Names For United States Citizens - Alternative Terms

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. More generically, they may be specified as "U.S. Americans". Several single-word English alternatives for "American" have been suggested over time, including "Usonian", popularized by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the nonce term "United-Statesian". The 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, United Stater." Nevertheless no alternative to "American" is common in English. The only known language to have universally accepted Wright’s proposal is Esperanto, calling the country Usono and the citizens Usonanoj.

Spanish and Portuguese speakers may refer to people from the United States as norteamericanos and norte-americanos respectively ("North Americans"), though these terms can include Canadians and Mexicans. The Real Academia Española discourages the use of americano or americana for U.S. citizen, and recommends the use of estadounidense; there are equivalent terms in Portuguese, French, and Italian. Other languages which optionally distinguish Pan-Americans from US-Americans include Japanese and Finnish; still others, such as Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Swahili, Vietnamese, and Esperanto, have two terms, neither with the ambiguity of English "American".