I am sure it occurs to everyone sooner or later that the names of these two races seem quite belittling and insulting.
Dwarf means anything that is smaller than normal. Although Dwarfs in current D&D aren't even smaller than normal-- a bit squatter, sure, but given their girth and muscle, they have every bit as much mass as any human does. And if Dwarfs have been around for longer than humans, surely they wouldn't refer to themselves as "small people"-- they would consider themselves normal sized and consider humans to be all stretchy. So as a term that humans use to refer to the race, whether intentionally or inadvertently belittling, it would seem odd that it would be the term the race uses for themselves.
Of course... I do suppose I could entertain the idea that within the D&D world, the term "Dwarf" could perhaps have arisen with the race and then any other animal that is referred to as a "dwarf" something-- such as a "dwarf field mouse" or "dwarf hippopotamus" could have been named after the name for the race came into the lexicon. Afterall-- the term "dwarf" is so disconnected from any other words we use that it doesn't stand out so much...
Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well for Halflings which have the term "half" right there in their name-- leading to the long-running joke that a half-halfling would be a "quarterling". It appears as though the term "Halfling" originates from the old term for a boy between the ages of 12 to 16-- no longer a boy, but only half a man. It is entirely impossible to ignore that this term has got to be a belittling term for the people, they surely must consider themselves fully grown people and just think that all these bigger races are just too damn large for their own good-- more akin to ogres or giants. Granted, I can accept that in some worlds, maybe the term "Halfling" was originally a derogatory term and then the Halflings decided to recontextualize it and own it-- then again, the instances we have of people doing that in term life are ones where the group generally takes the stance of "we can use that word, but don't you dare utter it or it means war!"
And, I know-- I know-- people are going to take this as a personal attack and say I am "SJW"ing or "White Knighting" or telling them they have been "playing wrong" for the last 40 years of D&D-- but I was just sitting here tonight writing out a list of races and came across them and when I alphabetized them and "Halfling" was alphabetized between "Half-Elf" and "Half-Orc", I just stopped and thought... that's kind of weird, isn't it? And then my mind wandered with the implications... like... isn't there something cooler we could call them?
I am not saying those whose games involve nothing more than wandering around corridors and opening doors and rolling random encounter tables then killing whatever appears out of thin air behind the door and then scooping up the XP and GP it drops-- that's all good. I enjoy that sort of play too. Though I tend to find computers can offer it up better than doing it sitting around a table with dice. You aren't doing anything wrong-- keep doing what you are doing. This is just for those who want to think about these weird little minutia things and world build and put "way too much thought" into things because our focus is on storytelling and acting. And in this case, the idea that there are people who would consider themselves to be normal sized within their own racial group and community and yet get referred to as "small people" and even "half people" kind of sparks my imagination with story possibilities.
Looking over things historically, dwarfs were too closely conflated with things like goblins and trolls and such in old mythology for me to be certain about what other names they could be called.
As for Halflings... "Hobby" is now a term for what we do in our recreational time, "Brownie" is maybe too associated with the Girl Scouts but is my leading favorite, "Leprechaun" is obviously associated with St. Patrick's Day and Lucky Charms Cereal making it hard to take it too seriously... also, I know that both Brownies and Leprechauns have appeared as magical creatures in earlier editions of D&D (then again-- Gnomes have changed over time-- so if merging Halfling and an unused old monster add more depth to the race...?) Hebling is another option, but that is just removing the issue from English to German. I know the term "Hin" has come up in some settings, but it just doesn't strike me as interesting...
Anyway-- I am absolutely certain that others have had the same thoughts about this thing. In the worlds you have created, are there terms that Dwarfs and Halflings use to refer to one another that are less blatantly demeaning and would appreciate it if others used them too? Because I think I might like to adapt them. Especially since I am thinking that I am going to add Half-Dwarf, Half-Ogre, and Half-Hobgoblin to the list of races and would really kind of appreciate if Halfling didn't awkwardly appear in the middle of those.
I've always been a big fan of the halfling race, since my first game of D&D.
The Mystarra setting had a great Gazeteer, that started off explaining that the word they used to refer to their own people is, "Hin" - this was also introduced as canon for the Forgotten Realms by Ed Greenwood, Skip Williams etc in 3rd edition D&D, and is still a word I use in all of my games.
