Talk:Anglicisation

message: Loss of Anglicized names due to "national pride" or official pressure: Not sure Bombay/Mumbai and Peking/Beijing are good examples of this. "Bombay" to "Mumbai" was a real name change: the two names are etymologically differerent, although they do look like they could be related. As for China, there's nothing "official" about Peking becoming Beijing. The only official name for China's capital is 北京, and the Hanyu Pinyin spelling of these characters happens to be Běijīng. While the PRC government may be promoting Hanyu Pinyin as its preferred Romanization scheme, this seems to be more about consistently representing the Mandarin Chinese language in Roman letters than dictating what appears on maps intended for non-Chinese speakers --- as evident from the fact that the pronunciation of some letters in Hanyu Pinyin bears no relation to their pronunciation in English or indeed most languages using the Latin alphabet --- e.g. q, x. In any case, Francophones seem quite happy with Pékin. What may have happened is that English-speakers caught wind of the Pinyin spelling and thought that some sort of name-change *had* occurred and for that reason started using "Beijing" (of course missing out the tone diacritics when writing it).
Sometimes a place name appears anglicized, but is not.  In some cases, the form being used in English is an older name that has now been changed.  For example, Turin in the Piedmont area of Italy, is named Turin in the original Piedmontese language, but now officially known as Torino in Italian.  In some cases, link English-language media overcompensates for this in the mistaken belief that the name being used in English was imposed by English speakers and is some sort of injustice.  Locals tried to get Piedmontese included as an official olympic language, but were unsucessful.  Well, I guess someone has to finish what Mussolini started.
Still-Anglicized place names are certainly not all Western European, and includes some where the name might be expected to be the subject of political contention (e.g. Jerusalem)
Better examples of official de-Anglicization might be Ivory Coast, where the government insists that the name not be translated from the original French  (Côte d'Ivoire), or Calcutta becoming Kolkata. --- Alex -- 2005-07-29 17:45 UCT
Names were not changed by immigration officials in the United States.  This is an urban myth that has been propagated for many many years.  Immigration officials didn't write down names, but rather worked from manifests provided by the shipping companies.  Any errors were made by the company, and not the Immigration clerks.  Immigration officials were available who spoke the native languages of the immigrants.  This is not to say that name changes did not occur.  They did.  It happened in my extended family when a grade school teacher told an great uncle of mine that he was spelling his last name wrong.  My paternal grandfather changed the family's name for unknown reasons; but to say that name changes occured by government officials is simply untrue. 
It is also a bit of an overstatement to say "personal names have been heavily anglicised."  The examples given of Johann/John, Piotr/Peter, Giorgos/George, and Yeshua/Joshua have been anglicised.  These are all biblical names, and have analogs in all European languages via Hellenistic Greek translation/transliteration of Hebrew names.  It is possible to find analogs of these names in other Middle Eastern languages as well.  There's examples of this, Peter the Great, Christopher Columbus, and the Pope's ruling name for three.  However it seems like this phenomena primarily occurs with individuals of historical prominence, not average persons, and not recently practiced (with the notable exception of the Pope).  If someone can cite some stats or examples of widespread anglicisiation of personal names, I think this section should be rewritten.  I guess its ultimately a judgement call, but I lean against the characterization of "heavy." -- 70.106.209.48 05:37, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proper Names 

message: Why are we accepting that anglicisation is most commonly discussed in the more abstract context of language? I'm not sure this is true, and is it not somewhat POV? I mean does it not depend on who's doing the discussing? I recently linked my user page here, because I mention that Gwent is one of the most anglicised parts of Wales, only to find that this article is all about language. I think that this article is unbalanced and doesn't reflect the true meaning or usage of the word.--Alun 05:45, 15 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Outside of the United Kingdom, I think it's much more commonly used in a linguistic sense.  If there is something interesting to say about the other sense though, feel free to add a section or split this article.  I don't know much about anglicisation as it applies to making things more English in a cultural sense, beyond the simple definition that I already included in the first paragraph of the article. --Delirium 23:23, May 21, 2005 (UTC)
It is very common to say things like "'Pavement' is the Anglicised version of 'Sidewalk'", where the word anglicised specifically refers to the form used in England, rather than the form used in English. This article should definitely at least mention that usage, though I'm not quite sure that there's anything "interesting" to say about it; rather, the article is currently misleading by claiming that anglicisation usually refers to the English language. The word Anglo-American is related, of course.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.110.192.219 (talk) 22:57, 26 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Why only 'language'?

