Demonyms for the United States

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. 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 "[t]he 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 ( or ), Arabic (), Portuguese (), Russian () and Hindi (अमरीकी transliteration: Amreeki''). In French, ' is used in a colloquial way. ', derived from '''' (United States), while rarer, is increasingly used, including by some scholars. In Italian, both ' and ' are used, although the former is more common. 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 , the leading German-language newspaper in Switzerland, dismisses the term US-amerikanisch as both "unnecessary" and "artificial" and recommends the term '. Moreover, respective guidelines of the foreign ministries of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland all dictate ' for official usage. Ami is a slang term common in colloquial speech. In Spanish, the ' (), published by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, recommends the genderless term ' (literally United Statesian, sometimes spelled as '), because ' also refers to all the inhabitants of the continents of North and South America. ' and ' are also common. In Latin American Spanish colloquial speech, Americans may be referred to as ', but the word usually carries a disparaging connotation; in Spain and Argentina, a more common word with a similar meaning to ' is '' (from the English Yankee''). In Portuguese, the terms are ', ' and '. The term ' is the mostly used in colloquial speech, but the press usually uses '. The everyday use of the term ' and its variant '''' (only registered in Brazilian dictionaries) is less common, especially in Portugal, but its use is defended as the preferred by some academics. In Chinese, there are 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). 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. == 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. 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 Pan-American, 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. The earliest recorded use in this context is in a 1784 letter by Horatio Nelson. == See also ==