I might suggest “Bantam” for halflings. It’s an existing word that denotes smaller stature, that doesn’t appear to have any real negative connotation, and that sounds kind of nice to me. Currently stumped (no pun intended) for a politically correct term for dwarves, though “Cobb” (or any similar variant based on the word cobby) might work. Not as happy with how that sounds, but maybe that’s just me.
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If you want to be technical about it, the word "dwarf" originated as a description of the beings from Germanic mythology. It got applied to humans with dwarfism because of their resemblance to the mythical beings, not the other way around (though one could probably make a case that people with dwarfism were the inspiration for the mythical beings, the word was not used to describe them then). If you want to go with an alternative, though, you could try alfar or svartalfar, or dweorg.
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"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I've always been a big fan of the halfling race, since my first game of D&D.
The Mystarra setting had a great Gazeteer, that started off explaining that the word they used to refer to their own people is, "Hin" - this was also introduced as canon for the Forgotten Realms by Ed Greenwood, Skip Williams etc in 3rd edition D&D, and is still a word I use in all of my games.
If "Hin" is the officially recognized correct term for Halflings in at least 2 of the D&D worlds (I wonder if it carries over to Eberron-- most things seem to), I guess I have to accept that as the official D&D answer. Although "Hin" seems to be German for "down, broken, destroyed" which still seems to carry a lot of negative connotations. Granted, any word can have negative meanings in some language, but German is the closest language to English and so I have to half-suspect that it was chosen because it still meant "small" in the mind of the writer who chose that term.
I might suggest “Bantam” for halflings. It’s an existing word that denotes smaller stature, that doesn’t appear to have any real negative connotation, and that sounds kind of nice to me. Currently stumped (no pun intended) for a politically correct term for dwarves, though “Cobb” (or any similar variant based on the word cobby) might work. Not as happy with how that sounds, but maybe that’s just me.
"Bantam" is a term that seems most closely associated with poultry and still fundamentally stresses that something is smaller than it should be. And that still strikes me as going down the wrong road. It seems to have first referred to soldiers who were significantly smaller than was accepted as normal. There have been some cases where it has been used where being smaller was a positive thing, but... ultimately it still means that one is recognizing themselves and all their kin and all their neighbors-- their entire genetic group, their entire race from their god to the lowliest member of their society as being abnormal-- being smaller than they should be.
If you were a person who was born into a genetic line, a family, a culture, where everyone was relatively close to your own size-- surely you would consider yourselves to be normal, right? I mean-- I would hope there are not whole races of people who consider themselves to just be fundamentally wrong in some significant way and totally internalize and incorporate that fully into their culture, not knowing how to express themselves as being a thing without expressing that they are abnormal, lacking, lesser than a regular person, deserving of less recognition, respect and recognition. That they and their parents and their grandparents and their great grandparents through all the generations in the past were born as something lesser than what should be considered normal.
What I really want to find it some term, some word, ideally with some historical context, that these races could use to refer to themselves and yet not contain any fundamental judgement of them as being smaller or lesser than any of the other races. Any term that fundamentally comes down to "You are too small-- ha-ha!!" just doesn't really work. What I really want to get at here is a term where any layperson from previous experience would understand from previous experience that the term refers to a small type of people, but the word itself not scream judgmentally that they are smaller than normal and that is the start and end of their identity.
That's why I put forward "Brownie" or "Leprechaun"-- looking a bit deeper, I suppose "Lutin" also works, but it is a French word that isn't recognizable to most English speakers.
I don't know-- maybe I am asking too much here. I just really feel like, at least among themselves, these races should consider themselves "normal" and referring to them specifically as something smaller than what should be would be an entirely human perspective. And, totally, we are humans and so from our perspective-- it is what it is. But crawling into the mind of such a person-- there's got to be some term they would use to refer to each other that doesn't carry a connotation of being smaller than one should be.
For example-- we have Gnomes. We all know that Gnomes are a small sort of people. They are a magic sort of people. But nothing in the term "Gnome" inherently has the connotation of being small as the primary descriptor. The idea of Gnome, while containing the idea of small to a human, is a term that is not otherwise used inherently to describe things that are small and certainly does not contain the connotation that a Gnome is only half a person.
