Just say "idiots." Source: USA citizen.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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No no, he has a point...
Being from the USA, I can confidently say “Yankee” is a term that is fairly neutral in meaning. People from the South states use it to refer to basically any American not from the South, and I get the sense people from the UK use it to refer to anyone from the USA.
In my experience, “Gringo” seems to be a term used by Spanish-speakers (even ones from North and South America) to refer to English speakers who think they’re better than everyone, so it appears to be a term with negative connotations
Texan here. Yankee is definitely not a neutral word to refer to everyone from the USA. Some people down here will fight you over it, but most would just give you a confused look.
I've always understood gringo to mean white person, especially one who can't speak Spanish. The term is sometimes used in Mexican restaurants to let the staff know that you can't deal with too many jalapeños.
In my experience (as a Brit), people generally only refer to Americans as Yanks in a mildly pejorative way or if we're taking the piss, otherwise it's Americans.
Southerners are the same way. Nobody calls us yanks as a compliment
i believe Brits call Americans "yanks"
U.K. bloke here…I don’t use it personally, just because, but yeah we say it for anyone from the USA.
When I was about 10 or so someone local to me had a lawsuit because his colleagues called him Yankee and he claimed it was racism, fairly certain he won, but it was an obscure case.
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.
It's a weird lacuna of the English language, there's no official word for estadounidense.
In Italian we have an equivalent, Statunitensi, but Americani is probably used more often to mean the same thing
The reason for this is simple: the word in English is "American". Because in English speaking countries, it is almost universally the case that we talk about the 7 continents. And in the rare case we talk about 6 continents, it's from merging Europe and Asia (which, frankly, is blatantly a far superior model of the continents), not merging North America and South America.
So "America" unambiguously refers to the country, and there's no need for estadounidense, any more than there's a need for "commonwealthian" for someone from the Commonwealth of Australia.
What about Canada?
I think the point the previous user is getting at is that there is no continent of "America" in most English-speaking countries—there is North America and South America.
Canada is in North America but it's not in "America," which without the North/South prefix, will make most English-speaking people assume you mean the US and not the continent Canada and the US are on.
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.
I wish Oregonians were called Oregonos instead because sounding like a spice is cool. lol
In America, yankee means people from a particular part of America. But we use it here in Australia to mean any American. It's especially fun when people from the south (that is…the south of the country America, not from the continent of South America) take offence at the term IMO.
We also use "seppo" which is an Australian shortening slang of "septic", which is rhyming slang (of the kind used in both Australia and London, England) that comes via "septic tank" via "yank".
Gringo seems strange to me. I thought that was a predominantly Latin American term for white people, and would apply equally well to Americans as Canadians as Australians as (of particular relevance to someone from Spain) English…but only the white of each, so it would seem to me it shouldn't work as synonymous with "American" because it excludes African Americans, Asian Americans, etc. But I'm not Spanish or Latin American, so I might just be misunderstanding the word.
Edit: what yank means depending on where you are (allegedly):
Hispanic here, I grew up using “gringo” specifically for people from the U.S. despite skin tone.
Canadians are “Canadiense”, English are “Ingles” but United States? “Estadounidense”? It’s sort of like saying “United Statian” but arguably more “correct/proper”
Gringo is just much faster/easier to say.
That being said this can vary a little from one Latin-American country to another.
Seppo, septic tank, yank. Love it! Cockney rhyming slang strikes again?
Australian rhyming slang in this case, but yeah, it functions in much the same way as Cockney.
I appreciate I’m nitpicking, but we all use rhyming slang. Probably changed over time.
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Gringo and yankee are both fine. However, it's most correct to refer to people from the USA by their birth state.
Or where they currently live.
Or, the case of NYC Puerto Ricans, both (New Yorican lol)
Burros como o caralho is Portuguese for USAians.
It translates to something like dumb as fuck.
Dumbfuckistan has a certain ring to it when you put it that way.
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
I prefer the formal name in spanish of estadounidense (united-statistian) to American.
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.
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.
That Southern US usage dates back to at least the US civil war in the 1860s.
But yankee was used to refer to at least some people in what is now the US as early as the 1660s.
I dunno how true it is, but I've heard it gets even more specific once you're in the north. I shared a map in another comment detailing the different meanings of it.
As for the etymology, apparently it goes back to Dutch settlers of New Netherlands, and may be connected to the name Janneke. It seems to have gone from being used by English settlers to Dutch settlers to being used in precisely the reverse at some point, and has at times meant either someone of English descent, of early Protestant descent, or other things.
It was used more generally by outsiders to refer to Americans as far back as the Revolutionary War (the song Yankee Doodle Dandy was originally making fun of Americans—macaroni being a sophisticated style of dress), so its history being used in that way actually predates the Civil War associations that I think many Americans would give it today.
So yeah, it really does have a fascinating linguistic history.
Also, weird…this is the second time in as many days I've had cause to look up Yankee Doodle Dandy.
As a Dutchie, I've heard it being an contraction of the names Jan and Kees, both are common names in Dutch
Yeah, that was another one of the theories. Linguists seem pretty sure it has something to do with Dutch, but are in disagreement over exactly how it came to be. (The "Janneke" example I gave above being, according to what I read, a diminutive form of Jan.)
Usonian also works.
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.
I like to look at it this way. The full name of Mexico is the United States of Mexico. But we still call them Mexicans.
It’s totally okay to call people from the United States of America as Americans. Everyone knows what you mean anyways.
Yankistani.