User:Acjelen/Temp/American
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American, when used as an adjective, can mean "of the
citizen", "residing in the Americas", or less frequently "American English". Immigrants
to the United States are usually called first-generation Americans, regardless of their citizenship status, and their children second-generation Americans.
American in North and South America
As many people from the various nations throughout the
Alternative words for American for more information. American remains the only widely used adjective in English for the United States
and the only widely used English term for a person who lives there.
While the use of American to refer to people and places elsewhere in the Americas was once fairly common in the United States, this use has declined in recent generations, to the point that many are uncomfortable with this usage.
American in other languages
English speakers most commonly use American to refer to the United States only; the same is true of cognates of the word in many other languages, such as the German Amerikaner, the French Américain(e), the Greek Αμερικανός (Amerikanos) and so on.
In
Iberoamerican countries, the use of americano (literally, "American") to describe a U.S. citizen could be considered culturally aggressive, because the word in Spanish habitually includes the inhabitants of the entire New World. In Portuguese, both in Portugal and Brazil, the term estadunidense is growing and it is considered more appropriate than the common term norte-americano (literally "North American"), as from a geographic view North America includes Mexico and Canada
in addition to the United States.
Other uses
The American race was a
19th-century racial classification referring to the various peoples now called Native Americans or Amerindians
. It is now obsolete.
The term American is also used to identify a type of
.See also
- Alternative words for American
- American (automobile)
- American Airlines
- Ancestries of Americans
- The Americas
- Central America
- Culture of the United States
- Hyphenated American
- Latin America
- Native Americans
- North America
- Organization of American States
- South America
- United States