In English, a word such as "English" or "French" can be:
a pronoun - the English live in England; the French live in France
a proper noun (the name of a language) - the main language spoken in England is English; the main language spoken in France is French
an adjective - I like English food; I like French food
Note that "the XPRON" = "(the) XADJ people", and "XPROP" = "(the) XADJ language", as in:
the EnglishPRON have a Queen = (the) EnglishADJpeople have a Queen
in England they speak EnglishPROP = in England they speak the EnglishADJlanguage
Even the adjective form can sometimes be equivalent to an ellipsis of a longer phrase:
in England they read EnglishADJ newspapers = in England they read EnglishADJlanguage newspapers OR in England they read EnglishADJowned newspapers
On the surface it would appear that the same word is used for the demonym (pronoun), the language name (proper noun), and the adjective. However, there are many exceptions to that:
WP:RELIABLE has some guidelines to follow. Click on the prior link to read the full text; I have repeated the most relevant information here:
The policy on sourcing is Wikipedia:Verifiability, which requires inline citations for any material challenged or likely to be challenged, and for all quotations. The policy is strictly applied to all material in the mainspace—articles, lists, and sections of articles—without exception [...]
Overview
Source reliability falls on a spectrum: highly reliable sources, clearly unreliable sources, and many in the middle. Editors must use their judgment to draw the line between usable and unreliable sources.
Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. This means that we publish the opinions only of reliable authors, and not the opinions of Wikipedians who have read and interpreted primary source material for themselves. [...]
Definition of a source
The word "source" when citing sources on Wikipedia has three related meanings:
Any of the three can affect reliability. Reliable sources may be published materials with a reliable publication process, authors who are regarded as authoritative in relation to the subject, or both. These qualifications should be demonstrable to other people.
Definition of published
The term "published" is most commonly associated with text materials, either in traditional printed format or online. [...]
Context matters
The reliability of a source depends on context. Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made in the Wikipedia article and is an appropriate source for that content. In general, the more people engaged in checking facts, analyzing legal issues, and scrutinizing the writing, the more reliable the publication. [...]
Age matters
Especially in scientific and academic fields, older sources may be inaccurate because new information has been brought to light, new theories proposed, or vocabulary changed. [...]
Article titles are based on how reliable English-language sources refer to the article's subject. There is often more than one appropriate title for an article. In that case, editors choose the best title by consensus based on the considerations that this page explains.
A good Wikipedia article title has the five following characteristics:
Recognizability – The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.
Naturalness – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.
Precision – The title unambiguously identifies the article's subject and distinguishes it from other subjects. (See § Precision and disambiguation, below.)
Conciseness – The title is no longer than necessary to identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects. (See § Conciseness, below)
Consistency – The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles. Many of these patterns are listed (and linked) as topic-specific naming conventions on article titles, in the box above.
Changing one controversial title to another without a discussion that leads to consensus is strongly discouraged. If an article title has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should not be changed. Consensus among editors determines if there does exist a good reason to change the title. If it has never been stable, or it has been unstable for a long time, and no consensus can be reached on what the title should be, default to the title used by the first major contributor after the article ceased to be a stub.[1]
This essay will be focussing on verifiable, demonstrable evidence from reliable sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. The context of each piece of evidence will be examined, and carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable and is an appropriate source for that content. The age of the content matters. Older sources may be inaccurate because of changed vocabulary.
Google searches are somewhat verifiable, with the results changing over time. They are demonstrable, however, they are not reliable sources because they don't have a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Anyone can author a page on the internet that Google can include in its search results. You don't have to be an expert, so Google search results should be completely dismissed.
Google ngrams are better than searches because they come from published books. The results are verifiable, however, they are not terribly demonstrable due to the limitation of finding only 5 pages with the search term per book. They are also ultimately unreliable because they don't come only from authors with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Almost anyone can author a book without being an expert. Although books come under more scrutiny than webpages, many books have been published with inaccurate information, or reflecting the biases of the author. People with strong (even extreme) views are more likely to write a book than those with no strong views.
Another difficulty with ngrams is differentiating different meanings of the same word. As demonstrated above, "English" can refer to the country, the culture, the language, or the people. An ngram search for English_NOUN, English_ADJ, English_PRON unfortunately shows that Google doesn't differentiate between "English" being used as a noun or a pronoun. Another limitation is that when the part of speech is included in the search, the results don't allow you to verify them in specific books.
