

Gretchen: There’re also creoles that are extended to other languages that aren’t linked to colonisation. There’s Portuguese-based creoles, Dutch-based creoles, German-based creoles, Spanish-based creoles, Arabic-, Malay-based creoles. There’s a variety of places you could have a creole. Many of them, but not all of them, are linked to the Transatlantic slave trade and forced displacement of people from a location. You had a variety of people from different linguistic backgrounds mixing – not with their consent – and making this combination language with a language they had in common was the colonial language but also bringing in influences from their various mother tongues.

Lauren: Obviously, the Transatlantic slave trade wasn’t relevant to Australia, which is not near the Atlantic Ocean, but similar factors around displacement and the bringing in of English as a dominant language of trade and commerce in people’s lives. We also have Yumplatok in Australia, which is a creole language of the part of Northern Queensland that heads up into Papua New Guinea.

Gretchen: And Tok Pisin is another creole language – and English-derived creole – of Papua New Guinea, which isn’t referred to by the name of “Creole,” like many of them are.

Lauren: But the “tok” in both of those is from English “talk.” Once again, another-language-vibe name as part of the name of a language there.

Gretchen: Another language that came about because of contact and colonialisation with a bit of a different history is Michif or Metis in Canada, which arose from French fur traders marrying local Cree women. Their kids spoke this language that has a combination of French and Cree using Cree verbs, which are a really interesting and complex system that have lots of prefixes and suffixes. Cree is an Algonquian language, and this is characteristic of Algonquian languages. And then French nouns, which are also sort of the more complex bit of French grammar where French nouns have all of this grammatical gender going on. These kids decided to learn the most featurally rich bits of both of their parents’ languages.

Lauren: Amazing that these children made this language out of the complicated verbs and the complicated nouns. But it also has two names, you said, Metis or Michif.

Gretchen: Yeah. The name of this people and this language is Metis or Michif, which comes from a local pronunciation variant of the word “métis,” which is from a French word that means “mixed,” but it doesn’t refer to any type of linguistic mixing where you could have two parents from different language backgrounds. It refers to this particular mixing that happened in this particular historical context.

Lauren: That makes sense that the language name takes on this specific meaning and refers to this specific linguistic context.

Gretchen: I think with language names, sometimes something that comes up with a language name is its etymology, you know, “This comes from a particular language,” or “This comes from a particular meaning,” but also etymology isn’t destiny when it comes to language names.

Lauren: Yeah. I always find it really fun to say, “Ooo, this part of the language name comes from the word for ‘language’” or the word for “talk” or the word for “people.” But a language is so much more than the literal parts of its name.

Gretchen: I guess the other point is etymology is an interesting thing to learn about, but what’s important is respecting the wishes of the community that has that particular language. One of the things that I’ve been following is names of Bantu languages because a lot of them seem to come in pairs. Sometimes you see “Swahili” in a list. Sometimes you see “Kiswahili.” Sometimes you see “Zulu.” Sometimes you see “Isizulu.” Sometimes you see “Sotho” and “Sesotho” or “Tswana” and “Setswana.,” “Congo” and “Kikongo.” A lot of these language names seem to come in pairs like that where one of them has this prefix that’s something like /ki-/ or /si-/ or /t͡ʃi-/.

Lauren: I know that Setswana is spoken in Botswana, and Sesotho is spoken in Lesotho. They’re all connected somehow. This marking of something is a language by the use of a prefix is something that happens across these languages. They’re all part of the Bantu language family.

Gretchen: Right. And Bantu languages are known for having prefixes that mark lots of things. I dunno if it’s settled whether in English people are more likely to use the language prefix to refer to the language or not. It seems to sometimes vary per language. I mostly see people talking about “Kinyarwanda,” the language of Rwanda, which includes the prefix, but I also often hear people talking about “Zulu” rather than “Isizulu” without the prefix. I don’t know if there’s a consensus across different groups here, or if it’s something that varies more locally.

