Talk:American (word)

See also: Talk:Names for U.S. citizens

Page needs some cleanup: Spanish terms

While pointing out the origin of the 'controversy' in misapplication of foreign (particularly Spanish) usage to English, the article still has several flaws aside from the general need for cleanup and formatting. First (and less importantly) yanqui and gringo are not simple synonyms for norteamericanos (and, I'm just curious here, do Canadian Hispanophones get in such a huff over that usage?) but are pejoratives, albeit sometimes used lovingly or jokingly. -LlywelynII (talk) 23:41, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

Page needs some cleanup: 'American POV' claims

Second and more importantly, the article makes numerous specific claims that "American" is only or primarily used as a synonym for "citizen of the United States of America" by speakers of American English. E.g.,

English, French, German, Italian, Japanese,[36] Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, and Russian[37] speakers may use the term American to refer to either inhabitants of the Americas or to US nationals. They generally have other terms specific to US nationals, such as German US-Amerikaner, French étatsunien, Japanese 米国人 beikokujin, and Italian statunitense, but these may be less common than the term American...

is simply untrue: "American" is by far the most common American demonym in all dialects of English and specification of any other use must be made in all of them. A Canadian, Briton, or Aussie speaking about "American English" will never be talking about or even imagine he could be confused with talking about "Canadian English" or "Latin American English." Similarly, while there are various synonyms for Americans (e.g., British Yank, Aussie Seppo) that could be included into the article, they are typically informal and no native English speaker refers to Latin Americans as (unqualified) Americans precisely because the word refers to the United States. Article claims or assumptions that this originates from or is exclusive to American dialect are unsupportable, misleading, and POV. -LlywelynII (talk) 23:41, 15 February 2010 (UTC)

I've added tags for the French and German US-specific terms described in the article. All someone has to do is link to a dictionary, at least in the French case. That being the case, it still leaves unanswered the question of the reasons for using different terms in different contexts. For French, the term "étasunien" appears to be a very recent neologism--it does not appear in the most recent edition of the dictionary of the Académie Française. Why was it coined? For simple disambiguation? To make a political point?

You seem to be pretty confident about all of the other languages, are we to presume you are fluent inEnglish, French, German, Italian, Japanese,[36] Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, and Russian? As a portuguese speaker, I assure you that in Portuguese, while some people use the word american to describe a US Citzen, that is an incorrect use. And people who use american meaning US citizen know the term to be innapropiate (the term north-american, commonly used as well, is equally imprecise).

A very frequent conception by people with your point of view is that the word american only describes USA, or USA-related things. The point is that for most other people, mainly Latin Americans, I'd wager, american describes things related to all of the americas (note Im using the US-centric definition of Americas) as opposed to US related. So, when saying that a Canadian is American is the equivalent of saying that a Frenchman is European, because American means from America.201.17.97.254 (talk) 02:12, 26 February 2010 (UTC)