A Google book search for "English" can be done, but verifying the results is a too labourious task. Google ngrams are unsuitable because a) the meaning of each instance can't easily be determined (i.e. the results aren't fully verifiable or demonstrable), and b) the reputation of each author is unknown.
Google trends is an interesting tool. It allows you to look up what people were searching for from any period after 2004. It suffers from the same problem as ngrams, in that a single word's meaning can't be determined due to lack of context. The results are verifiable and demonstrable, but the meaning of the data is highly questionable. Nevertheless, is it interesting to look at, which I will do later.
Encyclopædia Britannica's article is called Sinhalese language[2], and says:
Alternative Titles: Cingalese language, Simhali language, Singhalese language, Sinhala
Sinhalese language, also spelled Singhalese or Cingalese, also called Sinhala, Indo-Aryan language, one of the two official languages of Sri Lanka.
Notes:
The alternative titles equate "Sinhalese language" (with the word "language") to "Sinhala" (without the word "language").
The grammar is incorrect. It should be one of:
TheSinhalese language, also spelled Singhalese language or Cingalese language, also called Sinhala, is an Indo-Aryan language and one of the two official languages of Sri Lanka.
Sinhalese, also spelled Singhalese or Cingalese, also called Sinhala, is an Indo-Aryan language and one of the two official languages of Sri Lanka.
There are no mentions of "Sinhalese" referring to the people.
Two language mentions: "Sinhala" in the title and just "Sinhalese" once in the body; all other mentions of "Sinhalese" refer to the people
Sinhalese (language)
Sinhalese (people)
Sinhala (language)
Sinhala (people)
Other names (language)
Other names (people)
5
5
3
0
1
0
Note: The quality of Encyclopædia Britannica's articles is not always what you'd expect.
From their article on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck:
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in full Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, (born August 1, 1744, Bazentin-le-Petit, Picardy, France—died December 18, 1829, Paris), pioneer French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern evolutionary theorygenetics and .
The above quote is taken directly from Encyclopædia Britannica, and really does end with the nonsensical "theorygenetics and .".
Also, as noted in the Encyclopædia Britannica article: "Though published in the United States since 1901, the Britannica has for the most part maintained British English spelling." This may indicate a preference for conservative language and spelling, and may not reflect modern accepted practice.
When referring to the people, Britannica only uses "Sinhalese". When referring to the language, Britannica uses "Sinhalese" 62.5±26.9% of the time and "Sinhala" 37.5±26.9% of the time, using one standard deviation. Although the base rate of "Sinhalese" is greater than "Sinhala", the uncertainty is huge due to only having eight data points, and could possibly tip the balance in favour of "Sinhala" if more data could be collected. The data from Encyclopædia Britannica is weakly in favour of "Sinhalese".
Encyclopedia.com aggregates information from other published dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference works. It calls the people "Sinhalese" or "Sinhala" and the language "Sinhala".[3]
Note that the first language in the "All English Names" column is the primary language as seen from nearly entries; the entries are not ordered alphabetically:
English Name of Language
All English Names
All French Names
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-1
Saxon, Low
Low German; Low Saxon; German, Low; Saxon, Low
bas allemand; bas saxon; allemand, bas; saxon, bas
nds
Sepedi
Pedi; Sepedi; Northern Sotho
pedi; sepedi; sotho du Nord
nso
i.e. "Saxon, Low" should preferably be called "Low German", and "Sepedi" should preferably be called "Pedi".
ISO is in favour of "Sinhala" as the primary name.
Registration Authority
SIL International has been designated as the ISO 639-3/RA for the purpose of processing requests for alpha-3 language codes comprising the International Standard, Codes for the representation of names of languages - Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages.
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It was first issued in 1951, and is now published annually by SIL International. As expected, it follows SIL's standard, although mentions additional alternate names.
Ethnologue is in favour of "Sinhala" as the main name, mentioning "Cingalese", "Singhala", "Singhalese", "Sinhalese" as alternate names.[4]
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-ROM in 2005, and was released as the second edition on the Internet in April 2008. It is maintained by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and by the Max Planck Digital Library.
