Yankees, gringos and USAnians

By D.C-W.

ENGLISH needs a proper adjective to cover the United States of America and its citizens. “American” is formally ambiguous, even if the context generally makes it clear. It is already awkward when you want to talk about the American representative at the Organisation of American States, but if, say, Unasur, the Latin American block, ever gets itself in gear, the phrase “the American response to the crisis” might get more problematic.

Using "United States" as an adjective, or even US (banned at The Economist, lest too many capital letters "spatter the paper"), brings its own problems: is the apostrophe needed in “the United States' ambassador”? There's none in the formal name of the United States Mint, for example. The “Yankee ambassador” would side-step the problem neatly, but—leaving aside the fact that only outside America does "Yankee" mean all Americans—does the world's most powerful country really want its representative to be a Connecticut Yankee (or any other kind) at Queen Elizabeth's court?

Other languages have the same problem, and their responses differ. Spanish uses americano for all inhabitants of the Americas, though in practice, so little unites them that there is hardly ever cause to use the word. It also has in its armoury norteamericano, which commonly refers to citizens of the United States even though it technically means Mexicans and Canadians too; estadounidense, a latinate adjective from Estados Unidos, which is at least precise, but is rarely heard outside formal speech (well, try saying it); and of course yanqui and gringo, terms not conducive to good diplomacy.Portuguese, too, has estadunidense.

One might posit that only because these languages are spoken in Latin America do they have the need to differentiate one type of American from another. Yet the French language's links to the Americas, in the form of Quebec, don't seem to have had the same effect. Etatsunien or états-unien does not even show up in the dictionary of the Académie Française, while Wikipedia in French acknowledges the word's existence but says it would be like using "Usonian" or "United-Statesian" in English; the French style is to say américain. The Germans don't mess around and will call you US-amerikanisch (so good they named it twice) if they need to be clear—though they spoil this by being just as likely as everyone else to overlook the Mexicans when they say nordamerikanisch. Chinese, on the other hand, can address the problem head-on by appending the specific ideograms for country or continent to the same phonetic root (美国 meiguo, for the country, 美洲 meizhou for the continents).

In despair one might turn to poetry. But even here no help is to be found: Columbia as a personification of the United States is just too like Colombia. All that effort to end up with “the Columbians beat the Colombians 2-0”? No.

If you accept that the need to differentiate is growing as new world powers emerge, you accept that sooner or later our fecund language will see something coined or an old favourite leap to the fore. In fact, according to the Urban Dictionary, it has already happened:

Similar to United Statians, USAnian is a term used mostly by expats to denote North Amerians [sic] who are not Canadians.

Any better ideas?