We've sort of tried to cover this in the past but I'm not sure if we really have a consensus.
We have indian-citizens but georgia-citizens. Should the latter not be georgian-citizens or the former india-citizens?
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1@Vince - that'd be the one I linked to in my first line? ;)– Mark MayoCommented Nov 28, 2014 at 5:46
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@MarkMayo Oops indeed, I read this twice and did not notice. Sorry about it– VinceCommented Nov 28, 2014 at 16:31
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1 Answer
The correct usage is absolutely "Adjective citizen". Common usage bears this out, with most combinations giving 20 times the number of hits for "Adjective citizen" rather than "Noun citizen". This is clearly shown if you compare cases where the adjective is less similar to the noun, for example British citizen over Britain citizen, French citizen over France citizen. Looking at how governments describe their citizens also backs this up.
I don't think anyone is going to object to commonly-used abbreviations like us-citizen and uk-citizen. The key should be understandability rather than obsessive consistency.
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2That's one I can categorically attest to being wrong. The correct term is British citizen. And my searches find around 30,000 hits for "Britain citizen" (many of which are actually for "Britain's citizen") and over 600,000 for "British citizen". Commented Nov 27, 2014 at 22:24
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Yeah but instinctively, would you say New Zealand citizens, New Zealanders, New Zealander citizens or something else? This is all about discussing all options offered in the previous question: country-citizen tags - convention needed– VinceCommented Nov 28, 2014 at 0:13
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1@pnuts the problem is at present we have BOTH nz-citizens and new-zealand-citizens. It's about a 50/50 split on our site. Commented Nov 28, 2014 at 5:48
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