a PhD by another name

At the risk for coming across as a snob and slightly superior - I'm becoming increasingly annoyed when people, particularly at my institution, deliberately conflate a Dtech degree with a PhD. All of a sudden, despite prescriptions by national government that suggest the opposite, my institution appears to be offering PhDs. Colleagues I know who have completed or are completing their doctoral studies at our institution, talk about their PhDs. In our internal media publication this week, reference was made to systems being put in place to increase the amount of PhDs graduating from the institution. I read a draft of a journal article written by a recent institutional Dtech graduate, that blatantly referred to their study as a PhD research project. Surely all of this smacks of dishonesty. They know they aren't doing a PhD, nor did they graduate with a PhD and they know our institution doesn't offer PhDs. I'm all for recognising and acknowledging the merits of a particular qualification based on the defining parameters of that qualification, but when you pass one qualification 'off' as another, you inadvertently draw unnecessary attention to the quality, status and worth of the qualification being airbrushed away. The status of the replacement nomenclature becomes elevated, while that of real qualification diminished. Or maybe for the people doing it, they're actually hoping their Dtech qualification is conferred with the same status as the PhD.  Now it could be that the term PhD is the more common and familiar, so more likely to be in people's consciousness. But, the same could be said in other countries where PhDs and other professional doctorates make-up the qualification mix. Yet I've never heard an EdD mistakenly, or otherwise, referred to as a PhD in England. So is this parlance a South African phenomenon? And more importantly, why is this causing me so much irritation? Maybe underlying this little outpouring of irritability is a superiority complex which I should acknowledge. I don't really want my PhD conflated with a Dtech, thank you very much. Status, or rather the perceived deferential status of these two qualifications, is really at the heart of this (my) problem. But this conflation exercise, as I describe above, isn't doing anything to address the status inequality, rather I think it simply perpetuates it.