Here's a bit of a random topic! While writing up Ahnurthian information for my Patreon-in-progress, it occurred to me that I've always capitalized the words "Ounten" and "Illusuro", yet I've not been inclined to capitalize the words "humans" and "dragons", despite them all being separate races within Ahnurth. Similarly, I've always capitalized the regional subgroup titles for the races (Mantle Ounten, Snowpeak Ounten), the elemental grouping of dragons (Northlanders, Spirelanders, etc.), as well as the individual species/subgroups (Sirens, Oracles, Moramay, Boughbans). I've done this so far simply because it looks nicer to me, but now I realize this is probably not the best way to go about it. I never thought about it much before until now! I've seen variations with and without capitalization, depending on context and such, so I'm curious to hear about this from others.
What do you think are the appropriate "rules" for capitalization of fantasy races and sub-species?
Is there any time where capitalizing these names would be appropriate or no?
(RL Draygone)
What the above person says. LIke how in real life, black folks are lowercased and African-Americans are uppercased.
It more or less depends on the context in the sentence. And Caelan has a really great point as well.
Traditionally in English a species would not be capitalized, but a nationality would be. As stated above, this may have to do with groups of people called for their proper noun homes.
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Caelan
I would think that races would not be capitalized unless they were based after 'proper' names? Like if a race's name was the same name as their land of origin and not just derived from it. Since the plethora of new names involved in fantasy stories can be one of the easiest places to lose a reader to confusion, I think this distinction helps, because at a glance they know if this is a race or a nationality/region/person.