For example-- we have Gnomes. We all know that Gnomes are a small sort of people. They are a magic sort of people. But nothing in the term "Gnome" inherently has the connotation of being small as the primary descriptor. The idea of Gnome, while containing the idea of small to a human, is a term that is not otherwise used inherently to describe things that are small and certainly does not contain the connotation that a Gnome is only half a person.
I was trying to find terms that referred to the general physique of these races that, to me at least, don’t have a negative connotation - small but not bad small, I guess. Apparently that isn’t your intention, I misunderstood. I guess if you’re looking for words that are not synonymous with small in any way though, literally any made up word will do. Just not sure what it is you are looking for then.
edit: I remembered that several tribes of Native Americans refer to themselves as ‘the people’ or ‘the real people’ in their own language. I suppose you could do something similar and say the [halfling] word for people translates to for instance “nation” or “folk” or “seed” or something similar, and consequently have them say they are “of the Nation/Folk/Seed” when speaking Common. Alternatively, look for something other than stature that defines halfling/dwarven communities, culture or origin. Something like the Forged, or the Stoneblooded, or People of the Kiln, etc.
As others have mentioned, I don't have a problem with "dwarf" because, if I'm not mistaken, fantasy dwarves originated before the term was applied to real people. Halfling, on the other hand...obviously Hobbit is the right name for them, but copyright. That said, and I really hope this doesn't sound offensive, it's not necessarily insulting to describe a real race by its skin color (white, black), so it makes sense that Halflings might be named after their unique trait: they're half the size of other races. In the Lord of the Rings books, the hobbits refer to humans as "the Big People" and themselves as "the Little People," for what that's worth, and they don't find "halfling" offensive. If we really needed to change the name of the race, I'd go with Kithkin (we've already seen this one in Magic: the Gathering, so it wouldn't be out of nowhere).
As others have mentioned, I don't have a problem with "dwarf" because, if I'm not mistaken, fantasy dwarves originated before the term was applied to real people. Halfling, on the other hand...obviously Hobbit is the right name for them, but copyright. That said, and I really hope this doesn't sound offensive, it's not necessarily insulting to describe a real race by its skin color (white, black), so it makes sense that Halflings might be named after their unique trait: they're half the size of other races. In the Lord of the Rings books, the hobbits refer to humans as "the Big People" and themselves as "the Little People," for what that's worth, and they don't find "halfling" offensive. If we really needed to change the name of the race, I'd go with Kithkin (we've already seen this one in Magic: the Gathering, so it wouldn't be out of nowhere).
If they were the only people of their relative size, that might be acceptable, but given that there are Gnomes, Goblins, and Kobolds in the very least, they are hardly along in being the people who are less than 4.5' tall. And it is actually a little surprising that there aren't at least a few more peoples in their general size-range.
Kithkin is a pretty decent concept though. It more emphasizes their closeness as a society rather than their smallness. Although it still kind of empathizes how they are in opposition to others rather than being a neutral term without additional connotation like "elf" or "gnome" or "orc".
As others have mentioned, I don't have a problem with "dwarf" because, if I'm not mistaken, fantasy dwarves originated before the term was applied to real people. Halfling, on the other hand...obviously Hobbit is the right name for them, but copyright. That said, and I really hope this doesn't sound offensive, it's not necessarily insulting to describe a real race by its skin color (white, black), so it makes sense that Halflings might be named after their unique trait: they're half the size of other races. In the Lord of the Rings books, the hobbits refer to humans as "the Big People" and themselves as "the Little People," for what that's worth, and they don't find "halfling" offensive. If we really needed to change the name of the race, I'd go with Kithkin (we've already seen this one in Magic: the Gathering, so it wouldn't be out of nowhere).
I suppose then that Dwarf might not be the issue if the concept of a fantastical sort of Dwarf came prior to describing anyone who was less than 4'10" fully grown as a "dwarf". Although, given that the genetic conditions that would result in people being smaller than average would have been within the human genome for far longer than any myths about dwarfs would have existed, I cannot help but think that it was, in the very least, a cyclical causation.
But even if the term "dwarf" can be excused, the "halfling" still remains as something to be tackled.
I have to say this discussion seems largely academic. Dwarves are called Dwarves by Humans in the Common language. What do Dwarfs call themselves in their own language of Dwarvish? Do they call themselves Dwarves? What do Halflings call themselves in the Halfling language? It seems like you've completely ignored that angle.
