naming a language

[Tom Givon]

Of course, most traditional peoples (pre-ag. cultures) used to call 
themselves "the people" and all other groups "the others", "the enemy", 
"the strangers", etc. (Ute "Nuuchi-u", "Kumaachi-u", resp.). And some 
(Ute, Navajo) seem to be content to retain this practice to this day. 
Naming problems seem to be the product of contact. But, so far as can be 
determined, a rose by any other name is still you-know-what. Enjoy the 
spring, TG

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Mikael Parkvall wrote:
> I have often wondered why there is such a passion for endonyms among 
> linguists. It is one thing to avoid exonyms that the speakers might 
> find offensive, but apart from that, I have a hard time seeing the 
> point in using endonyms at any cost.
>
> There are plenty of cases where there is a relatively established (in 
> the linguistic literature) English term for a language, where later 
> publications have opted for a new name, and where I can see no other 
> effect than growing confusion. For people dealing with more than one 
> or a few languages (such as typologists), this implies that you have 
> to make an effort to know which language is which.
>
> Having the same L1 as two of the previous posters, I would certainly 
> not see any benefit in the linguistic community adopting ”svenska” for 
> my language, rather than the more usual ”Swedish”. That would simply 
> strike me as ridiculous, and indeed, no linguists use the endonym when 
> writing in English. Yet, I somehow suspect that if the language in 
> question were spoken primarily in a third world country, some 
> linguists would have preferred that option.
>
> Should the aim be to somehow to avoid Eurocentricity (or perhaps 
> rather ”national-languages-of-the-first-world”-centricity”), isn’t it 
> Eurocentric in itself to use one naming strategy for these languages, 
> and restrict another to everything else?
>
> Even if one term is used more than another in the already existing 
> literature, there may be reasons to choose another one. What the 
> speakers themselves call their language, however, is not a strong 
> reason to do so, in my view. Unless, of course, you happen to be 
> writing in that particular language.
>
> In a way, this can be compared to toponymical changes. There is a 
> point in using Harare or Volgograd instead of Salisbury or Stalingrad, 
> since the older names are, if nothing else, reminders of former 
> régimes presumably not supported by the people who inhabit these 
> cities today. But need we say Beijing and Guangzhou for what used to 
> be been Peking and Canton? If so, must we start saying “the United 
> Arab Emirates in Arabic”? (And should it be standard Arabic or the 
> colloquial?).
>
>
> Mikael Parkvall
>