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?
we call them “estadunidense” which roughly translates to “usian”. usians tend not to like it.
but, like, you call yourself after the entire continent, am i supposed to take it seriously?
You can say USAmerican or US (as an adjective, e.g. US government) as a neutral demonym. “Yankee” and “gringo” have pejorative connotations, although I’m not Latin American so I don’t know what the connotations are among LatAm Spanish speakers. Also, my understanding of the word “gringo” as someone who lives in neither of the Americas is that it refers to specifically white people, not USAmericans in general. I’m not sure if I’ve understood the usage of the term correctly, but if other people have the same understanding, they may get confused if you call eg a Black USAmerican a gringo.
I’m in Texas, so there is a lot of Mexican cultural exchange. Spanish was practically a second language in my public schools, and most people speak at least a little bit of spanglish.
When a Mexican calls an American a gringo, they’re not being nice. “Gringo” is typically used as a pejorative, to refer to a specific type of “mayo is too spicy and I’m afraid of people who have melatonin” white people.
Those deeply sleeping bastards
Its my understanding that in Spanish, “American” refers to anyone from the Americas. In some languages/countries, the Americas are taught as 1 continent (Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and America), so a person from any country in the Americas would be called “American”.
In most English speaking countries, we are taught that there are 7 continents, and north and south America are separate continents. In that context, you wouldn’t really use a term to refer to people from both continents. It’s similar to how, as a spaniard, I could not call you “eurasian”, i would just say “european”. In English, you would then have to refer to people as either “north american” or “south american”.
In practice, we do refer to people from south America as “south american”, but north america usually gets divided into “central american” and “caribbean”, which only leaves the US, Canada, and Mexico.
People from Mexico and Canada have obvious demonyms, while the USA does not. “Gringo” also applies to Canadians (and it’s specifically referring to non-spanish speaking european americans), so it doesn’t really work as a demonym. “Yankee” doesn’t really work, either, because it only applies to a subset of people from the US, so it’s similar to calling everyone from Great Britain “English”.
I haven’t met any primarily English speaking residents of the americas with any problem with people from the US being called “american”.
We say “USA” for the country and “US-American” for the people. Those arrogantly misusing the name of the continent can get rekt.
Call them murican. Everyone gets it, even the usa-ians
Being a native, a Yankee to me is a New Englander. My Spanish friend had to gently explain to me, “shut up, you’re all yanquis.”
Being a native from The South, “Yankee” to me means anybody from the area above the Mason Dixon line. Full disclosure, I’m not proud to be from The South. However, I do find many Yankees to be at least a little bit strange. So, the designation stands in my head.
Given that you’re the native, you should gently explain to the colonial that they are the ones who are wrong.
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
Ya tu sabé
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 ;-)
Thing is, it’s “United States of America”, much like “United States of Mexico” and, before 1968, “United States of Brazil”. So when they call themselves americans, they’re technically correct.
German here, most of the time I say “US-American”
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.
Eh, NY has the Yankees sports team but they are not part of New England and I’d say a good portion of the country would say NY has no Yankees in it besides the team.
That’s the reason I didn’t say New England.
I think you should reread what I said, I don’t think your response makes sense vs my statement.
The term Yankee includes more than New England. That’s why I didn’t use the term New England while you did.
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.
Sounds like that fight was lost 100 years ago.
Not really. Most americans aren’t native english speakers, and still consider themselves americans. They don’t roll over and let the US coopt that term.
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.
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.
Confidently wrong. US leaders didn’t start referring to its citizens as americans or its country as america until ~1900.
I know you won’t read the book I linked, and are going off of white-supremacist vibes, so here’s an article for everyone else about the history of this imperialist usage.
IDGAF about what leaders called it/us. That’s almost irrelevant.
But other people in the world absolutely were using the term American to refer to citizens of the US before the 1900s.
I’m also not sure why you insist on staying on this tangent when the conversation was about current usage.
other people in the world absolutely were using the term American to refer to citizens of the US before the 1900s.
I mean, a few, I imagine. There’s always been people saying shit wrong. Would help your case if you actually had a source and not just a vibe to refute an evidence based position.
By population, however, most of the world isn’t the anglosphere. Spanish speakers, which is most of America, by and large call you “Estadunidenses” whenever it’s not “gringo”. A good chunk of us also speak English and object to gringos colonizing “america” much like Indonesians or Indians or Malaysians probably would have if Japan decided it was “Asia”.
You might not have decided that we speak English, but the same government that made it a necessity for us in the global south to learn the language is the one that decided to steal that term. Language matters.
Oh, I have sources. I’m just not rounding them up for this shit. After the assholery I’ve already dealt with, I’m done. I didn’t give much of a fuck about dessalines’ tangent to begin with, but was willing to engage a little with it just because of who it was.
Getting you to read is impossible. Stop white-supremacist vibing and actually read about its historical usage. I even linked you an article, which I know you didn’t read.
It’s so frustrating to read books about the long history of these things and then have confidently wrong children try to correct you with a vibes-based analysis.
Dude, stop with the ad hominem bullshit.
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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!
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Just say “idiots.” Source: USA citizen.
No no, he has a point…
USian
Asians to the east. Usians to the west.
If I want to come off as a pseudo-intellectual I call them Yankee for east-north and Dixie for south-west (but also Florida and the bible belt) and gringo for hispanic Americans. I don’t know if any of those terms are really correct to use in that context and my definitions are entirely vibes-based.
I’d say leave east/west out of the Yankee/Dixie dichotomy you’re imagining, because every single southeastern state was a slave state that supported the confederacy.
It also falls apart when you go west of the Mississippi River, which was (outside of Texas and California) mostly unincorporated territory during the time of the civil war and not a part of what would have been considered the union or the confederacy at that time.
Also don’t refer to Hispanic Americans as “gringo” because that is a term used in Latin America to refer to people who are not Latin American.
Yeah thanks. I said pseudo because I do t really know the meaning of these words apart from vic3, nor do I know of anyone from the americas :D
Usonian also works.
