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?
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?
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.
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.
Also, most north/south/central Americans don’t actually give a shit. Only the terminally online do.
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.