-phone countries

<< O.K., I know that francophone and anglophone mean French and English
speaking. Lusaphone (sp?) is Portuguese speaking. But what the hell is a
Spanish speaking country called? Or did I just get it right there? >>

My spelling may be off, but I’m guessing:

Castillophone

As in, people in mainland Spain speak Castillian Spanish. It relates to all those castles in Spain…

“Castillophone” yields no results in a Google search, but “Hispanophone” yields 1,300. Some other national prefixes:

Luso = Portuguese
Hispano = Spanish
Franco = French
Anglo = English
Germano = German
Americo = American
Italo = Italian
Sino = Chinese
Russo = Russian
Hiberno = Irish

Before this falls off the first page, I should note that some of those prefixes (like Amererico-) refer primarily to the country, not to the language. And as long as I’m here, I have a few more:

Indo = India
Egypto (aegypto) = Egypt
Greco (graeco) = Greece
Scoto = Scotland
Gallo = Gaul (or less correctly, France)

And don’t forget “allophone”, which in Québec means everyone who doesn’t speak French :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe indirectly, but it really refers to the kingdom of Castile.

and xylophone?..

Then, in a country where people use a jazzy language that is gender-specific, that would be a sexophone?

For the record, I suppose places where classic high German is spoken would be Deutsche Grammaphone.

Puns like this deserve no less than beatings…:stuck_out_tongue:

Actually, “allophone” means anyone whose mother tongue is neither French nor English. The term is not widely used outside of Quebec; I’ve never heard it used in everyday conversation in Toronto, for example.

Or as a number of seperatist Quebec politicians would say, there’re the noble but struggling French-speaking (by definition) Quebecois, the hated English-speaking oppressors, and, uh, all those other people who don’t fit into the pigeonholes and then have the gall to screw up our independence referenda as well by not wanting to leave Canada… :smiley: