Random Nationality Generator

How this nationality generator works

Press Generate and you get a nationality. Turn up the Number box and you get several at once, all different. The three filters trim before the pick happens:

• Starts with: a single letter, matched against the first character.
• Contains: a string, matched anywhere inside the word.
• Ends with: a single letter, matched against the last character.

Everything happens in your browser. Copy takes the result to your clipboard.

Bermudian. Emirati. Kittitian. Macanese. Malagasy. Monegasque. Mosotho. Sammarinese. Tristanian. Wallisian.

The list a government had to write

These come from the list of nationalities published by Companies House, the United Kingdom's registrar of companies. It is the list you are shown when you register a British company and have to state your nationality on a form.

It holds 225 entries.

That matters for two reasons. The first is that it is an official government reference list, maintained and updated, rather than something a website made up. The second, and more interesting, is that it was built for a specific purpose: a person is standing at a counter, and the form needs a box that fits them.

Some of those names you will never have seen. That is exactly the point. A list built for a form has to cover everybody who might walk through the door, including the people nobody thought about.

The Companies House list is Crown copyright, published under the Open Government Licence version 3.0. Anyone reusing it, including this tool, does so under that licence.

Stateless is a nationality

Generate long enough and eventually you will be handed the word Stateless.

It is on the Companies House list because some people genuinely have no nationality. They hold no citizenship of any country. Millions of people are in that position, through the collapse of states, through laws that pass nationality only through fathers, through borders that moved while somebody was standing still.

And when one of those people registers a company in Britain, the form has to have a box for them.

It sits there in alphabetical order, between the S nationalities, doing a quiet and necessary job. It is the one entry on the list that is not a place.

Most random nationality generators do not have it, because most of them were assembled by taking a list of countries and adding suffixes. You cannot arrive at "Stateless" that way. You can only arrive there by starting from people.

Seven nationalities English has no word for

Look closely and you will find seven entries that are not adjectives at all. They are phrases:

• Citizen of Antigua and Barbuda
• Citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Citizen of Guinea-Bissau
• Citizen of Kiribati
• Citizen of Seychelles
• Citizen of the Dominican Republic
• Citizen of Vanuatu

English has no settled single word for people from those seven countries. Rather than invent one, or pick a contested one, the list writes it out longhand. Two more, Liechtenstein citizen and Vatican City citizen, do the same thing with the words the other way round.

Notice what is being avoided. There are words in circulation for several of these. But if a government prints one of them on a form and it turns out to be the wrong one, or the disliked one, the government has told somebody what they are called. So it declines.

A random nationality generator that says "Kiribatian" has made a decision that a government department specifically refused to make.

How a country turns into a nationality

The word for a person from a place is called a demonym. English builds them with a small set of endings, and there is no rule at all about which one a given country gets.

• -an and -ian is the most common. American, Mexican, Australian, Nigerian, Egyptian.
• -ese tends to attach to Asian, African and Italian-influenced names. Chinese, Nepalese, Senegalese, Maltese, Sammarinese.
• -ish for a cluster of old European names. Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Swedish, Danish.
• -i across much of the Middle East and South Asia. Iraqi, Pakistani, Israeli, Somali, Emirati.
• -er is rare. New Zealander, Luxembourger, Hong Konger, Cook Islander.

And then there are the ones that ignore the country's English name entirely, because they were borrowed from the language spoken there.

Dutch for the Netherlands. Mosotho for Lesotho. Monegasque for Monaco. Malagasy for Madagascar. Kittitian for Saint Kitts. Sammarinese for San Marino. Not one of those can be derived from the country name by any rule you could write down.

This is why a nationality generator cannot be built with string manipulation. Somebody has to look each one up.

Cymro, Cymraes and Prydeinig

Three entries are in Welsh, and they are the reason it is obvious the list is British in origin.

Cymro is a Welshman. Cymraes is a Welshwoman. Prydeinig means British. They sit alongside the English words for the same things, because both languages are official in Wales and the form has to offer both.

Which explains something else. English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish are all separate entries, and so is British. Five entries for one country, because within the United Kingdom people answer that question differently and the form is not going to argue.

You will also find Anguillan, Bermudian, Cayman Islander, Gibraltarian, Montserratian, Pitcairn Islander, St Helenian, Tristanian, Turks and Caicos Islander and British Virgin Islander. All British Overseas Territories, none of them independent countries.

The list is not a map of the world. It is a map of who turns up at one particular counter.

Ways people actually use this

• Writing characters. Generate a nationality and you have a starting point that is not the one you would have reached for.
• Testing forms and databases. If your software has a nationality field, run twenty of these through it. Citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina will find your character limit.
• Teaching demonyms. Pull ten and ask which country each one belongs to. Monegasque and Mosotho will do the teaching for you.
• Quiz rounds. Working backwards from the nationality to the country is much harder than forwards, and much better as a question.
• Getting the word right. If you are writing about somebody and you are not sure what to call them, this is a government-maintained answer rather than a guess.

Getting more out of the filters

• Type islander into Contains and you pull out most of the small territories at once: British Virgin Islander, Cayman Islander, Cook Islander, Pitcairn Islander, Solomon Islander, Turks and Caicos Islander.
• Type Citizen into Contains to see the seven countries English has no adjective for, all in one go.
• Starts with C is the crowded letter, partly because the "Citizen of" phrases are filed under C rather than under the country's own initial.
• Setting Ends with I gives you the Middle Eastern and South Asian demonyms, plus Thai, Somali and Swazi, which is a good reminder that these endings are a pattern rather than a rule.

Questions people ask

What is the word for a person from a country called?

A demonym. From the Greek for "people" and "name". Danish, Peruvian, Thai and Emirati are all demonyms.

Why are there more nationalities than countries?

Because nationalities are not countries. The Companies House list includes British Overseas Territories, the four nations of the United Kingdom listed separately, Welsh-language entries, and an entry for people with no nationality at all.

Is "Stateless" really a nationality?

It is on the official list, because people who hold no citizenship anywhere still have to fill in the form. It is the one entry that describes an absence rather than a place.

Why are people from the Netherlands called Dutch?

Because the English word was borrowed from the language, not built from the country's name. The same thing happened with Malagasy for Madagascar and Monegasque for Monaco. There is no rule. There is only history.

Is this list official?

Yes. It is the Companies House list of nationalities, used on United Kingdom company registration forms, published under the Open Government Licence version 3.0.

References

1. List of nationalities, Companies House
2. Nationalities, GOV.UK
3. Open Government Licence version 3.0