No French location adjectives as surnames?

[BwanaBob]

The names people are citing for English are place names, but they are not adjectives, which is what I thought Spectre meant. For instance you don’t see a name like John Bostonite, or Jim Miamian, or Edna NewYorker.

[bordelond]

@BwanaBob

The names people are citing for English are place names, but they are not adjectives, which is what I thought Spectre meant. For instance you don’t see a name like John Bostonite, or Jim Miamian, or Edna NewYorker.

There are a few – Londoner and Roman come to mind.

[Cat_Jones]

OK - but how often do we use adjectives like that anyway ? In France every little village has a given adjective to describe its inhabitants but for the UK I can only think of a handful - all relating to the big cities (Londoner, Liverpudlian, Bristolian, Glaswegian) and, as Sal Amoniac points out saying someone is from the capital city doesn’t really help them stand out from the crowd.

[Gymnopithys]

@Sal Ammoniac

I went home and looked at the book I have on the subject (Les noms de familles et leurs secrets, by Jean-Louis Beaucarnot), and he says this is not the case. He says these names (Parisot and variants) are all derived from and are deformations of the given name Patrice. His argument is that during the period when surnames were being adopted, many people came to Paris, but few left. So “Parisian” as a distinguisher left something to be desired, since in Paris everyone was a Parisian, and few from Paris left for another city, still less for the countryside.

This argument may seem implausible, but there’s a very definite tendency for French surnames to be derived from or identical to given or saints’ names. Beaucarnot gives a list of the 100 most common surnames in France, and in the top 10, there’s only one name (Petit) that isn’t also a given name. You’ll see names like Martin, Thomas, Bernard, etc. I’m going from memory here, but it looks like the four big categories are: 1) given names, as above; 2) descriptors (Petit, Larousse, Brunet, Leblanc); 3) occupations (Fournier, Lefebvre); and names of foreign derivation (Garcia, Lopez, Meyer).

The OP is wrong in an absolute sense, in that adjectival references to place names do exist as French surnames – but it has to be said that these names are not particularly common. In the top 100, I saw (on a somewhat cursory examination) only one: Picard, and it was in the 80-something place. There may be one or two other non-adjectival place references (for instance, Fontaine), but again, as a category, it’s a small one.

Beaucarnot was published in 1979, Morlet in 1991.

I can also mention Allemand, Lallemand, Hollander, Litalien, Langlais, Langlois, Français, François, Lefrançois, Espagnol, Lespagnol and many variants thereof.

I can go through dictionaries and find dozens of adjectival French surnames from localities in France and neighboring countries, but I’m not going to waste my time.