Factors Affecting the Formation of Citizen-Names in the United States

Abstract

M ENCKEN'S 1948 ARTICLE in American Speech, What the People of American Towns Call Themselves, commented on the regularities and vagaries to be found in words like Bostonian, New Yorker, and Brooklynite and listed about 450 derivatives of this kind. That list, the basis for Mencken's remarks on the subject in The American Language (1936, 548), was derived from a survey of newspaper editors. Mencken gave some generalizations about the distribution of suffixes in relation to the final letter(s) of the name, derived largely from Stewart (1934). It is the purpose of this article to re-examine the examples, analyze them in a wider linguistic perspective, and show that they yield insights into wordformation in general. I shall discuss the derivatives listed by Mencken (1948) but supplement them by the citizen-nouns from state and regional names to be found in the Dictionary of Americanisms (Mathews 1951), in Mencken (1947), Langenfelt (1920), and a number of fairly recent local newspapers and magazines: Anderson Countian Aspenite (Colorado, 1977), Chattanoogan (Tennessee, 1979), Chilmarker (Massachusetts, 1972), Covingtonian (Kentucky, 1939), Fort Worthian (Texas, 1977), Grosse Pointer (Michigan, 1977), lowegian (Iowa, 1981), Lake Placidian (New York, 1980), Lincoln Parker (Illinois, 1981), Pasadenan (California, 1977), Plainsman (Georgia, 1976), Quoguer (New York, 1978), Santa Barbaran (California, 1977). This sample was collected for my dissertation (Shaw 1982), which gives full details of sources. Like many novel coinings, words of the present type tend to be invented, and perhaps imposed, by journalists or other people with influence over the form of mass communication. Hence they reflect individual tastes, and one cannot assume that the form one finds is the only possible one, or even the most obvious, for once a form is established it will be used however odd it is from the point of view of the man in the street or of the language system. However, at least in this area, the system and the criteria for normality are defined by the mass of existing forms. Any individual form carries little weight, but the 500 or so examined here cannot all be random or fanciful formations. They show quite