Lauren: I guess that just kind of works how an “-ish” or and “-ese” suffix works in English. We have “-ish” suffixes like “English” and “Danish” and “Irish.”

Gretchen: Yeah, or “-ese” suffixes like “Japanese,” “Cantonese,” “Portuguese.” These can also get applied to novel contexts to refer to the concept of a language in general – something like “Simlish,” the language of the Sims.

Lauren: Oh, yeah. Or “Legalese.”

Gretchen: Or “Journalese.”

Lauren: I guess there is an older tendency to refer to “Nepali” as “Nepalese” as a language. Now, you are more likely to see it written as “Nepali,” so taking their preference for the name as it’s pronounced closer to their own use of the name rather than this English suffixised form.

Gretchen: Sometimes the move closer towards how a community identifies themself happens at the morphological level where the suffix or the prefix changes as well.

Lauren: This distinction between what a group of people refer to their own language as and how a language is referred to by people outside of the group is often quite different as we’ve discussed with a few examples so far.

Gretchen: I think the first example that I learned of names for languages being really different in the language versus from other people who speak the language was in German, which in French, which I was learning very early, is “Allemand.” and then in German itself, is “Deutsch.” All three of these were really different from each other.

Lauren: In Italian it’s “Tedesco,” and in Polish it’s “Niemiecki.” These are all very different.

Gretchen: These are all very different. Something like “English” to “Anglais” in French, I was like, yeah, I sort of see how that happens. You hold it loosely and see how it’s similar. But “German” to “Deutsch” to Allemand” to –

Lauren: “Niemiecki” to “Tedesco.”

Gretchen: These all sound really different to each other.

Lauren: Part of this is that Germany as a country and German as a unified language is a relatively recent construction in Western and European history, so each of these groups were using names for whatever the German closest to them was and have kept those names as Germany unified.

Gretchen: Right. There’s different Germanic tribes or Germanic peoples that were referred to by different names in different areas. The broader name for this phenomenon of the name of a language inside its own group and outside of its own group is a contrast between the “endonym,” the name inside, and the “exonym,” the name from outside.

Lauren: The “-nym” part there being “name” and “endo-” and “exo-” being a contrasting pair.

Gretchen: Right. That’s “-nym” as in “pseudonym” or “synonym.”

Lauren: “Antonym.”

Gretchen: “Endonym” and “exonym” being themselves antonyms.

Lauren: Indeed. “Endo-” and “exo-” pop up in a whole variety of other places as well. We have “exoplanets” which are planets outside of our solar system.

Gretchen: Does this mean that planets inside our solar system are technically “endoplanets”?

Lauren: Hmm, maybe technically, yeah, just like we have “exoskeletons” like lobsters or Super Mecha Warriors.

Gretchen: Wait, so we could also have “endoskeletons,” which is what humans have which is a skeleton inside our body?

Lauren: Yeah, I’m gonna start referring to it as my “endoskeleton” now.

Gretchen: I think it’s funny because “endo-” and “exo-” are so clearly opposites. But “endo-” is familiar to me less from “endoplanets” and more from words like “endocrine system,” which is your hormones.

Lauren: Ah, I guess that is that “endo-”.

Gretchen: I looked up whether there is also an “exocrine system.”

Lauren: Is there?

Gretchen: Yeah. The endocrine system are the stuff that gets secreted inside your body and the exocrine system is all the stuff that you secrete outside your body, like sweat and saliva and mucus.

Lauren: I guess also in medicine we have “endoscopes,” which is when you use a camera in an orifice of your body to look at some internal part of your body.

Gretchen: This is like when you’d put a camera down your throat to look at your vocal cords.

Lauren: Yeah. I guess an “exoscope” is just any normal camera you take a selfie with because it’s looking at the outside of your body.

Gretchen: Great. I’m gonna refer to my normal camera as an “exoscope” now.

Lauren: An “endonym” is the name that we have in our own language for our language, and an ��exonym” is the name that we have for a language of some other group of people.

