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?
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
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.
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.
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”.
Burgerlander
Marvelstani
Call them murican. Everyone gets it, even the usa-ians
Burros como o caralho is Portuguese for USAians.
It translates to something like dumb as fuck.
German here, most of the time I say “US-American”
It’s a weird lacuna of the English language, there’s no official word for estadounidense.
I prefer the formal name in spanish of estadounidense (united-statistian) to American.
This probably isn’t helpful for referring to all Americans but in the U.S., we use whatever state/regjon within the United States a person is from as the demonym. So, someone from California would be Californian, someone from Texas would be Texan. For a regional example, someone from the Northeast would be a New Englander.
For most of the history of the Republic, the states viewed themselves sort of like EU countries do now: independent states in America that united. It probably wasn’t until the World Wars that it changed.
It can get more complicated, unfortunately. Native Americans would probably use their tribal name instead of the state, for instance. But that’s why we don’t have a demonym and everyone has resorted to USian or USAian on message boards.
Usonian also works.
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
Yankistani.
