Asklemmy

I'm USAian. (just identifying for this thread, i don't call myself that)

would "gringo" include Black USAians? Asian USAians? Spain-born USAians?

from my understanding of "gringo", that doesn't seem to include non-white USAians. Most English monolingual USAians think that means "white guy".

a lot of gen z USAians might not know the word Yankee as a term for USAians. if speaking to them, you might have to explain it's not the baseball team.

maybe it's better to stick with "USAians". it's never been used but it's easy to figure out. other possible choices are:

• Statesians
• USAliens
• USAmericans
• Staters
• Stater Tots (re: tater tots)
• USticles

better yet, call each of us by the state we're each from. that's the safest bet. you know all our 50 state names right? and their official demonyms? 🤣 kidding

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.

Gringo and yankee are both fine. However, it's most correct to refer to people from the USA by their birth state.

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

Not too sure about gringo but I know yankee is correct, I hear that one a lot from folks I know in the UK.

There's some weird linguistic drift where in the southern US, we call northerners yankees, even though in the rest of the world we're all yankees. Now I'm curious how that started.

Unfortunately the USAians are so dominant in the region of the Americas that they've coopted the term American for most people. My Columbian friend hates when we refer to USAians as Americans because he says "hey we were here first" 😆. But unfortunately that's the way it is.

Yanks or Yankee Doodles is what we used to call them but they get rather upset these days when you call them that. I wouldn't call them gringos because it just sounds unnatural for a Brit to say that seriously.

Yankistani.

USian

Usonian also works.

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.