Kashubians

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A person belonging to the Kashubian ethnic group, a Slavic people living mainly in the Pomerania region of northern Poland
2. Someone from the Kashubian community, a Slavic minority whose homeland lies in northern Poland around the Baltic coast
3. One of the Kashubian people, a western Slavic group traditionally settled in the Pomeranian area of northern Poland

Etymology: The Kashubians are a Slavic people of northern Poland, centred on the region around Gdańsk, and their name in English is built from the name of their land. "Kashub" is the anglicised form of the Kashubian word for the people and their territory, and the English adjective "Kashubian" was formed by adding the suffix "-ian" to it. That suffix is the familiar one from words like "Russian" or "Italian," and its ancestry runs back through Latin, where it appeared as "-iānus," and further back to Proto-Italic forms, ultimately from an Indo-European adjectival ending. The plural "Kashubians" is simply the noun form of that adjective, used for the people themselves. Because the suffix is so common in English ethnic names, the word sounds like any other nationality term, even though the root "Kashub" is a name from a Slavic language rather than from Latin or Greek.