Changing the Philippines’ name would require a new law and the public’s approval in a referendum, Malacañang said on Tuesday, February 12, 2019, after President Duterte had revived a proposal to rename the Philippines to “Maharlika.”

Proposals to change the name of the Philippines have been around since the 1970s. “Maharlika” is the Filipinos’ “ancient heritage,” long before the arrival of Western colonizers. “Maha” is Sanskrit for “noble” or “great” while “likha” means “create,” thus, Maharlika means “nobly created,” according to the article. But some scholars are opposed to the name change, saying it would disregard Filipinos’ historical roots and national identity.

Immigrating to a new country brings many challenges. For some people, voluntarily adopting a name similar to where someone is living, rather than keeping an original name, is one part of trying to assimilate or fit in with the new community. According to a new study focused on the United States, where anglicized names are more typical, anglicizing ethnic names may reduce bias towards immigrants. The results appear in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

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“We do not suggest immigrants to Anglicize their ethnic names in order to avoid discrimination,” says Xian Zhao (University of Toronto), lead author on the study. “This certainly puts the onus on immigrants to promote equity and our previous studies also suggest that Anglicizing names may have negative implications for one’s self-concept.”

A few state demonyms are probably well-known. By demonyms we mean the words you call people or things from a specific state (like “Pennsylvanian”, “Texan” or the entertaining “Michigander”). But not everybody knows that state demonyms follow a regional pattern.

The regional patterns are revealed in this map from Twitter’s OnlMaps where you may find the demonyms recommended by the U.S. Government Publishing Office. It is obvious that states in the same region tend to have the same suffix in their demonym: the old South and the West Coast generally end an “-ian,” New England ends in “-er,” the West in “-an.” A few stray states use “-ite.”