I have to say this discussion seems largely academic. Dwarves are called Dwarves by Humans in the Common language. What do Dwarfs call themselves in their own language of Dwarvish? Do they call themselves Dwarves? What do Halflings call themselves in the Halfling language? It seems like you've completely ignored that angle.
I suppose it is true that what people call themselves in their own language is hardly ever respected by speakers of English. In English, we call people "Germans", but they call themselves "Deutsche", we call people Italian and yet they call themselves "Italiana" or "Italiano" (actually, that one is rather similar), we call people Russian and they call themselves "Russkly", we call people Chinese but they call themselves "Zhongwen", we call people Japanese but they call themselves "Nihonjin". The English language does seem to have a distinct disrespect for the terms that people would prefer to refer to themselves as-- and when those people speak the English language, they are forced to use those same terms regardless of what they prefer to call themselves.
Then again-- none of the terms I listed above fundamentally contain the linguistic implication that they people being referred to are lesser people, much less that they should be considered only a half-person.
In my world, halflings call themselves hobbits and humans use the term halfling. The halflings themselves don’t take offense unless it is used in a derogatory manner.
Just because Wizards of the Coast can’t use the term doesn’t mean I can’t.
Dwarves are an entirely different story, but are called Dwarves.
Then again-- none of the terms I listed above fundamentally contain the linguistic implication that they people being referred to are lesser people, much less that they should be considered only a half-person.
In my world, gnomes and halflings are teased as half-persons. God creator guy was attacked during creation of these 2 races, leaving the creation stone, "half-sculpted." At least that's one side of the story.
Gnomes and halflings have gone on to form strong alliances with the 'tall-folk', and hold a grudge stronger than the dwarves.
In my setting, dwarves got their name when they were enslaved by giants who called them that.
After they freed themselves, they adopted that name with pride and to remember what happened.
About the halflings I did not thought about that due to the spanish name is not that "offensive"(?) (the spanish translation is more like "Medians"). Maybe you could call them like that? Medians, mediums, middles...
The name "hobbit" comes from "hob", a variant of the name "robin". It relates to "Robin Goodfellow" and "hobgoblin", as types of fairy creatures.
Both are sprites, and both are childlike (thus like small human children). A "hob" is generally applied for a helpful nature spirit, while a "goblin" is generally applied for a harmful nature spirit. The oxymoron "hob-goblin" is used in a humorous sense, for a spirit that likes to play practical jokes. The laughter is "helpful" but the pranks can be painful!
In the worldview where Shakespeare is from, the hobgoblin especially refers to Puck, understood as the jester of the royal fairy court.
Meanwhile, the hob refers to house spirits, something like the vibe of a place where humans live. Thus, hob tends to be regional variant of gnomes, brownies, and similar.
According to Shakespeare, the fairies look like small human children. In one of his plays, actual human children are able to convince that they are fairies. So the smallness mainly refers to age. The fairies appear any age from about newborn to about 20. Additionally, the fairies of the culture of Shakespeare can shrink because they are spirits who lack matter, thus can shrink in the exact same way that angels can when they "dance on the head of pin". The angels can shrink smaller because they are more refined. The fairies can shrink to the size of about a thumbnail (a signet on a ring).
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I am sure it occurs to everyone sooner or later that the names of these two races seem quite belittling and insulting.
Dwarf means anything that is smaller than normal. Although Dwarfs in current D&D aren't even smaller than normal-- a bit squatter, sure, but given their girth and muscle, they have every bit as much mass as any human does. And if Dwarfs have been around for longer than humans, surely they wouldn't refer to themselves as "small people"-- they would consider themselves normal sized and consider humans to be all stretchy. So as a term that humans use to refer to the race, whether intentionally or inadvertently belittling, it would seem odd that it would be the term the race uses for themselves.
Of course... I do suppose I could entertain the idea that within the D&D world, the term "Dwarf" could perhaps have arisen with the race and then any other animal that is referred to as a "dwarf" something-- such as a "dwarf field mouse" or "dwarf hippopotamus" could have been named after the name for the race came into the lexicon. Afterall-- the term "dwarf" is so disconnected from any other words we use that it doesn't stand out so much...
