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I recently stumbled upon this article and the first paragraph surprised me a bit. It says:
Nerima (練馬区 Nerima-ku) is a special ward in Tokyo, Japan. In English, it calls itself Nerima City.
That sounds very strange to me. How can a ward call itself?
I have three questions:
To say something "calls itself" something is an informal, fairly common subtle way to express scepticism, reservation, doubt or disdain about something; particularly, the validity of its name. It's similar to prefacing "self-styled" or "so-called".
If I was to say "In English, Nerima calls itself Nerima City" in conversation, I'd be implying that Nerima might not be justified in calling itself a city, and I'd be implying that I suspected some cynical motive (e.g. self-promotion).
From the context, I'm sure this is not what the authors of this formal, factual Wikipedia article intended, I'm sure it's an accident of translation. It's possible they might have been reflecting the unusual nature of referring to a ward of Tokyo as a city in its own right, but it would be unusual for Wikipedia to do so in such a way.
It's very easy to find scores of real-life examples of this usage that are clearly expressing skepticism or doubt. Since it's generally an informal and negative phraseology, most of these I examples I found through web searches were from dubious-looking forums or agenda-pushing sites, so forgive me for not linking to them... There were also a couple of published books using this phraseology in the first few pages of results, which I have linked to.
The tiny island-State, currently verging on poverty, calls itself 'great Britain.' It takes gall... [anti-Britain rant continues]
The organization MENSA, which calls itself “the high IQ society,” requires an IQ score of 130 or higher for membership... [goes on to ask if this is really a remarkable score]
Our first visit to the cafe which calls itself 'nailsworth's quietest cafe'!! [damning 1-star review of said cafe]
A group called NARAL, which calls itself a feminist organization... [goes on to attack this organisation]
Israel, which calls itself a Jewish state... [you don't need me to tell you where this one's going...]
...activities, and weaknesses of the group that calls itself the “Islamic State” [ book critically examining whether it does resemble a functioning state ]
For somewhere that calls itself “Great” Britain, you sure don't shout about it. Why are you such negative whiners here? [as a Brit I'll admit this is a fair question... but as a pedant I'll point out that the 'Great' was introduced to distinguish the largest of the British Isles variously from other neighbouring islands such as Ireland, or from Brittany in France ]
It's not exclusively used with a negative connotation, but since it commonly is, in cases where it isn't, that's usually made explicitly clear:
Yarmouth rightly insists on calling itself 'Great' and has done so for 800 years. This was originally to distinguish the town from 'Little Yarmouth' across the river [ book about the history of the English town Great Yarmouth ]
Even here, the phraseology communicates the fact that many people might question or dispute the greatness implied by the name "Great Yarmouth" (which is not an especially large or famous town).
It is grammatical, but it is not English as spoken by any kind of native English speaker. It sounds like a poor translation from a language like French, which tends to avoid passives (eg "is called") by either impersonals ("one calls it") or reflexives ("it calls itself").
In English, it calls itself Nerima City.
The sentence, as it was found in the Wikipedia article before it got edited to something more informative and natural, was terrible and unnatural.
The sentence is technically grammatical, but it is usually used for things that cannot talk, so the phrase has problems from the beginning (something that cannot talk cannot call itself anything). Therefore, it calls itself will not be used often.
I agree that "calls itself" is correct English. It does, however, have a somewhat ironic taste to it, as if there was something just slightly comical about this appellation. If irony is not intended I would suggest that it is poor style rather than grammatically incorrect.
From the article on special wards:
Although special wards are autonomous from the Tokyo metropolitan government, they also function as a single urban entity in respect to certain public services, including water supply, sewage disposal, and fire services.
If you think about humans, it would not be unreasonable to see the construction "He calls himself Joe" or "She calls herself Kate." "It calls itself Nerima City" is a natural next step, if you permit governing districts to phrase things as though they are agents. It's actually not that uncommon for us to talk about governing bodies as though they were agents: "The US demands the withdraw of troops from the border."
The second half of the puzzle is the fact that Nerima calls itself a city:
In Japanese, they are commonly known as the 23 wards (23区 nijūsan-ku?). Confusingly, all wards refer to themselves as a city in English, but the Japanese designation of special ward (tokubetsu ku) remains unchanged. Moreover, in everyday English, Tokyo as a whole is also referred to as a city. Thus, the closest English equivalents for the special wards would be the London boroughs, and this can help to understand their structures and functions.
So if an official from Nerima were to talk to you in English, they would call their region "Nerima city," even though you would think of it as a ward, not a city.
Is "it calls itself" proper English?
If it is, does it sound natural or more encyclopedic perhaps? See above. It doesn't seem "academic", if that's what you want to know. It actually seems like a quite creative way to say how one place's people see themselves as.
Can you say "it calls itself" about anything that has a name, or are there some restrictions?
Language is organic and engages rules much like traffic laws. That is, you don't need to follow them strictly to still do some amazing things.
If an object has the ability to both call and be called (callable), then this sentence makes perfect sense. While reading the example that was posted I was thrown off because it is atypical to reference a city calling something.
A very common use case of "it calls itself" is in programming. If a function is recursive it is very easily explained by saying that "it calls itself". Again, this makes sense because functions call other functions and are callable.
