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".
Read more about this topic: Names For United States Citizens
Famous quotes containing the words alternative and/or terms:
“If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“Women have acquired equal place to man in society, but the double standard has really never been relinquished; certainly not by men. Modern man’s fear of passivity or of the active woman proves to be as eternal as modern woman’s struggle to come to terms with her femininity.”
—Peter Blos (20th century)