From Spain here, when we want to speak about USA people we use the term “yankee” or “gringo” rather than “american” cause our americans arent from USA, that terms are correct or mean other things?
German here, most of the time I say “US-American”
In Brazil, we use USians or Statesians
I used the second one on an academic paper and it went through.
I NEVER use “American”, because
America no es solo USA, papá esto es desde el Tierra del Fuego hasta el Canada
America no es solo USA
Nah, we often call them Americans too, despite them being like Canada’s trousers. Many (most? I’m not certain) Canadians know how Americans label themselves abroad and are okay being a separate group to avoid bad impressions. “eres Americano? No; soy Canadiense” or so.
But thanks for thinking of us. It’s great to be considered!
I use ‘yank’ a lot; sometimes Tank, as I’ve got a Brit friend ;-)
In the USA, Yankee refers to mainly northeast US, including the New York City area. Western Americans would be neutral about being called that and you might piss off some southerners.
My exposure to the term gringo has mainly been that it refers to white Americans. I don’t know if you would call a black American gringo or how they would accept it.
Just say “idiots.” Source: USA citizen.
Do you not have a term in Spanish?
If y’all use yank, yankee, or gringo, they’re all fine.
But, American is fine too. If you’re using English, everyone will know what you mean. It isn’t like it hasn’t been the term used in English for at least a century.
Here the thing. If you’re referring to someone from one of the two/three americas, you specify north, central and south. That depends a little on whether you consider all three as discrete areas, or not, but that’s the norm in English.
If you want to refer to all people from the americas at once, Americans is also fine. Context will carry which way you’re using it. English is fairly easy to make contextual indicators like that.
An example: “oh, Americans love their flag”. Which americans are we talking about? The ones with a specific American flag. Which, the statement isn’t universally true, it’s just an example.
If you aren’t using English, it doesn’t matter at all, use whatever terminology is the norm in that language.
The reason it doesn’t matter is that there really isn’t an “American” people in the continental sense. The cultures of the continents don’t even have a unifying effect, though you do have some connection between Spanish speaking vs Portuguese, vs native, vs English, etc. The language links in South America are much more significant than the fact that they live on the same continent.
Any time you’d be referring to the entire Americas, or the peoples of them, you’d specify that because there’s not a single American continent.
One nation out of all of them being america really isn’t a difficulty in conversation. It’s a non issue.
Most americans, the majority of whom don’t live in the US, dislike the usurpation of that term. There’s a longer history starting in the late 1800s of US politicians using “america”, “greater america”, to coincide with its imperial ambitions in Latin america and the carribean.
The USA even had a time when it had more people in its colonies living outside its contiguous borders, than it did inside.
There’s a lot on this in the book, how to hide an empire.
That has very little to do with the topic, which is colloquial language as it exists now, compared and contrasted between English and Spanish in specific.
And, tbh here, if you wanna talk populations, brazil is half the population of South America. And that total is still only 100million higher than the US. Since we’re talking about mainly Spanish and English here, you can decide if you want brazil included or not, but even that’s still not some kind of crazy difference.
Since Canada and Mexico are the other parts of North America, and don’t generally give a flying fuck about the terminology, are we going to include them in the count too? Like, the Mexicans I know use their own Spanish terms for Americans, sometimes even when speaking English.
Like, dude, I get it, you wanna link everything into colonialism and imperialism, which is fine. But let’s not pretend that Americans hasn’t been the term used in English across the world for damn near as long as the US has existed. It was what, 1788? 1789? That one of the French diplomats used it in writing the first time? Might have been before that, but that’s the one I remember. The term was certainly in use before that.
Now, using “Americans” to refer to everyone over here did exist before the U.S., going back to at least the 1500s. I think that was only in use in English, I’ve never looked up what was used in French and Spanish back then. But since the USA came into being as country, it has been the default term for US citizens colloquially.
Even some of the other languages use variations of it. There’s Mexicans and Nicaraguans at least that use Americanos rather than other terms. I swear the Guatemalans near here default to that as well, when they aren’t using gringo or race specific terminology, but I don’t have as much interaction with them.
All of which goes back to the point that the whining about it online is a fairly recent thing, and it was definitely not a thing back far as the nineties irl for the general population. That may be biased by my exposure to Latinos being almost exclusively people that live here, rather than visitors.
If people wanna try to shift language into something else, all it takes is coming up with a replacement term that’s not unwieldy or stupid sounding (like usians), then getting people to use it.
But nobody has come up with a realistic english replacement. Usians isn’t going to happen. You might run into it online because it’s easier to type, but you won’t see it used in speech because it sounds stupid. It would be like calling brits ukians.