Unfortunately, that doesn't work so well for Halflings which have the term "half" right there in their name-- leading to the long-running joke that a half-halfling would be a "quarterling". It appears as though the term "Halfling" originates from the old term for a boy between the ages of 12 to 16-- no longer a boy, but only half a man. It is entirely impossible to ignore that this term has got to be a belittling term for the people, they surely must consider themselves fully grown people and just think that all these bigger races are just too damn large for their own good-- more akin to ogres or giants. Granted, I can accept that in some worlds, maybe the term "Halfling" was originally a derogatory term and then the Halflings decided to recontextualize it and own it-- then again, the instances we have of people doing that in term life are ones where the group generally takes the stance of "we can use that word, but don't you dare utter it or it means war!"
And, I know-- I know-- people are going to take this as a personal attack and say I am "SJW"ing or "White Knighting" or telling them they have been "playing wrong" for the last 40 years of D&D-- but I was just sitting here tonight writing out a list of races and came across them and when I alphabetized them and "Halfling" was alphabetized between "Half-Elf" and "Half-Orc", I just stopped and thought... that's kind of weird, isn't it? And then my mind wandered with the implications... like... isn't there something cooler we could call them?
I am not saying those whose games involve nothing more than wandering around corridors and opening doors and rolling random encounter tables then killing whatever appears out of thin air behind the door and then scooping up the XP and GP it drops-- that's all good. I enjoy that sort of play too. Though I tend to find computers can offer it up better than doing it sitting around a table with dice. You aren't doing anything wrong-- keep doing what you are doing. This is just for those who want to think about these weird little minutia things and world build and put "way too much thought" into things because our focus is on storytelling and acting. And in this case, the idea that there are people who would consider themselves to be normal sized within their own racial group and community and yet get referred to as "small people" and even "half people" kind of sparks my imagination with story possibilities.
Looking over things historically, dwarfs were too closely conflated with things like goblins and trolls and such in old mythology for me to be certain about what other names they could be called.
As for Halflings... "Hobby" is now a term for what we do in our recreational time, "Brownie" is maybe too associated with the Girl Scouts but is my leading favorite, "Leprechaun" is obviously associated with St. Patrick's Day and Lucky Charms Cereal making it hard to take it too seriously... also, I know that both Brownies and Leprechauns have appeared as magical creatures in earlier editions of D&D (then again-- Gnomes have changed over time-- so if merging Halfling and an unused old monster add more depth to the race...?) Hebling is another option, but that is just removing the issue from English to German. I know the term "Hin" has come up in some settings, but it just doesn't strike me as interesting...
Anyway-- I am absolutely certain that others have had the same thoughts about this thing. In the worlds you have created, are there terms that Dwarfs and Halflings use to refer to one another that are less blatantly demeaning and would appreciate it if others used them too? Because I think I might like to adapt them. Especially since I am thinking that I am going to add Half-Dwarf, Half-Ogre, and Half-Hobgoblin to the list of races and would really kind of appreciate if Halfling didn't awkwardly appear in the middle of those.
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D&D Beyond FoundersI've always been a big fan of the halfling race, since my first game of D&D.
The Mystarra setting had a great Gazeteer, that started off explaining that the word they used to refer to their own people is, "Hin" - this was also introduced as canon for the Forgotten Realms by Ed Greenwood, Skip Williams etc in 3rd edition D&D, and is still a word I use in all of my games.
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I might suggest “Bantam” for halflings. It’s an existing word that denotes smaller stature, that doesn’t appear to have any real negative connotation, and that sounds kind of nice to me. Currently stumped (no pun intended) for a politically correct term for dwarves, though “Cobb” (or any similar variant based on the word cobby) might work. Not as happy with how that sounds, but maybe that’s just me.
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If you want to be technical about it, the word "dwarf" originated as a description of the beings from Germanic mythology. It got applied to humans with dwarfism because of their resemblance to the mythical beings, not the other way around (though one could probably make a case that people with dwarfism were the inspiration for the mythical beings, the word was not used to describe them then). If you want to go with an alternative, though, you could try alfar or svartalfar, or dweorg.
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"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
If "Hin" is the officially recognized correct term for Halflings in at least 2 of the D&D worlds (I wonder if it carries over to Eberron-- most things seem to), I guess I have to accept that as the official D&D answer. Although "Hin" seems to be German for "down, broken, destroyed" which still seems to carry a lot of negative connotations. Granted, any word can have negative meanings in some language, but German is the closest language to English and so I have to half-suspect that it was chosen because it still meant "small" in the mind of the writer who chose that term.
