Ask HN: Why can't I call myself “a Japanese”?
&quot;A Japanese&quot; or &quot;a Chinese&quot; were common in English a few decades ago. This has declined very significantly. Interestingly, people often use these as self-descriptions (I think especially non-native speakers).<p>There is a similar phenomenon with &quot;a Jew&quot;, which was once common and where now most speakers would use &quot;a Jewish person&quot; (except, to some extent, for Jews using it as a self-description, although &quot;I am Jewish&quot; is more common than &quot;I am a Jew&quot;, but their denotation is also different because the former foregrounds religious identification and the latter foregrounds ancestry or ethnic identification).<p>Apart from the &quot;person-centered language&quot; phenomenon that other people have mentioned, I think there&#x27;s the closely related euphemism treadmill<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill</a><p>where even a completely neutral term may acquire a negative connotation because of its widespread use in a negative sense, or by people intending to give it a negative connotation. Or people may simply fear that a neutral term has acquired a negative connotation by recalling that it was widely used in the past.<p>As other commenters have pointed out, there are still demonyms which are common to use in the singular and their idiomaticity has tended to change (mostly in the direction of stopping).<p>Although I think there&#x27;s an interesting phenomenon where <i>new countries&#x27;</i> demonyms feel plausible to me in the singular (&quot;an East Timorese&quot;, &quot;a South Sudanese&quot;, &quot;a North Macedonian&quot;, &quot;a Kosovan&quot;&#x2F;&quot;a Kosovar&quot;). It&#x27;s hard to prove but I suspect that the relative novelty or unfamiliarity of these terms acts to alleviate speakers&#x27; internalized fear that they might inadvertently be using the same terminology that was previously used by xenophobes!<p>But I&#x27;m not totally confident in that.<p>It would be interesting to gather more data by surveying a lot of native speakers about a lot of demonyms and trying to quantify the possible influences of (1) familiarity, (2) phonology, (3) history of ethnic conflict, ...<p>Another one that feels kind of parallel is the arbitrariness in whether you use a definite article in the name of a country. For example, &quot;the Sudan&quot; and &quot;the Ukraine&quot; used to be very common in English but it&#x27;s not unusual to see the country names without the article now. On the other hand, &quot;the United Kingdom&quot;, &quot;the Netherlands&quot;, and &quot;the Maldives&quot; are still always &quot;the&quot;. This is different in other languages, where for example &quot;Switzerland&quot; is never &quot;the&quot; in English, but is always &quot;the&quot; in German (&quot;die Schweiz&quot;); &quot;Japan&quot; is never &quot;the&quot; in English, but is always &quot;the&quot; in Portuguese (&quot;o Japão&quot;), as is Brazil (&quot;o Brasil&quot;). It&#x27;s challenging, though maybe not impossible, to give a clear account of the origins of all of these distinctions...<p>Edit: in Arabic, too, some countries are &quot;the&quot; and some aren&#x27;t, but it also doesn&#x27;t correspond with English practice.