Hell, go find something in another language, English is great at adopting words. Beikoku-jin (japanese) or Usanano (Esperanto) are cool as hell, flow off the tongue, and beikoku would definitely get the weebs on board. Give it a go, see what happens.
Most americans, the majority of whom don’t live in the US
Gonna stop you right there. The number of Americans who don’t live in in the US is tiny.
“American” is the demonym for someone from the United States of America. You don’t have to like it, but that’s the way it’s been in the English language for hundreds of years, and getting angry about it doesn’t change linguistics, which is defined by usage.
English speakers don’t recognise the Americas as a single continent, but as two separate continents separated by the isthmus of Panama. So it doesn’t make sense to have a single demonym to refer to everyone from those two continents.
The arrogance of some Spanish speakers of thinking they have the right to dictate the English language is astounding. And I refuse to buy into it. I’m not coming into Spanish-speaking spaces and trying to change how they talk about things in their language.
Hi, Brazilian here.
I’m sorry, but “the number of Americans who don’t live in the US is tiny”?? WTF?
Hi, South ~~AMERICAN!!! here.
the US doesn’t get to shove their so-called “democracy” up our asses, impose their monetary exchange, be proud of their stupid ass imperialism, force people to learn their dumb as fuck language and then go “yeah, it’s OUR language, you can’t dictate how we call ourselves”
Sorry, dude, but you kinda lost the privilege to “dictate” your own language when you decided to think about the whole third world as your backyard and to name yourselves after THE WHOLE FUCKING CONTINENT.
peace, bye!
Might want to check who you’re actually talking to here. You seem to be making some incorrect assumptions.
Being from the USA, I can confidently say “Yankee” is a term that is fairly neutral in meaning. People from the South states use it to refer to basically any American not from the South, and I get the sense people from the UK use it to refer to anyone from the USA.
In my experience, “Gringo” seems to be a term used by Spanish-speakers (even ones from North and South America) to refer to English speakers who think they’re better than everyone, so it appears to be a term with negative connotations
Texan here. Yankee is definitely not a neutral word to refer to everyone from the USA. Some people down here will fight you over it, but most would just give you a confused look.
I’ve always understood gringo to mean white person, especially one who can’t speak Spanish. The term is sometimes used in Mexican restaurants to let the staff know that you can’t deal with too many jalapeños.
I’ve heard gringo is about language, primarily English. Not about being a whitey
Mexican upbringing here, it is most definitely a “Whitey” thing.
Do Southerners use Yankee pejoratively to refer to northerners?
I’m afraid so. There are a lot of people still fighting our Civil War, the one that supposedly ended over 150 years ago. Even without those troglodytes, there is a distinct cultural difference between the North and South, as I think there is in many countries. We tend to rub each other the wrong way sometimes.
Old joke about the difference. Walk up to a Southerner’s house, and they say, “can I help you?” Walk up to a Yankee’s house, and it’s, “whaddya want?”
In my experience (as a Brit), people generally only refer to Americans as Yanks in a mildly pejorative way or if we’re taking the piss, otherwise it’s Americans.
Southerners are the same way. Nobody calls us yanks as a compliment
U.K. bloke here…I don’t use it personally, just because, but yeah we say it for anyone from the USA.
When I was about 10 or so someone local to me had a lawsuit because his colleagues called him Yankee and he claimed it was racism, fairly certain he won, but it was an obscure case.
i believe Brits call Americans “yanks”
It’s a weird lacuna of the English language, there’s no official word for estadounidense.
In Italian we have an equivalent, Statunitensi, but Americani is probably used more often to mean the same thing
The reason for this is simple: the word in English is “American”. Because in English speaking countries, it is almost universally the case that we talk about the 7 continents. And in the rare case we talk about 6 continents, it’s from merging Europe and Asia (which, frankly, is blatantly a far superior model of the continents), not merging North America and South America.
So “America” unambiguously refers to the country, and there’s no need for estadounidense, any more than there’s a need for “commonwealthian” for someone from the Commonwealth of Australia.
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What about Canada?
What about it?
They’re just Americans anyways
I think the point the previous user is getting at is that there is no continent of “America” in most English-speaking countries—there is North America and South America.
Canada is in North America but it’s not in “America,” which without the North/South prefix, will make most English-speaking people assume you mean the US and not the continent Canada and the US are on.
In America, yankee means people from a particular part of America. But we use it here in Australia to mean any American. It’s especially fun when people from the south (that is…the south of the country America, not from the continent of South America) take offence at the term IMO.
We also use “seppo” which is an Australian shortening slang of “septic”, which is rhyming slang (of the kind used in both Australia and London, England) that comes via “septic tank” via “yank”.
