914: Muslim as a Demonym Jun 10, 2017

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Almost every demonym or other adjective used to denote a people involve either a suffix like '-ish' and '-ian', or are strong nouns like 'Greek' from 'Greece'. There are some few exceptions, such as 'Muslim' that comes from the word 'Islam'. In English there are fewer prefixes that are used in general compared to suffixes, and far fewer than there are in some other languages like Hungarian. Arabic, and other semitic languages like Hebrew on the other hand don't have root words in the way that Indo-European ones to which affixes are added but use templates into which usually vowels are added to provide grammatical meaning. Nevertheless, in general M is a common way to make something into a demonym, so 'Islam' would become 'Mislam' (Muslim). In kiSwahili, a Bantu language with a great deal of Arabic influence, and 'Marekani' ('America') becomes 'Mmarekani' (American) as well.

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