WALS is in favour of "Sinhala"[5] noting alternative names:
Omniglot is an online encyclopedia focused on languages and writing systems. It calls the language "Sinhala", noting it is also known as "Sinhalese" or "Singhala".[6]
The Linguasphere Observatory is a transnational linguistic research network. It has called the language "Sinhala" since at least 2000, with alternate names of "sumangala", "singhala", "sinhalese", "singalese", "ceylonese".[7]
Glottolog is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the former Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and since 2015 at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. They call the language "Sinhala". They have a huge list of other names in many languages including "Sinhalese" in English.[8]
What's very useful about Glottolog is that they have a huge list of books they've cited, over 150 just for Sinhala. The table is too large to reproduce here in its entirety, so I have summarised it:
Years
Sinhala
Sinhalese
Singhalese
Notes
1300 - 1945
0
4
2
"Cingalese" also gets a look in. Names in other languages are "Singaleesche", "Singalesisk"
1946 - 1959
-
-
-
Ceylon gained its independence from Britain in 1948. None of the cited books were published between 1946 and 1959.
1960 - 1971
5
10
1
One book used both "Sinhala" and "Sinhalese" in the title. What looks to be a German book calling the language "die singhalesische Sprache" (literally "the Singhalese language"). Note that as in English, "singhalesische" is an adjective and "Sprache" ("speech"/"language") is a noun.
1972 - 1975
2
5
1
Ceylon renamed itself to Sri Lanka in 1972.
1976 - 1981
10
2
0
What looks like two Italian books published calling the language "singalese".
1982 - 1991
17
1
0
The Sri Lankan Civil War started in 1983. The same German book as above republished.
1992 - 2001
20
2
0
A German book giving the name as "Singhalesisch". A French book calling it "singhalais". Another German book calling it "Singhalesischen".
2002 - 2011
17
2
0
A French book calling the language "Singhalais". A German book calling it "Singhalesisch". A language I can't easily identify (probably another Asian language) calling it "Sihala".
Glottolog has done the hard work of filtering the reputable books from the nonreputable books. Between 1960 and 1975, 1 in 3 cited books with the language in the title called it "Sinhala", the other 2 in 3 calling it "Sinhalese". The turning point for most reputable authors dropping "Sinhalese" in favour of "Sinhala" seems to be 1976. From 1976 to 2011 just over 90% of the books that named the language called it "Sinhala", not "Sinhalese".
The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage does not mention either "Sinhala" or "Sinhalese" at all.
I've used up my quota of free article views, however, The New York Times seems to prefer "Sinhalese" when referring to the people, and "Sinhala" when referring to the language. A search for "Sinhalese" brings up about 479 articles mostly about violence in Sri Lanka. A search for "Sinhala" brings up about 35 articles, approximately half of them about language, although it also shows that "Sinhala" can be used for the people too.
A Duck Duck Go search for "Sinhalese news" returns "Sinhala" in 9 of the first 10 results. Only SBS (an Australian foreign language television and radio service) calls the language "Sinhalese". SBS already internally calls its program "SBS Sinhala", and will make that its official name soon (no date given as of March 2019). Some articles already call the program by its future name.[9]
Google's search results are similar, but because they are personalised, everyone gets slightly different results.
† The data for "Sinhalese" reached its maximum in May 2009, when the Sri Lankan Civil War ended. In that same month, searches for both "Sinhalese language" and "Sinhala language" dropped, achieving only half of the average for the 2004-2018 period. This indicates that "Sinhalese" is more closely connected to the people than the language in most people's minds.
Search term
Absolute increase from 2006 to 2018
Relative increase from 2006 to 2018
Sinhalese language
-3.7%
-42.5%
Sinhala language
12.6%
72.5%
Sinhalese
-8.9%
-12.1%
However, when "Sinhala" is added to the search, it completely dominates the results, steadily increasing from about 71.4% in January 2004 to about 98.8% in January 2019, or from 5 in 7 searches to 85 in 86 searches. The number of times "Sinhala" has appeared in search queries has increased by a factor of 17, more than an order of magnitude.
As noted above, there is no way to determine which meaning of "Sinhala" was intended from this data. We also don't know who performed these searches. Were they Sri Lankan expatriates or non-Sri Lankans? However, it does show a very strong tendency of searches for both "Sinhala" and "Sinhala language" to increase during the years 2004 to 2018, while "Sinhalese" and "Sinhalese language" have each fallen by about 33%. While it's not impossible that an increase in the number of people using "Sinhala" instead of "Sinhalese" has not contributed to this result, it is very unlikely.
1944: "Sinhala language" not used at all. "Sinhalese language" used in all books.
From 1944 to 1952 "Sinhala language" still not used. "Sinhalese language" increases, peaking in 1948, then decreases slightly.
From 1952 to 1958 books making reference to "Sinhala language" start to appear, growing strongly. "Sinhalese language" rises sharply.
From 1958 to 1964 both "Sinhalese language" and "Sinhala language" decrease. "Sinhalese language" loses most of its gained ground.
