Falkland Islands/Las Malvinas

les marins et pêcheurs de Saint-Malo, premiers colons connus de ces îles.

I wonder whether many of the Falkland Islanders have French names.

It's interesting that the dispute is over Spanish and English names for islands first named for some French settlers.

To bjd: I don't know if you intended that "les marins..." statement to be italicized, but if you did, there are two ways to accomplish it:

1. Just place > immediately before the first word.

2. Place the first as you did, and the second +before the period that ends the sentence.

#10
[Wikipedia|en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkland_Islands#Demographics] has quite a lot of info on the origin and ethnical composition of Falkland Islanders. Nothing about surnames though.

I wonder whether many of the Falkland Islanders have French names.

The islands were completely depopulated between 1811 and 1820, so if there are any (and the Wikipedia article mentions later French settlers) then none are from the original French settlement. I didn't come across anyone with a French name when I was there.

As a location, Port Louis, the site of the French settlement, retains (approximately) its French name.

The Wikipedia article suggests that those people found on the islands at the time of the second British settlement in 1833 were allowed to remain. But it suggests that, following the US destruction of the 1820 River Plate settlement in 1831, those remaining were limited to a few pirates and escaped prisoners. Interestingly, one of those then became the island's governer and he was called Dickson. The former governer under the RP, one Luis Vernet, sent out a representative to continue his business interests in the islands, who had previously been there, and he was called Brisbane. We tend to think of the River Plate settlement as Spanish, but it seems that quite a few adventurers in the south west Atlantic were of various origins and prepared to operate under whoever was in charge.

In Canada, its always been the Falklands, never the Spanish version.

The Argentinean insistence that people should call them Las Malvinas when speaking English, is a deliberate political attempt to impose their name for them over the name the inhabitants use, and thereby obtain a reduction in the perception of legitimacy for the autonomous, democratic Falkland Islands government.

A nation which's traits revolved around slavery and piracy for centuries should be very careful about pointing out other nation's "deliberate political attempts".

"Are both names routinely used in other English-speaking countries (or elsewhere)? "

No. I'd say over half of the Argentina population has absolutely no idea what Falklands stands for.

Las Malvinas (in Ireland).
What is Englands obsession with holding small pockets of other peoples countries by using the pathetic excuse that the people there want to be British? They don't seem to want to be British enough to actually live in Britain though do they?!

Welcome tae LP, dublinerbik.