Self-determination is one of the legal–political concepts that both have a self-evident colloquial meaning and are also technical terms. Such concepts easily end up in a field of tension. Although in their colloquial usage they have often very disparate, unrelated, or even contradictory meanings, their terminological usage demands, if not unambiguousness, certainly a greater clarity. At the same time, the terminological meaning must retain a connection with the colloquial meaning. Otherwise, misunderstandings can arise, and the technical term cannot gain acceptance – in contrast to neologisms, which do not have to take much heed of pre-terminological meanings of the words from which they are derived because they are not present to the same extent. No one is bothered today by the original meaning of revolution as the regular rotation of celestial bodies.

A double meaning in colloquial language is less problematic. To determine (and with that determination) can be used both in a descriptive sense, as in the description of an object and its nature, and in a normative sense, as in the determination or direction of the will or action of one or more persons by these persons themselves or by others. Self-determination, by contrast, only has a normative meaning; its descriptive counterpart would tend to correspond to the exploration of one's selfhood.

The Russian samoopredelenie is directly comparable with the German Selbstbestimmung. The Russian term combines samo (“self”) with the verb opredelit – “to determine” or “to specify,” but also “to decide” or “to decree.” The Dutch zelfbeschikking (rarer: zelfbestemming) also is a compound of colloquial words; however, here the descriptive meanings are lacking. In other European languages, fewer colloquial words have been incorporated into the expression, as, for example, in the English self-determination, the Italian autodeterminazione and autodecisione, the Spanish autodeterminación and autodecisión, or the Portuguese autodeterminação, without the directly evident meaning of the expressions seriously being put into question. In these cases, the descriptive meanings also are lacking. In French, there is a unique mixture: For self-determination one usually sees the term autodétermination, whereas the right of self-determination is rarely rendered as droit d'autodétermination, but rather with a freer paraphrase, as droit des peuples à disposer d'eux-mêmes.