15 Extinct Demonyms From Empires That No Longer Exist

Why Empires Die but Their Demonyms Don't

The word Ragusan still turns up on medieval shipping contracts, yet it names no living person today. A demonym is the name for the people of a place; an exonym is what outsiders call them; a toponym is the place name itself. This article follows one rule: every entry belongs to a polity that has ceased to exist, and its demonym is no longer the standard label for any living population. For the wider story of how demonyms changed across eras, see our history of demonyms.

Why do these names outlive the states that minted them?

• Administrative and legal records — tax rolls, treaties, and papal bulls freeze the Latin or Greek form in place long after the borders vanish.
• Sacred and literary canons — the Hittites of the Hebrew Bible and Dante's Byzantines keep their labels circulating for centuries.
• Scholarly convention — historians deliberately retain the antique demonym to avoid anachronism.

Note that these words still obey modern English capitalization rules, because demonyms are proper nouns. The suffixes -ian, -ite, -ese, and -ene keep them sounding alive. What follows, from Akkad to Ragusa, is a tour of five groups of vanished demonyms.

The First Empires: Akkadian, Babylonian, and Hittite

The Akkadian Empire, founded by Sargon of Akkad around 2334 BC, is routinely called the world's first empire. Its demonym takes its name from the capital, written as either Agade or Akkad—city names that scholars still debate the precise location of. Today the word survives almost exclusively as a language label: 'Akkadian' names the ancient Semitic tongue preserved on clay tablets in cuneiform script, not any living population. No one is Akkadian now; the adjective outlived the people it once described.

Babylonian

Hammurabi welded Babylon into an Old Babylonian kingdom, and the Neo-Babylonian Empire of 626 to 539 BC under Nebuchadnezzar II carried the name to its zenith before falling to Cyrus the Great. The demonym persists now chiefly in fixed phrases: 'Babylonian captivity', 'Babylonian mathematics', 'Babylonian astronomy'. Rastafari usage of 'Babylon' carries the word further still, though it denotes a corrupt system rather than a nationality. Modern residents of the site call themselves Iraqis.

Hittite

The Hittites ruled from Hattusa through the Anatolian heartland until their empire collapsed around 1180 BC, amid the wider Late Bronze Age collapse. Because their own records were lost, the name survived only in Hebrew and Egyptian sources, until 19th-century excavations at Bogazkoy revealed the archives and the language anew. Today Anatolians are Turkish, not Hittite. The demonym belongs to archaeology and biblical reference now—'Hittite' appears in Genesis more often than it does on any passport.

Classical Mediterranean Ghosts: Carthaginian, Parthian, and Palmyrene

Carthaginian is a word that describes people who have not existed for two thousand years. Carthage was founded around 814 BC by Tyrian colonists on the coast of present-day Tunisia, and it grew into Rome's chief rival in the western Mediterranean. The Punic Wars of 264 to 146 BC settled the contest: Scipio Aemilianus razed the city and sold its survivors into slavery. Latin called the city's people Poeni, borrowed from the Greek Phoinikes, meaning Phoenician — hence the alternate label Punic. Roman senators carried Cato the Elder's refrain, Carthago delenda est, into every speech. Modern inhabitants of the site are Tunisian, never Carthaginian.

Parthian

Parthian belongs to the empire that held Mesopotamia and Persia from 247 BC to AD 224, founded by Arsaces I and ruled by the Arsacid dynasty. For three centuries it tangled with Rome along the Euphrates, most spectacularly in 53 BC, when Crassus and seven legions were destroyed at Carrhae. That campaign bequeathed a phrase still in circulation: the Parthian shot, the arrow a cavalryman loosed while wheeling away, apparently in retreat, and then kept loosing. The Sasanians overthrew the Arsacids in AD 224, and the demonym retreated into classical reference. Iranians today are Iranian or Persian.

Palmyrene

Palmyrene names the citizens of a caravan city called Palmyra, or Tadmur, sitting in the Syrian desert between Damascus and the Euphrates. Its brief imperial moment came under Queen Zenobia, whose Palmyrene Empire of AD 260 to 273 seized Egypt and Anatolia before Aurelian marched east, captured her, and hauled her in golden chains through a Roman triumph. The adjective outlived the state narrowly: it survives in inscriptions, coin legends, and art-historical discussion of a distinctive sculptural style. After ISIS destroyed much of the site in 2015, Palmyrene became one of the few ancient demonyms attached to a place that can no longer receive visitors.