Gringo seems strange to me. I thought that was a predominantly Latin American term for white people, and would apply equally well to Americans as Canadians as Australians as (of particular relevance to someone from Spain) English…but only the white of each, so it would seem to me it shouldn’t work as synonymous with “American” because it excludes African Americans, Asian Americans, etc. But I’m not Spanish or Latin American, so I might just be misunderstanding the word.
Edit: what yank means depending on where you are (allegedly):
Hispanic here, I grew up using “gringo” specifically for people from the U.S. despite skin tone.
Canadians are “Canadiense”, English are “Ingles” but United States? “Estadounidense”? It’s sort of like saying “United Statian” but arguably more “correct/proper”
Gringo is just much faster/easier to say.
That being said this can vary a little from one Latin-American country to another.
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Seppo, septic tank, yank. Love it! Cockney rhyming slang strikes again?
Australian rhyming slang in this case, but yeah, it functions in much the same way as Cockney.
Seppo is pretty common in the UK too, particularly in families with people in the forces.
Oh that’s really interesting. I would have sworn that o-shortening was a distinctly Australian thing. Do you have other words that you shorten like that? Do you know if that’s a specific term that Brits might have borrowed from Australia, or if it evolved naturally out of British slang?
Not sure where it came from but you can see it here under S - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_British_military_slang_and_expressions#S
As for other words, I don’t think we do quite so many as the Aussies but there are words like aggro, cheapo, wino, preggo used in every day speech.
I appreciate I’m nitpicking, but we all use rhyming slang. Probably changed over time.
Burgerlander
Marvelstani
That sounds like the name of a person from Docklands in Melbourne.
Burros como o caralho is Portuguese for USAians.
It translates to something like dumb as fuck.
I prefer the formal name in spanish of estadounidense (united-statistian) to American.
imo, ‘gringo’ has no special meaning unless it was given one from a local group. like how “let’s go brandon” only makes sense on a specific group.
‘yankee’ used to have a specific one before, i.e. north-eastern US bros, but it got saturated and now could be used generally. imo, ‘yankee’ usage has ye olde vibe to it, but maybe that’s just me.
EDIT: corrected ‘southern’, thanks to Denvil
Southern?
thanks! missed that one.
Gringo and yankee are both fine. However, it’s most correct to refer to people from the USA by their birth state.
Or where they currently live.
Or, the case of NYC Puerto Ricans, both (New Yorican lol)
I suppose it depends on context, but someone who was born in PR, but lives in NYC, is a Puerto Rican. Someone born in NYC to a Puerto Rican family is a New Yorican. Both people are ethnically Puerto Rican, but only one is from Puerto Rico.
Not too sure about gringo but I know yankee is correct, I hear that one a lot from folks I know in the UK.
There’s some weird linguistic drift where in the southern US, we call northerners yankees, even though in the rest of the world we’re all yankees. Now I’m curious how that started.
That Southern US usage dates back to at least the US civil war in the 1860s.
But yankee was used to refer to at least some people in what is now the US as early as the 1660s.
I dunno how true it is, but I’ve heard it gets even more specific once you’re in the north. I shared a map in another comment detailing the different meanings of it.
As for the etymology, apparently it goes back to Dutch settlers of New Netherlands, and may be connected to the name Janneke. It seems to have gone from being used by English settlers to Dutch settlers to being used in precisely the reverse at some point, and has at times meant either someone of English descent, of early Protestant descent, or other things.
It was used more generally by outsiders to refer to Americans as far back as the Revolutionary War (the song Yankee Doodle Dandy was originally making fun of Americans—macaroni being a sophisticated style of dress), so its history being used in that way actually predates the Civil War associations that I think many Americans would give it today.
So yeah, it really does have a fascinating linguistic history.
Also, weird…this is the second time in as many days I’ve had cause to look up Yankee Doodle Dandy.
As a Dutchie, I’ve heard it being an contraction of the names Jan and Kees, both are common names in Dutch
Yeah, that was another one of the theories. Linguists seem pretty sure it has something to do with Dutch, but are in disagreement over exactly how it came to be. (The “Janneke” example I gave above being, according to what I read, a diminutive form of Jan.)
Unfortunately the USAians are so dominant in the region of the Americas that they’ve coopted the term American for most people. My Columbian friend hates when we refer to USAians as Americans because he says “hey we were here first” 😆. But unfortunately that’s the way it is.
Yanks or Yankee Doodles is what we used to call them but they get rather upset these days when you call them that. I wouldn’t call them gringos because it just sounds unnatural for a Brit to say that seriously.
I like to look at it this way. The full name of Mexico is the United States of Mexico. But we still call them Mexicans.
It’s totally okay to call people from the United States of America as Americans. Everyone knows what you mean anyways.
