Rename that language!

[Linguoboy]

Every time I see the "Name That Language!" subject line, I have to remind myself that it's not an invitation to give official names to languages. So, what the hell, here's an invitation to do just that. Specifically, what is a language you've always wished was called something else, either because the current term is misleading or confusing or you just don't like the sound of it? What you prefer to call it and why?

[Ryusenshi]

Maybe we could start by not using the word Dutch for the language spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium (because it's confusing when the word Deutsch refers to their neighbors), and call it Netherlandish instead?

[zompist]

On the contrary, we should name every language as its name (current or not) for 'people' plus an adjectivizer.

English > Thedish
French > Populaire
Spanish > Gentilicio
Latin > Vulgaris
Greek > Demotike
Hindi > Logi
Russian > Narodny
Mandarin > Rende
Quechua > Runaq
Swahili > Kiwatu

[Nortaneous]

>implying the language they speak in present-day Greece isn't already called Demotic

[So Haleza Grise]

I like the idea Nahuatl has of just naming it "clear speech". Ideally every language would just be called "language", minimising the requirement for national/ethnic identifiers altogether.

I also really like the Australian languages trick of naming languages after the words for "yes" or "that" etc.

[Yalensky]

I also really like the Australian languages trick of naming languages after the words for "yes" or "that" etc.

France did this too: langue d'oc in the south and langue d'oil in the north, after their words for "yes". And IIRC the Pama-Nyungan family is named for widespread words for "person".

Maybe we could start by not using the word Dutch for the language spoken in the Netherlands and Belgium (because it's confusing when the word Deutsch refers to their neighbors), and call it Netherlandish instead?

Or maybe Dutch should be spoken in Dutchland.

[alice]

You could always follow the example of Quenya, and call it "speech".

[bradrn]

We had an interesting discussion a while ago (starting here) about renaming Austronesian and Austroasiatic to be less confusing. Proposals included Notonesian, Kamian, Kautaian and Ploegian (for Austronesian), and Moyan, Noyan, Peiroan, Epeirotican, and the established near-synonym Mon-Khmer (for Austroasiatic).

[Linguoboy]

I also really like the Australian languages trick of naming languages after the words for "yes" or "that" etc.

France did this too: langue d'oc in the south and langue d'oil in the north, after their words for "yes". And IIRC the Pama-Nyungan family is named for widespread words for "person".

In one of my fantasy worlds, I named the varieties in a dialect continuum according to their forms of the definite article. (I was somewhat inspired by the Western South Slavic dialect continuum, where the word for "what" is commonly used.) Applying this to Romance would yield a scheme something like:

Lelate Romance (French)
Lolate Romance (Occitan)
Oate Romance (Galaico-Portuguese)
El·late Romance (Castilian/Catalan/Valencian)
Essate Romance (Mallorcan)
Susate Romance (Sardinian)
etc.

Or Western Germanic:
Derdiedas (High German)
Dededat (Low German)
Deendéidat (Luxembourgish)
Deediedat (Limburgs)
Dedehet (Standard Dutch)
Dedeit (West Frisian)
etc.

[Starbeam]

I love doing this. Personally, I think some languages have gotten bad nomenclature, so I often try to come up with alternatives. Either for disambiguation or because the names proved unfortunate/ cruel.

[sasasha]

I also really like the Australian languages trick of naming languages after the words for "yes" or "that" etc.

France did this too: langue d'oc in the south and langue d'oil in the north, after their words for "yes". And IIRC the Pama-Nyungan family is named for widespread words for "person".

In one of my fantasy worlds, I named the varieties in a dialect continuum according to their forms of the definite article. (I was somewhat inspired by the Western South Slavic dialect continuum, where the word for "what" is commonly used.) Applying this to Romance would yield a scheme something like:

Lelate Romance (French)
Lolate Romance (Occitan)
Oate Romance (Galaico-Portuguese)
El·late Romance (Castilian/Catalan/Valencian)
Essate Romance (Mallorcan)
Susate Romance (Sardinian)
etc.

Or Western Germanic:
Derdiedas (High German)
Dededat (Low German)
Deendéidat (Luxembourgish)
Deediedat (Limburgs)
Dedehet (Standard Dutch)
Dedeit (West Frisian)
etc.

I love this. Poor old The.

[Linguoboy]

I love this. Poor old The.

We could at least call it "Thethe" /ˈðiːðə/.

[sasasha]

I love this. Poor old The.

We could at least call it "Thethe" /ˈðiːðə/.

True!

Edited so that I at least have more than one word in my response:

I actually like your Romance examples without the -te a lot:

Lela Romance (French)
Lola Romance (Occitan)
Oa Romance (Galaico-Portuguese)
Ella Romance (Castilian/Catalan/Valencian)
Essa Romance (Mallorcan)
Susa Romance (Sardinian)
Illa Romance (Italian)
Ula Romance (Romanian)

It's quite graceful, really.

[missals]

Parallel to Pama-Nyungan, Indo-European could be renamed the Manu-Guman languages, after two of the most common words for "human" in the family (or specifically the Sanskrit and Gothic reflexes of the ancestral etyma).

[Starbeam]

I'd also pitch renaming lineal phases of a language old/middle/new to language phase [#]. For the sake of allowing more phase distinctions if nothing else.