Gretchen: To go back to the German example, “Deutsch” is the endonym, and then “Tedesco” and “Allemand” and “German” and “Niemiecki” are all exonyms for “German” coming from the perspective of various other languages.

Lauren: We’ve seen some recurring motifs already in terms of endonyms, people using words like “talk” or “language” or “people” for reference to their own language, but there’re also lots of different types of exonyms as well.

Gretchen: Sometimes, when a community wants to change the name of their language, that sometimes means replacing certain exonyms that other communities are using for their language with something that’s closer to the endonym of how they’re referring to themselves, which is especially important if this particular community hasn’t had a lot of self-determination in the first place. I don’t think I know any Germans who are like, “Yeah, no, English speakers need to refer to us as ‘Deutsch’,” but that’s a reflection of German social status, which is not the same if you’re from a language where there’s been this long history of colonisation.

Lauren: One type of exonym that can sometimes be easy to spot in the wild is when the name for the language as an exonym is very similar to their own endonym. For example, we call Italian, “Italian,” and in Italian it is “Italiano.”

Gretchen: Right, which is really similar. Sometimes, it’s just the languages don’t have quite the same sounds. The vowels in Italian are gonna be different from the vowels in English, and so “Italian” versus “Italiano” is produced with slightly different vowels even though the spelling is quite similar.

Lauren: These are cognate because it’s the same word just pronounced in each of the respective languages. Sometimes, these cognates can be a little bit more hidden.

Gretchen: Yeah. Like, “Tedesco” in Italian is actually from the same origin as the German word “Deutsch.” It also gives us the English “Teutonic.”

Lauren: Ah, right.

Gretchen: It’s just that those words ended up with diverging trajectories in those languages. One place where you have a lot of adaptation for pronunciation differences is if the languages have different modalities. If you have a sign language, and you wanna refer to it in a spoken language, you need a spoken name to refer to it and vice versa, you need a signed name to refer to a spoken language.

Lauren: I think this is why a lot of signed languages end up having acronym-type names, so “American Sign Language,” “ASL,” “British Sign Language,” “BSL,” because there isn’t a direct way to take the cognate from the signed language into the spoken language.

Gretchen: Actually, that raises a question for me which is “Auslan” which has, I think, a relatively straightforward etymology, “Australia” and “language,” but it doesn’t have that acronymic thing. I guess it would just be “ASL” for “Australian Sign Language” which would be confusing. Do you know how that came about?

Lauren: In the 1970s and ’80s when Trevor Johnston started working on Auslan, it already had a name in Auslan. It has its own sign. But Trevor Johnston needed a way to refer to it in English as well. He actually took inspiration from what was happening in America at the time, which is that what we now know as ASL was also being quite commonly referred to as “Ameslan” – so a blend instead of an acronym.

Gretchen: Of like, “American Sign Language” – oh, the S there is for “sign.” “Ameslan.” Okay.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So, the S in “Auslan” is also for “sign” rather than “Aus” as in “Australia.

Lauren: It’s a bit of both. And I think that’s why it’s really stood the test of time because it really has a very word feel. As you said, it also would have to compete with “ASL” for recognition in that three-letter acronym approach. “Auslan” has stood the test of time in a way that “Ameslan” hasn’t.

Gretchen: That’s interesting. I think that when I think of other linguistic varieties that have acronymic names, I think of accents and dialects and varieties that’ve been named in the last, maybe, century or so.

Lauren: Acronym-ing is a very 20th Century approach, for sure.

Gretchen: 20th and 21st, I guess. Things like “MLE,” “Multicultural London English,” or “RP,” “Received Pronunciation,” or “AAVE,” “AAE,” “AAL,” which is “African American Vernacular English,” “African American English,” “African American Language,” depending on how you wanna name it – these are all very acronymic names for things that have been named comparatively recently, whereas some of the older English varieties, I’m thinking things like “Cockney,” which is associated with the working class in London’s East End, or like “Scouse” in Liverpool, these have names that aren’t acronymic. These are varieties that have been named for a longer period of time.