From 1964 to 1983 "Sinhala language" increases strongly while "Sinhalese language" is steady until 1975, then strongly decreases. Parity reached in 1982.
From 1983 to 1990 both "Sinhalese language" and "Sinhala language" increase, although "Sinhala language" maintains a narrow majority.
From 1990 to 2008 "Sinhala language" and "Sinhalese language" both slightly decrease with "Sinhala language" increasing its gap.
2008: "Sinhala language" is now used about 37.0% more than "Sinhalese language"
The small amount of overlap between the two data sets (Google ngrams and Google trends) from 2004-2008 shows that the data is not directly comparable. However, both show strong trends of "Sinhala" increasing its share, while "Sinhalese" decreases its share. The secondary evidence supports the primary evidence.
This shows that when "Sinhalese" is the main name of the language article, "Sinhala" still gets strong numbers of page views, while when "Sinhala" is the main name, "Sinhalese" gets virtually no page views. Unfortunately, this data only starts in July 2015, so does not show the behaviour caused by previous article moves.
Sinhalese people was created as Sinhalese in December 2001. It was moved to its current title in October 2005. It had an improper move attempt in February 2008 to Sinhala people which was reverted. No other moves have occurred or been attempted.
Leaving Sinhalese people where it is seems uncontroversial. There have been previous move wars about whether the language should be called "Sinhala" or "Sinhalese". Consensus has been reached many times that "Sinhalese" should be changed to "Sinhala". No consensus has ever been reached for "Sinhala" being changed to "Sinhalese", those changes happening unilaterally and without discussion.
As per WP:TITLECHANGES, the past unilateral changes from "Sinhala" to "Sinhalese" were inadvisable. In the case of Sinhala language there was previous consensus for "Sinhala", and in the case of Sinhala script the "Sinhala" part of the name had been stable for a long time.
Out of the reputable sources identified so far, 16 have "Sinhala" as the main or only name, 2 use "Sinhalese" as much as or more than "Sinhala", and none use "Sinhalese" as the only name. SBS will officially move from primarily "Sinhalese" to only "Sinhala" soon (no date given as of March 2019). When they do, no reputable sources that I've found so far will use "Sinhalese" more than "Sinhala".
The ratio of "Sinhalese language":"Sinhalese" (about 1:11) from Google trends is greater than the ratio of "Sinhala language":"Sinhala" (less than 1:42), i.e. the word "language" is more likely to follow "Sinhalese" than "Sinhala", indicating that "Sinhala" is more recognisable as the name of a language than "Sinhalese"
The following statements appear to be true:
The Sinhalese language is usually called "Sinhala" in English, being a phonetic respelling (rather than a translation) of the native word සිංහල
The language was called "Sinhalese" in English in the past (amongst similar variants), and this name is still recognisable and usable
Encyclopædia Britannica weakly prefers "Sinhalese" to "Sinhala" as the name of the language
Standards organisations have decided that "Sinhala" is the common name in English
Language organisations use "Sinhala" as the primary name in English
News organisations appear not to have an official recommendation for either name, but their journalists seem to favour "Sinhala" over "Sinhalese", sometimes using both interchangeably
Technology organisations only use "Sinhala"
The available secondary evidence fully supports the primary evidence
Addressing the guidelines for article titles:
Recognizability – People are likely to be familiar with both "Sinhala" and "Sinhalese" or neither
Naturalness – Based on the evidence from Google trends, most people will search for "Sinhala"
Precision – both "Sinhala language" and "Sinhalese language" unambiguously identify the article's subject matter
Conciseness – "Sinhala language" and "Sinhalese language" are equally concise
Consistency – Currently, articles on Sinhala are inconsistently titled, some as "Sinhala", some as "Sinhalese", in roughly equal numbers. Language articles tend to be created under "Sinhala", then later changed to "Sinhalese"
The majority of the English speaking world uses "Sinhala" in preference to "Sinhalese". Reasons for this are not speculated on in this essay. "Sinhalese" remains an acceptable alternative, however, "Sinhala" should be used wherever appropriate. The word used in direct quotations should not be changed. If there is an historical reason for using "Sinhalese" instead of "Sinhala", it may be used, e.g. in an article about Ceylon in the 1800s. The name used across Wikipedia should match the name used in the majority of primary article sources.
^This paragraph was adopted to stop move warring. It is an adaptation of the wording in the Manual of Style, which is based on the Arbitration Committee's decision in the Jguk case.