[Yalensky]

Or Western Germanic:
Derdiedas (High German)
Dededat (Low German)
Deendéidat (Luxembourgish)
Deediedat (Limburgs)
Dedehet (Standard Dutch)
Dedeit (West Frisian)
etc.

This does show one of the problems with naming related languages after a cognate set: you get a lot of very very similar names! It's Ryusenshi's Dutch/Deutsch problem all over again.

Another idea:
Polandian
Germanian
Chinian
Englandian
Walesian
Francian

What about Sanskrit or Nahuatl, which aren't from place names? Well, um.. how about Indian and Mexician. And Esperanto? Zamenhof's-writing-deskian.

[bradrn]

Or Western Germanic:
Derdiedas (High German)
Dededat (Low German)
Deendéidat (Luxembourgish)
Deediedat (Limburgs)
Dedehet (Standard Dutch)
Dedeit (West Frisian)
etc.

This does show one of the problems with naming related languages after a cognate set: you get a lot of very very similar names! It's Ryusenshi's Dutch/Deutsch problem all over again.

Another idea:
Polandian
Germanian
Chinian
Englandian
Walesian
Francian

What about Sanskrit or Nahuatl, which aren't from place names? Well, um.. how about Indian and Mexician. And Esperanto? Zamenhof's-writing-deskian.

So what about, say, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujurati, Punjabi, Seri, Zapotec, Chʼol, Kʼicheʼ, Purépecha? Or should I say: Indian, Indian, Indian, Indian, Mexican, Mexican, Mexican, Mexican and Mexican.

[Yalensky]

So what about, say, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujurati, Punjabi, Seri, Zapotec, Chʼol, Kʼicheʼ, Purépecha? Or should I say: Indian, Indian, Indian, Indian, Mexican, Mexican, Mexican, Mexican and Mexican.

Gujaratian and Punjabian and, um, Indian A, B, C and so on. Of course.

Nah, forget that. All languages shall be renamed as human A, human B, human C, etc. Or simply A, B, C for short. More than 26 languages? Just double up or triple up the letters. Assigning letters to languages shall be carried out by pulling letters out of a hat. English for example could be DXC. The only real solution: the resulting labels are apolitical, disinterested, and unambiguous. Such a system could sidestep the whole "is it a dialect or a language?" question by assigning all speech variants to the same level (e.g. DXC is not a branch of DX or D, but all three are equal and separate random labels. Labels make no implication regarding hierarchy or relatedness. Western American English could be QPHU, Received Pronunciation can be TL, Cockney ZAA, Trump-speak GHRJ. And why stop there? My sleepy voice right when I wake up? That's IENXHUE. My particular idiolect of babytalk when I was little? That's AVFS.)

(In all seriousness I'm curious what classifications of languages using non-cultural alphanumeric labels might exist. Perhaps in libraries for tagging materials?)

[bradrn]

So what about, say, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujurati, Punjabi, Seri, Zapotec, Chʼol, Kʼicheʼ, Purépecha? Or should I say: Indian, Indian, Indian, Indian, Mexican, Mexican, Mexican, Mexican and Mexican.

Gujaratian and Punjabian and, um, Indian A, B, C and so on. Of course.

Nah, forget that. All languages shall be renamed as human A, human B, human C, etc. Or simply A, B, C for short. More than 26 languages? Just double up or triple up the letters. Assigning letters to languages shall be carried out by pulling letters out of a hat. English for example could be DXC. The only real solution: the resulting labels are apolitical, disinterested, and unambiguous. Such a system could sidestep the whole "is it a dialect or a language?" question by assigning all speech variants to the same level (e.g. DXC is not a branch of DX or D, but all three are equal and separate random labels. Labels make no implication regarding hierarchy or relatedness. Western American English could be QPHU, Received Pronunciation can be TL, Cockney ZAA, Trump-speak GHRJ. And why stop there? My sleepy voice right when I wake up? That's IENXHUE. My particular idiolect of babytalk when I was little? That's AVFS.)

Ethnologue counts about 7000 languages. Ceiling of log base 26 of 7000 is… wait, let me get my calculator… 3. So you could represent 7000 languages using only three letters. (Actually, 26³ = 17576, so three letters works for up to about twenty thousand languages.) Maybe this system is more plausible than I thought!

(In all seriousness I'm curious what classifications of languages using non-cultural alphanumeric labels might exist. Perhaps in libraries for tagging materials?)

ISO 639-3 represents each language with a three-letter code, and as an ISO standard it seems to be used pretty widely. But the codes are derived from the language names, so I’m not sure if this satisfies your criterion of using ‘non-cultural’ labels.

[Linguoboy]

ISO 639-3 represents each language with a three-letter code, and as an ISO standard it seems to be used pretty widely. But the codes are derived from the language names, so I’m not sure if this satisfies your criterion of using ‘non-cultural’ labels.

Wikidata, on the other hand, treats them like any other entity, assigning each an arbitrary string of digits proceeded by "Q". The Welsh language, for instance, is Q9309 while the closely-related Cornish is Q25289. (Wales itself is Q25, the title "Prince of Wales" is Q180729, and the current Prince of Wales is Q43274.)

Incidentally, Wikidata records aggregate record IDs from other schemata, so if you're interested in seeing which ones use meaningful abbreviations vs which ones use arbitrary strings, you can page down to the bottom of the record for Welsh, which has a very complete set, and compare.