American (word) - U.S. National in Other Languages

U.S. National in Other Languages

English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, and Russian speakers may use the term American to refer to either inhabitants of the Americas or to U.S. nationals. They generally have other terms specific to U.S. nationals, such as German US-Amerikaner, French étatsunien, Japanese 米国人 beikokujin, Arabic أمريكاني amriikaanii (as opposed to the more-common أمريكي amriikii), and Italian statunitense, but these may be less common than the term American. Adjectives derived from "United States" (such as United Statesian) are awkward in English, but similar constructions exist in Spanish (estadounidense), Portuguese (estado-unidense, estadunidense), Finnish (yhdysvaltalainen: from Yhdysvallat, United States), as well as in French (états-unien), and Italian (statunitense).

In Spanish, at least one reference reports estadounidense, estado-unidense or estadunidense are preferred to americano for U.S. nationals; the latter tends to refer to any resident of the Americas and not necessarily from the United States. In Portuguese, estado-unidense (or estadunidense) is the recommended form by language regulators but today it is less frequently used than americano and norte-americano. Latin Americans also may employ the term norteamericano (North American), which conflates the United States, Canada and Mexico.

With the 1994 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the following words were used to label the United States Section of that organization: in French, étatsunien; in Spanish, estadounidense. In English the adjective used to indicate relation to the United States is U.S.

The word Gringo is widely used in parts of Latin America in reference to U.S. residents, often in a pejorative way but not necessarily. Yanqui (Yankee) is also very common in some regions, but it is usually pejorative. Throughout Latin America the word Gringo is also used for any foreigner from the United States, Canada, or Europe, however the true sense of the word is any foreigner.

In other languages, however, there is no possibility for confusion. Chinese měiguórén for example, is derived from a word for the United States, měiguó, where měi is an abbreviation for Yàměilìjiā "America" and guó is "country". The name for the continent of America is měizhōu, from měi plus zhōu "continent". Thus a měizhōurén is an American in the generic sense, and a měiguórén is an American in the U.S. sense. Similar words are found in Korean and Vietnamese. In Swahili, the more naturalized word Marekani means specifically the United States, and Wamarekani are U.S. nationals, whereas the international form Amerika refers to the continent, and Waamerika are the inhabitants thereof. Likewise, the Esperanto word Ameriko refers only to the continent. For the country there is the term Usono, cognate with the English word Usonia later popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright. Thus a citizen of the United States is an usonano, whereas an amerikano is an inhabitant of the Americas.