Country demonyms — what people from a country are called

A demonym is what you call someone from a place — French, Japanese, Peruvian. They're irregular enough (Dutch, not Netherlandish) that hard-coding them is a mistake. Here's the lookup, both ways.

From a country

The demonym ships on the country record, so a code lookup gives it to you:

curl "https://countries.dev/alpha/NL?fields=name,demonym"

{ "name": "Netherlands", "demonym": "Dutch" }

That's the case that catches people out — the country is Netherlands but the demonym is Dutch, and no string transform gets you there.

From a demonym

Have the adjective and want the country? /demonym does the reverse:

curl "https://countries.dev/demonym/French?fields=name,demonym"

[
  { "name": "France", "demonym": "French" },
  { "name": "French Southern Territories", "demonym": "French" },
  { "name": "Martinique", "demonym": "French" }
]

It returns an array, because one demonym can cover a country and its overseas territories.

Building a sentence

Demonyms double as adjectives, which makes them handy for generated copy:

const c = await fetch(
  "https://countries.dev/alpha/IT?fields=demonym,capital",
).then((r) => r.json());

`A ${c.demonym} passport, issued in ${c.capital}.`; // "An Italian passport…"

If you need the noun for a currency or language instead, those are on the same record — see the currency and language fields.

Demonym docs →