Why People from the United States Are Called “Americans”

We’re often criticized by Central and South Americans when we call ourselves “Americans.”

Their argument is that everyone in North, Central and South America is “American” and the implication is that we’re elitist for only using the term to refer to people from the United States of America.

The Spanish language has a specific word used to label people from the United States: Estadounidense or abbreviated as EE. UU.

However, the English language has no such word. Instead, people from all over the world refer to us simply as “Americans.”

Even in Ecuador, we’re called Americanos more than Estadounidenses.

If you’re from Ecuador, you’re Ecuadorian. If you’re from Colombia, you’re Colombian. If you’re from Brazil, you’re Brazilian.

“American” is just a shorter way of saying, “United States of American.” The term was assigned to us and adopted long ago by people who didn’t have an issue with the name’s semantics.

After 200+ years and several generations of being called (and calling ourselves) “American,” it has become part of our national identity just like Ecuadorian, Colombian, Brazilian, etc. is part of their national identities.

We would never tell someone from another country that they need to change their national identity, and if we did, it would not be received well. Therefore, we will not be changing ours.

Even though we no longer live in the US and we’re not happy with the direction the country has gone over the past 50+ years, we are still Americans and thankful to have been born there. It is our national identity and no one has a right to take that away from us.

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JP Stonestreet

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Hola todos! Welcome to my author bio page! Let's see. Where to begin... I grew up in the country on a lake outside a small Kansas farm town. As soon as I could, I got the hell outta there! Since then, I've lived and/or worked in Kansas City, Washington D.C., Denver, San Francisco, and Ecuador. I started and sold a dotcom, wrote a book about it, started a YouTube channel, and now I write a lot. Amelia and I have embraced the Unconventional Life and we want to help you do it, too!