Parisienne, Mocovite, Tangerine

Help me please!
Citizens of particular places are refered to as, say, New Yorkers or Los Angelinos. In fact, if you hail from Tangiers, you get to be known as a Tangerine! Waht I want to know, (NEED to know) is how are these derived? Is there a commitee? I used to live in a town called Sebastopol. People nearly came to blows over Sebastopolers, Sebastopolites, or my favorite, Sebastopolitans. Tragicly, the issue was never resolved. Also- what is that part of speech called? Citizen moniker?
Oh Teeming Millions–Help me!
A Benician

For American places, I am personally guessing that it is mostly the locals who do it. (See meme) “Seattlites” for instance seemed to be the commonly agreed upon term in my last town, though every once in a while you would get a “Wait what are we?” and then a couple ideas would come out, and Seattlite would win again.

Living, now, in Tokyo though…no idea. Tokyoer? I haven’t had any other whiteys to meme it out with.

Tokyoite is fairly accepted terminology.
When I lived in Japan I used to do one class on names for people from particiluar cities. I mentioned the strange ones like Novocastrian and Mancunian.

I was going to start a thread on this. As it seems strange that some places do not have these names for themselves.

When I lived in Michigan we were known as “Michiganders.” There was a movement that people actually paid attention to trying to get that officially changed, like through legislation or proclamation or some such nonsense, to “Michiganians.” Don’t remember how that turned out.

Depends on how it’s used. Could be a noun, could be an adjective, could be something else too most likely.

An old friend of my dad’s wintered in Venice, Florida. Instead of being Venetians, “Hey, we’re old, not blind,” he said the locals were Venisons. A little further north, folks from Tampa joke that they are Tampons.

It’s called a proper adjective.

(curtsey. exit)

No it’s not. Sorry. I need sleep.

I take back my curtsey.

It’s called a demonym. There’s an incomplete but obsessively-close list [url=“http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Demonyms%20of%20the%20World”]here. Most are intuitive, but things get funny when you get down to the city and state levels (e.g. “Bay Stater” for Massachussetts, and “Glaswegian” for Glasgow).

I’m from Altoona, Pennsylvania. We’re Altoids…

Common usage, usually influenced by euphony.