[quote=“Kenny McCormick”][quote=“Cold Front”]More on Afghani
This article is a follow-up by Timothy Noah to his previous one, and it shows the issue is a bit more complex than he originally showed. Nevertheless, the correct English term for a native of Afghanistan is “Afghan”.[/quote]
RichardM is right. Meanwhile, an Afghan is the name of the dog species or that carpet/rug/woolly sweater thing.
Afghani is a correct term I believe.[/quote]
If Brian is right about the OED, then I’m wrong. And Richard is correct that the fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary does have Afghani as a noun describing an inhabitant of Afghanistan, but that fact was in the last article I linked to.
In the United States, however, the preferred word to describe a native of Afghanistan is still Afghan. That is the usage mandated at AP. That is the usage mandated at the New York Times. That is the usage among American scholars of Afghanistan and the region of Central Asia. That was also the sole usage in the American Heritage Dictionary for the third edition, which came out in 1997.
But Reuters is not an American company – it’s a European-based company – so its mandated usage follows whatever American or non-American standard it chooses. Even if not a single dictionary of American English had the word Afghani, it’s sufficient that the OED has it for my answer to the trivia question to be wrong.
In any case, I didn’t figure to be learning so much from my own question which I knowingly posed to others, but that’s the way it happens sometimes. 