The Sumerians called the region around Nippur Kengir or Kenger, meaning approximately ‘cultivated land’. This expression then came to designate the whole country of Sumer (s. specimen l. 13).
The Sumerians did not see themselves as a people and consequently had no name for that people. They called their language eme gir151 (tongue noble) ‘noble language’.
Sumer is geographically the same as South Babylonia and the biblical-aramaic Chaldaea. The Akkadian name of this region is Sumer, and its language, Sumeru. On one Akkadian tablet, the name of the language is li_ša_an šu_mi_ri ‘language of Sumer’. Modern designations are derived from this expression.
1 Thus Thomsen 1984. According to Falkenstein 1964, the glossonym was eme si-sá ‘normal language’.