Lauren: It’s interesting how the way that we talk about different languages and different varieties reflects larger trends in approaches to naming things.

Gretchen: Another way that language names can come about is by doing a more direct or a partial translation of the name for the language in the language. An example of this is “Light Walpiri,” which is a mixed language of Australia that has Indigenous Walpiri language, Kriol, and Standard Australian English as its parent languages. The name “Light Walpiri,” which I’d encountered in a few contexts because it made some news when the linguist named Carmel O’Shannessy was documenting it initially, I was interested to read in one of the papers that the name comes from “Walpiri rampaku,” which literally means in Walpiri “light Walpiri.” She as a linguist decided to translate part of the name into English while keeping the connection with how people were referring to it in the language – or possibly speakers were doing that, but it has this connection to how people were talking about it without being a direct reflection of it.

Lauren: So, that exonym that is the way that I know the language is a direct translation of their endonym for it within Walpiri. Interesting. I never knew the history of “Light Walpiri.”

Gretchen: I was wondering why “light,” and that seems to be why.

Lauren: Sometimes, the exonym that we use in one language was borrowed as the exonym from another language. So, we didn’t borrow someone’s endonym or own way of talking about their language, we borrowed it from, maybe, their neighbours.

Gretchen: This is really common in the North American Indigenous context. There are loads and loads of examples. One of them is the name “Navajo,” which comes from a Tewa word, which is another Indigenous language spoken nearby, “navahu,” which combines the word “nava,” meaning field, and “hu,” meaning “valley,” to mean “large field.” It was borrowed from Tewa into Spanish to refer to a particular place, and then later into English for the people and their language. But the name that the people themselves use is Diné, which also means “people,” with the language known as “Diné bizaad” or “people’s language,” or sometimes “Naabeehó bizaad,” but “Naabeehó” is this adaptation of the word “Navajo” because there’s not actually any V in Diné.

Lauren: Always a bit of giveaway when the exonym has sounds in it that don’t exist in the language it’s referring to.

Gretchen: Really big one. In this case, “field” and “valley,” that’s got a relatively neutral valence. It’s not the name in their own language, but it’s not a particularly bad thing to be people in a field or a valley. But a lot of these names from neighbours are sometimes pretty pejorative.

Lauren: That is definitely a large theme in exonyms, especially when it’s not the group itself that got to determine how they were referred to by outsiders. It’s part of why Kagate speakers moved to calling themselves “Syuba” even though both of those names refer to their previous occupation as paper-makers, which was seen as not a very aspirational career in the social hierarchy of Nepal. They’ve taken a lot more pride in their own word for that name rather than for the Nepali word which has more immediate negative connotations for Nepali speakers. It took me a long time to make the connection between the Slavic language family and the word that we have from originally Greek and then Latin into modern languages as “slave.” These two words are actually cognate with each other.

Gretchen: Oh boy. Okay. Is there a sense of which one arouse first?

Lauren: I felt like I got conflicting and slightly-confusing-and-lost-to-history stories depending on the etymological dictionary I looked up but definitely seemed to be pretty cognate, and it says something about the social status of speakers of those languages within, definitely, the Roman Empire.

Gretchen: That’s for sure a thing. This is also really common when it comes to Indigenous languages that a lot of their names are pejoratives. I’m not necessarily sure that I wanna repeat a whole bunch of pejoratives of what the names are. People are trying to bury them. I think my go-to example that’s comparatively a relatively mild pejorative is the name “Maliseet,” which is a language spoken around Eastern Canada and North-Eastern United States, also sometimes called “Passamaquoddy.” I grew up with that just being the name for the language, but then I learned later that this actually comes from a name by the Mi’kmaq people, who are another Indigenous group that’s slightly further east in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and around there, who were encountered by Europeans slightly earlier. They were asked, “Who lives over there?”, and gave the name “Maliseet,” which means, “They speak slowly.”

Lauren: Charming.

Gretchen: Sort of makes some sense when you think of, they speak related languages, maybe if they’re talking to each other, they’re trying to come to some understanding and speak slowly to each other. But it’s not super flattering, and it’s a word that people have understandably been moving away from in more recent years.

