The Naming of the Language
Some thoughts on how to name your conlangs.
I’m a proponent of the “a dog called Dog” approach myself, but keep in mind that I’m a lazy idiot.
Many natlangs are (endonymously, at least) named after the ethnic group who speaks them or the location where they started out being spoken:
- English is named for the Angles (i.e., the Anglo- in “Anglo-Saxon;” the origin is more apparent with Ænglisc, the endonymous name of Old English).
- French (le français) is named for the French people (les Français).
- Italian (l’italiano) is named for Italy (l’Italia).
- Japanese (日本語 nihongo) is named for Japan (日本 Nihon).
- Russian (русский город russkiy gorod “Russian language”) is named for the Rus (народ руси narod rusi “Rus people”), the historical predcessors of the modern-day Russian people.
More interesting is when you delve into the names of languages that aren’t (necessarily) named for their speakers. These languages can be named exonymically (by outsiders) or from some word that doesn’t refer to the ethnicity or homeland of its speakers.
- Mandarin Chinese, for example, is variously called 汉语 hanyu (the language of the Han [Chinese] people) and 普通话 putonghua (common speech). China is a multiethnic country (the Han ethnic group is the most common), and it is also a multilingual one – but Putonghua is the standard variety of Chinese used throughout the country as a lingua franca, and when non-Chinese refer to the “Chinese” language, they almost certainly mean Mandarin.
- Guaraní is the outsider’s name for a language spoken in Paraguay, Uruguay, and elsewhere in South America called Avañe’ẽ by its speakers. The name Guaraní was bestowed upon the language by Spanish colonists.
- Aztec is one of the outsiders’ names for the Nahuatl language spoken in central Mexico, spoken by the various Nahua ethnic groups.
- Navajo is the outsiders’ name for Diné bizaad, the official language of the Navajo Nation and the Navajo people – and despite appearances, it’s not Spanish in origin – it comes from the Tewa language spoken by the nearby Pueblo people.
Some languages’ names are just those languages’ words for “language,” “speech,” or “word(s),” sometimes prefaced with a possessive (i.e., “our language”). The exonym Mandarin comes to English from Sanskrit by way of Malay and, in turn, Portuguese, from a word meaning “servant.”
The “language called Language” approach is the one I usually take. (I’m just a language nerd, not a worldbuilder, so I’m not thinking about how these languages fit into a conworld – I just need names for projects. My cats are grateful that I don’t take that approach in naming them!)
A curious example of the art of language naming comes, incidentally, from the world of conlanging. The Esperanto language originally had no name – it was la lingvo internacia (“the international language”), and the book describing it was published by L.L. Zamenhof under a pseudonym – Esperanto (he who hopes). Esperanto, thus, was named for its creator. (I’m highly, highly tempted to create a language called Williamese just for gits and shiggles.)