Frede Iversen

People from the United States of America are known as and refer to themselves as Americans. Different languages use different terms for citizens of the United States. All forms of English refer to US citizens as Americans, a term deriving from the United States of America, the country's official name. In the English context, it came to refer to inhabitants of British America, and then the United States. However, there is some linguistic ambiguity over this use due to the other senses of the word ''American'', which can also refer to people from the Americas in general. Other languages, including Japanese, and Russian, use cognates of American to refer to people from the United States, while others, like French, or particularly Spanish and Portuguese, primarily use terms derived from United States. There are various other local and colloquial names for Americans. The name America probably came from the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.

Development of the term ''American''

Amerigo Vespucci first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern outskirts as conjectured by Christopher Columbus, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to the peoples of the Old World. Martin Waldseemüller coined the term ''America'' (in honor of Vespucci) in a 1507 world map.

First uses of the adjective ''American'' referenced European settlements in the New World. Americans referred to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and subsequently to European settlers and their descendants. English use of the term ''American'' for people of European descent dates to the 17th century, with the earliest recorded appearance being in Thomas Gage's ''The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies'' in 1648. In English, ''American'' came to be applied especially to people in British America and thus its use as a demonym for the United States derives by extension.

The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 refers to "the thirteen States of America", making the first formal use of the country name, which was officially adopted in 1777 by the nation's first governing constitution, the Articles of Confederation. The ''Federalist Papers'' of 1787–1788, written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison to advocate the ratification of the United States Constitution, use the word ''American'' in both its original pan-American sense, but also in its United States sense: Federalist Paper 24 refers to the "American possessions" of Britain and Spain (i.e. land outside of the United States) while Federalist Papers 51 and 70 refer to the United States as "the American republic". People from the United States increasingly referred to themselves as Americans through the end of the 18th century and the 1795 Treaty of Peace and Amity with the Barbary States refers to "American Citizens" while George Washington spoke to his people of " e name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity" in his 1796 farewell address. Eventually, this usage spread through other English-speaking countries and the unqualified noun ''American'' in all forms of the English language now chiefly refers to natives or citizens of the United States, though other senses are generally specified with a qualifier such as Latin American or North American.

International use

International speakers of English generally refer to people from the United States as Americans while equivalent translations of American are used in many other languages, namely Italian (), Dutch ('), Afrikaans ('), Japanese (, rōmaji: ''amerika-jin''), Filipino ('), Hebrew (), Arabic (), Portuguese (), Russian () and Hindi (अमरीकी transliteration: ''Amreeki'').

The term ' derived from ' (United States) is the correct term used in French in the fields of geography and demographics.
Although, '' '' is also used in a colloquial way.

In Spanish the ' ( en, Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts, italic=yes), published by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, recommends the genderless term ' (literally ''United Statesian''), because ' also refers to all of the inhabitants of the continents of North and South America, or can be used to refer to Hispanic Americans. ' and ' are also common.
In Latin American Spanish colloquial speech, Americans may be referred to as ' (likely originating from ''“griego”'', meaning 'Greek'), but the word usually carries a disparaging connotation; in Spain and Argentina, a more common word with a similar meaning to ' is '.

In German, the designation ' and its adjective form ' are sometimes used, though ' (adjective: ') is more common in scientific, official, journalistic, and colloquial parlance. The style manual of the ''Neue Zürcher Zeitung'', a leading German-language newspaper, dismisses the term ''US-amerikanisch'' as both "unnecessary" and "artificial" and recommends replacing it with '. The respective guidelines of the foreign ministries of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland all dictate ' for official usage. ''Ami'' is common in colloquial speech.

In Italian, both ' and ' are used, although the former is more common.

In European Portuguese, ' is mostly used in colloquial speech, but the term usually used in the press is '. In Brazilian Portuguese, the everyday term is usually ' or ' and ' is the preferred form in academia.

In the constructed language Esperanto, ', similar to ', is the standard term for an American. The United States itself is called ', similar to ''Usonia''. Only in formal contexts is the United States referred to by the long-form official name ' or ' (United States of North America). L. L. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, used the ' terms as early as 1910.

Chinese has distinct words for American in the continental sense and American in the national sense. The United States of America is called (Pinyin: ''měiguó''; Jyutping: ''mei5 gwok3'') while the continents of the Americas are called (Pinyin: ''měizhōu''; Jyutping: ''mei5 zau1''). There are separate demonyms derived from each word and a United States citizen is referred to as (Pinyin: ''měiguó rén''; Jyutping: ''mei5 gwok3 yan4'').

Alternative terms

The only officially and commonly used alternative for referring to the people of the United States in English is to refer to them as citizens of that country.Wilson, Kenneth G. (1993)
"American, America"
From ''The Columbia Guide to Standard American English''. Retrieved April 27, 2009. Another alternative is US-American, also spelled US American.

Several single-word English alternatives for American have been suggested over time, especially Usonian, popularized by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and the nonce term United-Statesian.

Writer H. L. Mencken collected a number of proposals from between 1789 and 1939, finding terms including Columbian, Columbard, Fredonian, Frede, Unisian, United Statesian, Colonican, Appalacian, Usian, Washingtonian, Usonian, Uessian, U-S-ian, Uesican, and United Stater. Names for broader categories include terms such as Western Hemispherian, New Worlder, and North Atlantican.

Nevertheless, no alternative to "American" is common in English.

Yankee

''Yankee'' (or ''Yank'') is a colloquial term for Americans in English; cognates can be found in other languages. Within the United States, ''Yankee'' usually refers to people specifically from New England or the Northern United States, though it has been applied to Americans in general since the 18th century, especially by the British."Yankee"
From the ''Oxford English Dictionary''. Retrieved November 27, 2008. The earliest recorded use in this context is in a 1784 letter by Horatio Nelson.

The cockney rhyming slang and Australian derogatory slang term ''septic'' (and in the Australian case, ''seppo'') derive from rhyming "yank" with "septic tank".

See also

* List of demonyms for US states and territories

References

Notes

Bibliography

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Demonyms for the United States
American culture
Ethnonyms
Political terminology