Lauren: I mean, I only know it as “Passamaquoddy,” so it’s an indication that the exonym that’s now in use is the one that the Passamaquoddy actually prefer.

Gretchen: There’s another exonym which I, unfortunately, haven’t been able to find a good pronunciation guide of online that begins with a W and translates as meaning, “people of the bright river” or “of the shining river.” There’s still several different endonyms that this is under discussion for, but this is one case of very, very many, some of which are much more insulting.

Lauren: It gives you a sense of the history of power dynamics in general.

Gretchen: There’s an interesting case of miscommunication when it comes to the Mi’kmaq language itself because this was a case where a First Nations people and European people were encountering each other mutually for the first time in what’s now Eastern Canada. The name “Mi’kmaq” is an exonym which literally means in Mi’kmaq “my friends and family” or “my kin friends,” so it implicitly in the answer to “Who lives around here?”, well, it’s like, “My friends and family live around here.”

Lauren: Wonderfully literal.

Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, which, fair enough, really. The endonym is “Lnu,” “Lnu’i’sit,” “the people’s language.” But since the exonym isn’t insulting and the endonym sounds a lot like a related Indigenous language that’s spoken a little further north, “Inu,” at the moment, the exonym is still in use in English because it’s still a word in the language and has this history. Conversely, the name in Mi’kmaq for “French,” the French people and the French language, is “Wenju” or “Wenjuwi’sit,” which is “He or she speaks French,” which literally translates to something like, “Who are they?”

Lauren: That is amazing. So, these French people turned up, and they’re like, “Who are they?”

Gretchen: Basically, yeah. It’s got this sort of interestingly mutual miscommunication, whereas the Mi’kmaq word for “English” is “Agase’wit,” “He or she speaks English,” which is clearly borrowed from French, so you can see the contact via French. But when it comes to the paired miscommunication, I find it an interesting story of contact.

Lauren: I always find power dynamics are really interesting for who is centred as the default speaker or what is centred as the default language.

Gretchen: When it comes to the colonial context those languages are often named after the country they were originally spoken in. But I was at a conference a while back, and I met a linguist from Brazil and said, “Oh, you speak Portuguese,” and he said, “Well, you know, I like to call it ‘European Brazilian’.”

Lauren: That’s amazing. Especially considering there are far more Brazilian speakers of Portuguese than there are those in Europe who speak Portuguese.

Gretchen: Yeah. And it sort of raises the question of could you generalise this in other contexts.

Lauren: Do you think that maybe I should start telling people that in the UK they speak “protipodean” Australian?

Gretchen: Oh god, it’s like “antipodean” but “protipodean” Australian. You know what? I’ll buy it.

Lauren: I’m gonna start trying to get grants to document protipodean Australian so we can go back and hang out with people in the UK.

Gretchen: I look forward to seeing the Reviewer 2 comments on that application, thank you.

Lauren: Maybe at some point in the future, languages like Brazilian Portuguese will find new ways of talking about themselves or asking to be referred to. Jokes aside, language names are in flux, and they tell us a lot about history, but they’re not set in stone. We can change the way we refer to languages.

Gretchen: Right. Linguists have this responsibility, if someone’s in charge of making the types of documentation that make a language visible to bureaucratic infrastructure to be very thoughtful in talking with multiple people about how that language name is decided.

Lauren: I think we all have a responsibility to keep in mind that language names can change and can have complicated histories. The thing we can do is always respect the choices of the people who speak those languages when it comes to the names they’re given.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar” stickers, and aesthetic IPA posters, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Lauren: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk with about it? Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include outtakes from our interviews with Randall Munroe, Kat Gupta, and Lucy Maddox, an episode about stylised ye-olde-time-y English, and children learning languages. Plus, on February 18th or 19th, 2023, depending on your time zone, you can join us for a patron-exclusive liveshow featuring special guest, Dr. Kirby Conrod, to talk about language and gender. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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