message: This article is a ramble it needs to cite its sources (WP:CITE). There are lots of generalisations that have been added which are clearly a POV. Often this is to do with degree of the type covered by  some/many/most which allows for lots of non-NPOV. Eg often even with diacritical marks that do not normally exist in English and others like this  With languages that use non-Latin alphabets, such as the Arabic, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabets, a direct transliteration is typically used, in order to secure faithfulness to the original pronunciation rather than conformance to the norms of English. Who says so? If the word is directly translated from the native language into English then unless the grammar rules are the same as English the word will not be read that way. Besides it is not translation from one alphabet to another it is transliteration. Even if the word is from the Latin alphabet one needs to know for example that in German "W" is pronounced as a "V" if one is to have hope of "secur[ing] faithfulness to the original pronunciation" and unless one has learnt German this is unlikely to be true. --Philip Baird Shearer 12:09, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: unreferenced

message: "Anglicisation in language"
There are two primary types of Anglicisation in language: Anglicising non-English words for use in English, and Anglicising non-English languages through the introduction of English words.
The latter does not follow a standard definition of 'Anglicize'; the use of English words in non-English cultures is more a form of acculturation. - IstvanWolf 00:04, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's not true at all.  "Anglicize" means simply to make more like English.  It's true that a common use is to describe anglicization of individual words when importing them into English, but it's also common to describe anglicizing other languages or even entire cultures; one of the two canonical quotes the OED has under its 'anglicize' entry refers to the British 'anglicization of India'. Compare Hellenize. --Delirium 21:53, 13 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  removed the following 

message: There was a hopeless inconsistency about the use of capital letters.  Wikipedia prefers lower case in general, especially when dictionaries allow a choice so I moved it that way.--SE16 00:37, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think these terms are usually capitalized, though Anglicisation seems to be used lowercase more than others. Compare (all capitalized) the terms Americanization, Hellenization, Arabization, etc. --Delirium 23:54, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

text: That's true, but in modern British English, -ise is more common, outside the relatively limited number of people who use Oxford spelling. It's discussed a bit here. But in any case, Wikipedia usually spells descriptively, and on a descriptive basis Anglicisation is the common spelling in British English. --Delirium (talk) 20:35, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

text: What's the 'British Encyclopedia'? Britannica.com is a commercial site owned by a company incorporated in the U.S.A. I don't think a 'descriptive' case can be made for preserving -isation, we'd have to have a head-count, and I fear the Englishized version would be more popular. It's not worth arguing about, is it? If people want an article on Anglicization, they can just create a redirect page. Wikipedia has a policy regarding national variations in English:  - see in particular the clause 'Retaining the existing variety'. If this page was started in UK English (my skin is crawling, so ingrained is my POV), then the current spelling is the one that must stay. SeanCollins (talk) 01:58, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Oxford English Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The five entries for the anglicize words in the Oxford English Dictionary favour spellings with a 'z' and with a lower-case letter 'a' at the beginning, for these words: anglicize, anglicized, anglicizer, anglicizing, anglicization. The OED entry for anglicize begins as follows: anglicize, v. Forms: 17- anglicise, 17- anglicize, 18- anglocise  (rare), 18- anglocize (rare). Also with capital initial. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines it as follows: anglicize: verb (UK usually anglicise). Both agree on the lower case beginning, while the Cambridge dictionary asserts that 's' is favoured over 'z' in the UK. Therefore, the two British dictionaries take slightly different approaches to the question of 's' or 'z'. The American Merriam-Webster Dictionary has entries for both anglicize and anglicise (both with lower case 'a'). The latter entry says, chiefly British variant of anglicize. While both entries say, Usage: often capitalized, the headwords are defined in the dictionary with a lower case default spelling. --O'Dea (talk) 09:58, 27 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: In accordance with the above and with MOS I have decapped within the article text. --candyworm (talk) 16:30, 19 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: anglicisation or Anglicisation

