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, papΓ‘ esto es desde el Tierra del Fuego hasta el Canada
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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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 ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Southern?
thanks! missed that one.
This probably isnβt 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 wasnβt 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 thatβs why we donβt have a demonym and everyone has resorted to USian or USAian on message boards.
I wish Oregonians were called Oregonos instead because sounding like a spice is cool. lol
Oregonos sounds like part of a complete breakfast.
Oregano-s and Oregon-Oβs. I like it.
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