"Bantam" is a term that seems most closely associated with poultry and still fundamentally stresses that something is smaller than it should be. And that still strikes me as going down the wrong road. It seems to have first referred to soldiers who were significantly smaller than was accepted as normal. There have been some cases where it has been used where being smaller was a positive thing, but... ultimately it still means that one is recognizing themselves and all their kin and all their neighbors-- their entire genetic group, their entire race from their god to the lowliest member of their society as being abnormal-- being smaller than they should be.
If you were a person who was born into a genetic line, a family, a culture, where everyone was relatively close to your own size-- surely you would consider yourselves to be normal, right? I mean-- I would hope there are not whole races of people who consider themselves to just be fundamentally wrong in some significant way and totally internalize and incorporate that fully into their culture, not knowing how to express themselves as being a thing without expressing that they are abnormal, lacking, lesser than a regular person, deserving of less recognition, respect and recognition. That they and their parents and their grandparents and their great grandparents through all the generations in the past were born as something lesser than what should be considered normal.
What I really want to find it some term, some word, ideally with some historical context, that these races could use to refer to themselves and yet not contain any fundamental judgement of them as being smaller or lesser than any of the other races. Any term that fundamentally comes down to "You are too small-- ha-ha!!" just doesn't really work. What I really want to get at here is a term where any layperson from previous experience would understand from previous experience that the term refers to a small type of people, but the word itself not scream judgmentally that they are smaller than normal and that is the start and end of their identity.
That's why I put forward "Brownie" or "Leprechaun"-- looking a bit deeper, I suppose "Lutin" also works, but it is a French word that isn't recognizable to most English speakers.
I don't know-- maybe I am asking too much here. I just really feel like, at least among themselves, these races should consider themselves "normal" and referring to them specifically as something smaller than what should be would be an entirely human perspective. And, totally, we are humans and so from our perspective-- it is what it is. But crawling into the mind of such a person-- there's got to be some term they would use to refer to each other that doesn't carry a connotation of being smaller than one should be.
For example-- we have Gnomes. We all know that Gnomes are a small sort of people. They are a magic sort of people. But nothing in the term "Gnome" inherently has the connotation of being small as the primary descriptor. The idea of Gnome, while containing the idea of small to a human, is a term that is not otherwise used inherently to describe things that are small and certainly does not contain the connotation that a Gnome is only half a person.
I was trying to find terms that referred to the general physique of these races that, to me at least, don’t have a negative connotation - small but not bad small, I guess. Apparently that isn’t your intention, I misunderstood. I guess if you’re looking for words that are not synonymous with small in any way though, literally any made up word will do. Just not sure what it is you are looking for then.
edit: I remembered that several tribes of Native Americans refer to themselves as ‘the people’ or ‘the real people’ in their own language. I suppose you could do something similar and say the [halfling] word for people translates to for instance “nation” or “folk” or “seed” or something similar, and consequently have them say they are “of the Nation/Folk/Seed” when speaking Common. Alternatively, look for something other than stature that defines halfling/dwarven communities, culture or origin. Something like the Forged, or the Stoneblooded, or People of the Kiln, etc.
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I am disappointed that nobody in this thread has mentioned "Hobbit" yet.
Also (thanks to coming across my old Changeling: the Dreaming books), for a race that’s characterized by very tight communities: Kith.
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Yes, I know D&D can't use the term, but as far as I am concerned, the proper name for a "Halfling" is "Hobbit."
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As others have mentioned, I don't have a problem with "dwarf" because, if I'm not mistaken, fantasy dwarves originated before the term was applied to real people. Halfling, on the other hand...obviously Hobbit is the right name for them, but copyright. That said, and I really hope this doesn't sound offensive, it's not necessarily insulting to describe a real race by its skin color (white, black), so it makes sense that Halflings might be named after their unique trait: they're half the size of other races. In the Lord of the Rings books, the hobbits refer to humans as "the Big People" and themselves as "the Little People," for what that's worth, and they don't find "halfling" offensive. If we really needed to change the name of the race, I'd go with Kithkin (we've already seen this one in Magic: the Gathering, so it wouldn't be out of nowhere).