message: The article names a number of Italian cities as examples of anglicisation.  I wonder if this is appropriate since most Italian place names came into English via French.  The English exonyms thus follow largely French pattern.  Names like Milan, Venice, Rome, Naple, Turin, Florence, are all examples of straight borrowing of Francisation. o (talk) 04:33, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Italian to English 

message: These two names are not anglicizations.  The K in Peking is there because there actually was a K sound centuries ago.  We write Beijing now because in Mandarin there was a phonological change where some K sounds were replaced with something a little like J (also a little like CH).  Peking represents the historical Mandarin pronunciation, and the K is still pronounced in other Chinese languages.  The spelling Tsingtao actually represents the same exact sound as Qingdao.  They're just different romanizations.  If Tsingtao is anglicized, then Qingdao is every bit as anglicized.  The romanization that produces Tsingtao is simply older.  Neither place belongs in the article.  (Ejoty (talk) 10:16, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yep. They're different (English-based) romanizations, as opposed to the Cyrillic & made-up system eventually employed in Hanyu Pinyin. Hence, Anglicized. (You're on firmer ground arguing that Tsingtao is actually based on a German transcription system, as it was.)— LlywelynII 16:35, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not Peking and Tsingtao 

message: If you change American spelling to British spelling, is that anglicising? Given that the former was English too.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.134.95.147 (talk) 16:55, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Right, 'American' is but a slightly altered form of English. We more usually anglicise words from non-English languages, e.g., the Welsh name Dafydd is sometimes anglicised as 'David'. (Americans might prefer to spell it 'anglicized' !!) Cheers, Bjenks (talk) 13:48, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is anglicise the opposite of americanise? 

message: Why is this article only concerned with the Anglicisation of particular words? Isn't Anglicisation also a form of cultural transformation (even imperialism) whereby British customs and culture are exported and/or accepted? Should this article not be extended to cover that form of Anglicisation?
Pipin81 (talk) 22:07, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  'Anglicisation' covers more than language 

message: All languages domesticate words that they take up from elsewhere and do various things with them. Take, for example, the Greek word 'kritêrion': 
English (criterion) changes the first grapheme but is faithful to the phonology, while the 5th grapheme can be expressed only phonologically; the Greek plural ending is retained;
German (Kriterium) retains the first grapheme, for largely domestic visual reasons, i.e. older printed German are as likely to use a 'c' as a 'k', e.g. the name of my adopted city Kassel, which used to be Cassel; the 5th grapheme is as in English; the ending is transposed from Greek to Latin, and the plural is then Germanicized into 'Kriterien'.
If the term 'Anglicization' is to be used of this perfectly normal and universal phenomenon, then why not 'Francization', 'Italicization', and so on ? English is not the only language that does this, but since it has been (compelled to be) an extremely receptive language, with an extremely diverse superstructure on the West Germanic substrate, it seems hardly surprising that foreign words in English will sometimes appear in a guise other than that of the source language. Pamour (talk) 15:47, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  ethnicization/domestication 

message: I'm not inclined to research this or post anything extensive, but the use of the term as an historical process leading in part to the breakdown of the differentiated American colonial societies between the south, the middle colonies and the northeastern coastal areas is a standard one that seems not to have any representation here. 
Basically, "they had to become more English (or see each other by some more unifying identity, and it happened to be that of Englishness, hence the insistence on their rights as Englishmen (sic) which was among the rallying cries for representation in the British government) before they could unite enough to become American," as I understand it.
The original article, as nearly as I can tell, is here: J. Murrin, “England and Colonial America,” Princeton Alumni Weekly Review, Vol. 75, 1974, pp. 42-42. There are several very inaccurate discussions of this phenomenon on the web, and it would seem that some inclusion of a section on it would be in order to clean those confusions up, if nothing else.108.20.74.63 (talk) 23:26, 18 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historic process of Angliciz/sation of colonial America as discussed by Murrin in the 1970s is omitted 