Rome's Heirs: Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman

The people of the Eastern Roman Empire never called themselves Byzantines. They were Rhomaioi—Romans—and considered themselves the only true continuation of Rome. The label we use comes from Byzantium, the Greek colony on the Bosphorus where Constantine founded Constantinople in AD 330. It was a scholarly coinage, popularized by historian Hieronymus Wolf in 1557, more than a century after the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453. The name stuck anyway. Today, lowercase byzantine has drifted from geography into everyday English, describing anything needlessly convoluted.

Seljuk

The Seljuk Empire spanned 1037 to 1194 and took its name from Seljuk, the ancestor of its ruling clan. Tughril Beg founded the state and won its defining victory over the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071, opening Anatolia to Turkic settlement and producing the Sultanate of Rum. English sources alternate between Seljuk and Seljuq without meaningful distinction. The demonym describes a medieval imperial people, not a modern nation: today's residents of Türkiye are Turkish, not Seljuk.

Ottoman

Osman I gave his name to both a dynasty and a state the Turks called Osmanli. The empire lasted from roughly 1299 until the abolition of the sultanate in 1922, followed by the caliphate's end in 1924. The Republic of Turkey that replaced it gave its people the demonym Turkish. The empire's own label survives mostly in a piece of furniture, alongside words you use every day that are hidden demonyms.

New World Empires: Aztec, Incan, and Tarascan

"Aztec" descends from the Nahuatl aztecatl, "people of Aztlan," a mythical homeland the Mexica themselves rarely invoked. The empire of 1428–1521 was formally the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, and its people called themselves Mexica—or, more carefully, Culhua Mexica. Nineteenth-century scholars revived "Aztec" as a convenient umbrella term, and it now clings mainly to the language: Nahuatl is still routinely called Aztec, even as the demonym fades from use for the people themselves.

Incan

Inka began as a royal title, not an ethnic label. The state was Tawantinsuyu—"the four parts together"—and its ordinary subjects were runa, or simply members of their own ethnic group, such as Quechua. "Incan" is largely a nineteenth-century English coinage that bolted the suffix -an onto a sovereign's title, producing an adjective the Andes never used. Peruvians are Peruvian; Quechua speakers are Quechua. Calling them Incan collapses a vast, plural empire into a word borrowed from its kings.

Tarascan

The Tarascan state, known as Irechekwa, held its capital at Tzintzuntzan in modern Michoacán and famously turned back Aztec expansion along its western frontier. Spanish forces took it in the 1530s. "Tarascan" itself is a disputed Spanish exonym, possibly derived from a Purépecha word for "son-in-law." The people are properly the Purépecha, and many treat the older term as a misnomer—one more label imposed from outside rather than claimed from within.

Empire's Leftovers: Prussian, Bohemian, and Ragusan

The word Prussian hides two unrelated peoples. The Baltic Old Prussians were a distinct nation whose language died out in the 18th century after centuries under the Teutonic Order. The German Prussians belonged to the Kingdom of Prussia, which from 1701 to 1918 was the engine of the German Empire. The Free State of Prussia was formally abolished by the Allied Control Council in 1947. Today Prussian survives chiefly as a cultural adjective — Prussian virtues, or the pigment Prussian blue.

Bohemian: From Celtic Home to Counterculture

Bohemian traces to Latin Boiohaemum, "home of the Boii," a Celtic people. The Kingdom of Bohemia later folded into the Habsburg lands, but the name traveled further. In 19th-century France, writers began calling itinerant artists bohème, assuming the Roma had come from Bohemia — a false etymology that stuck. The two senses now coexist:

The demonym for the region today is Czech.

Ragusan: A Republic That Vanished

The Republic of Ragusa was a maritime city-state on the Dalmatian coast, flourishing from 1358 to 1808, when Napoleon's forces absorbed it. Its citizens spoke a Romance dialect now vanished, a sister tongue to Dalmatian and Venetian. The city itself survived under new flags, but the demonym did not: its former citizens are today Dubrovnikers, or simply Croatians. Ragusan remains in maps, ship registries, and old correspondence — a label for a state that no longer issues passports.

All 15 Extinct Demonyms at a Glance

Fifteen names for peoples whose states vanished, leaving the words stranded between history and the present.

Taken together, these words show how quickly political identity gets overwritten by whatever administration follows. For a companion look at ancient demonyms that remain in modern English, read 20 ancient demonyms we still use. You can also trace the borders these words once described in our searchable demonym database, then follow them on a world atlas guide.