Names For United States Citizens - International Use

International Use

International speakers of English refer to people from the United States as "Americans", while equivalents of "American" are used in many other languages. French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian speakers use translations of American (Japanese: アメリカ人 rōmaji: amerika-jin), (Russian: американец, американка), (Mandarin Chinese: pinyin- měiguórén, traditional- 美國人, simplified- 美国人) to refer to U.S. citizens. Spanish and the Brazilian dialects of the Portuguese, use terms derived from Estados Unidos, the translation of "United States" – estadounidense and estadunidense, respectively. In European Portuguese the term americano is used to describe US citizens or things. Although the term estadunidense is growing in usage, in Brazil americano is still said to describe U.S. citizens. These languages, especially Portuguese in both its European and Brazilian variants, also use translations of North American: norteamericano and norte-americano. The same linguistic ambiguity that occurs in the English use of the term "American" occurs in the other European languages; to compensate for this, French (predominantly Quebec French) and Italian speakers may refer to U.S. citizens as États-unien and statunitense respectively, though this is less common. German speakers may distinguish between "American" and "US-American" (German: Amerikaner and US-Amerikaner, ). This confusion is also present in Portuguese, as people from the United States may alternatively be referred to as americanos in that language. However, in Spanish, americano chiefly refers to all people from North and South America, and using it in the United States sense, may be considered offensive to Spanish speakers; the Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas de la Real Academia Española recommends instead "estadounidense".