message: The use of italics is all over the place in this article: sometimes the Anglicised names are italicised, sometimes the native names, sometimes both and sometimes neither. One solution would be always to italicise the native name; another would be always to italicise the older name. I favour the former; any thoughts? Dave.Dunford (talk) 10:47, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Italics 

message: The lead section could be expanded a little more – giving a definition one could find in a dictionary is not very helpful as an introduction to the article. Perhaps a couple main background points about the history or etymology of the word, as well as how it is used currently would be much more helpful.
Subsections (1) and (2) could be improved through expansion. These contain very plain statements, which don’t help much as a starter point (which is usually why people come to Wikipedia articles). For example, it is stated under the ‘Social anglicisation’ heading that this was an important process for the UK, however this is a pretty dry statement as it doesn’t explain anything further. Giving expanded explanations as well as examples would facilitate understanding of these points being made.
Double-checking of grammar, run-on sentences, and punctuation. There are some easy-to-fix mistakes in the article which interrupt the flow of the sentence and distract from the main points, as in the opening statement ‘In terms of language, anglicisation is a policy of use of the English language, such as was one of the causes contributing to the Boer War.’
Lastly, there are a number of ‘citation needed’ footnotes which should be fixed, so that this article is credible to people as a legitimate source for the topic. Dianamen (talk) 06:24, 19 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, there is grammatical flaw in the clause "or pronunciations were changed to fit the spelling (Benoît, pronounced [bənwa], became /bɛnˈɔɪt/) Benedict". The word "Benedict" could be removed completely; then everything would be fine. Alternatively, the content of the parenthesis could be changed as follows: "(Benoît, pronounced [bənwa], became /bɛnˈɔɪt/ or Benedict)" since "Benedict" can be seen as a translation into English of "Benoît". This does, however, not fit well with the statement that precedes the parenthesis as "Benedict" is not the same spelling as "Benoît". Maybe, the author of the cited line could clear up his or her meaning?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheseusX (talk • contribs) 06:47, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  A couple points that could help improve this article

message: 'Ghent (Gent, or Gand)' should be changed to 'Ghent (Gent)'. Ghent is a Dutch-speaking city, known locally as 'Gent' (presumably the 'h' was inserted in English to prevent the name being pronounced like the abbreviation for 'gentleman'). 'Gand' is a French exonym, like 'Anvers' for Antwerp (Dutch 'Antwerpen') and 'Courtrai' for Kortrijk, and hence has no business here. Some surviving English exonyms for Dutch-speaking Belgian towns and cities are in fact copied from the French ones (such as 'Bruges' for Brugge and and 'Ypres' for Ieper), but 'Gand' isn't one of them. The fact that Dutch-speaking Belgians had to struggle for over a century to gain equal treatment for their language makes this a particularly unfortunate slip.31.15.247.228 (talk) 10:13, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ghent 

message: The article is unlike other cultural assimilation articles, lacking a coherent description and example(s) of what consitutes Anglicization.--Sıgehelmus  (Talk) |д=) 01:02, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusing 

message: I've been trying to add some of the history of anglicisation in the British Isles to the article. These processes - alongside the ongoing anglicisation of foreign cultures - are well-documented in literature. However, I've noticed this article seems to be dealing with two slightly different concepts which use the same title.
On one hand, there is the socio-cultural, economic and political anglicisation, such as what happened in Ireland, Wales and the Channel Islands as noted in the article. And there is the linguistic anglicisation, i.e. translating names into English, anglicising loan words and the anglicisation of foreign languages. I therefore propose that we review and change the structure of these articles.
My proposal is as follows:
An overarching Anglicisation article which defines the term, distinguishes the forms of Anglicisation and then links to two articles:
* Socio-cultural anglicisation - which covers social, cultural and institutional adoption of English/Britishness
* Linguistic anglicisation - which covers the alteration of terms into Englishness
Alternatively, socio-cultural & institututional anglicisation could be covered in the main article, with a separate article for linguistic anglicisation called "Anglicisation (linguistics)"
I also propose that the article Anglicisation of names forms the basis for the linguistic anglicisation article, with the lists of anglicised names in that article transferred to English translated personal names. Jèrriais janne (talk) 18:27, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal: A new structure for articles re. Anglicisation