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Halflings refer to themselves as “Hin” in some D&D canon.
If they were the only people of their relative size, that might be acceptable, but given that there are Gnomes, Goblins, and Kobolds in the very least, they are hardly along in being the people who are less than 4.5' tall. And it is actually a little surprising that there aren't at least a few more peoples in their general size-range.
Kithkin is a pretty decent concept though. It more emphasizes their closeness as a society rather than their smallness. Although it still kind of empathizes how they are in opposition to others rather than being a neutral term without additional connotation like "elf" or "gnome" or "orc".
I suppose then that Dwarf might not be the issue if the concept of a fantastical sort of Dwarf came prior to describing anyone who was less than 4'10" fully grown as a "dwarf". Although, given that the genetic conditions that would result in people being smaller than average would have been within the human genome for far longer than any myths about dwarfs would have existed, I cannot help but think that it was, in the very least, a cyclical causation.
But even if the term "dwarf" can be excused, the "halfling" still remains as something to be tackled.
I have to say this discussion seems largely academic. Dwarves are called Dwarves by Humans in the Common language. What do Dwarfs call themselves in their own language of Dwarvish? Do they call themselves Dwarves? What do Halflings call themselves in the Halfling language? It seems like you've completely ignored that angle.
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In my worlds, Dwarves call themselves either Dwerg or Dyerven, depending on the world. Halflings call themselves either Hin or Helfeng.
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I suppose it is true that what people call themselves in their own language is hardly ever respected by speakers of English. In English, we call people "Germans", but they call themselves "Deutsche", we call people Italian and yet they call themselves "Italiana" or "Italiano" (actually, that one is rather similar), we call people Russian and they call themselves "Russkly", we call people Chinese but they call themselves "Zhongwen", we call people Japanese but they call themselves "Nihonjin". The English language does seem to have a distinct disrespect for the terms that people would prefer to refer to themselves as-- and when those people speak the English language, they are forced to use those same terms regardless of what they prefer to call themselves.
Then again-- none of the terms I listed above fundamentally contain the linguistic implication that they people being referred to are lesser people, much less that they should be considered only a half-person.
In my world, halflings call themselves hobbits and humans use the term halfling. The halflings themselves don’t take offense unless it is used in a derogatory manner.
Just because Wizards of the Coast can’t use the term doesn’t mean I can’t.
Dwarves are an entirely different story, but are called Dwarves.
In my world, gnomes and halflings are teased as half-persons. God creator guy was attacked during creation of these 2 races, leaving the creation stone, "half-sculpted." At least that's one side of the story.
Gnomes and halflings have gone on to form strong alliances with the 'tall-folk', and hold a grudge stronger than the dwarves.
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In my world, Halflings are human-goblin hybrids from way back when. (Half-goblin to Half-lin to Halfling)
In my setting, dwarves got their name when they were enslaved by giants who called them that.
After they freed themselves, they adopted that name with pride and to remember what happened.
About the halflings I did not thought about that due to the spanish name is not that "offensive"(?) (the spanish translation is more like "Medians"). Maybe you could call them like that? Medians, mediums, middles...
The name "hobbit" comes from "hob", a variant of the name "robin". It relates to "Robin Goodfellow" and "hobgoblin", as types of fairy creatures.
Both are sprites, and both are childlike (thus like small human children). A "hob" is generally applied for a helpful nature spirit, while a "goblin" is generally applied for a harmful nature spirit. The oxymoron "hob-goblin" is used in a humorous sense, for a spirit that likes to play practical jokes. The laughter is "helpful" but the pranks can be painful!
In the worldview where Shakespeare is from, the hobgoblin especially refers to Puck, understood as the jester of the royal fairy court.
Meanwhile, the hob refers to house spirits, something like the vibe of a place where humans live. Thus, hob tends to be regional variant of gnomes, brownies, and similar.
According to Shakespeare, the fairies look like small human children. In one of his plays, actual human children are able to convince that they are fairies. So the smallness mainly refers to age. The fairies appear any age from about newborn to about 20. Additionally, the fairies of the culture of Shakespeare can shrink because they are spirits who lack matter, thus can shrink in the exact same way that angels can when they "dance on the head of pin". The angels can shrink smaller because they are more refined. The fairies can shrink to the size of about a thumbnail (a signet on a ring).
he / him