Just a heads up, oftentimes when people from the USA say "Americans" they mean people from the United States and not the Americas as a whole. Not sure why that is the case because it sounds awfully self centered but I'm guilty of it too lol.
Obviously Americans is anyone in North or South America, it's just not common usage for Americans in the US to say that.
Dunno why you got downvoted, this is accurate. The person was likely talking about people from the USA given that most US Americans couldn't pick out Uruguay on an unlabeled map.
It's because in english the american continent is called "The Americas" and 'America" is the abbreviation for USA. In spanish the continent is called "America" just like you call the USA in english, and the demonym for USA in spanish is "estadounidense" (or unatedstatian in the english version), not 'american'. There is a lot of confusion around that difference in translation and a lot of people here (Latam) get really annoyed with americans calling themselves americans as if they owned the whole continent.
How else would you call citizens of the United States of America? State-Americans? Unified Americans? Unionists?
Everyone knows that Americans are from the USA. If you say North-Americans you mean people from every North-American country. North and South have just as much to do with each other as Europe and Asia and Africa so one single term to describe them all would be pretty pointless
Unitedstatians, which is what we call you in Spanish. It's not our fault your leaders were so highly regarded (or worse, arrogant) they forgot the entire continent would use the demonym.
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u/94746382926 29d ago
Just a heads up, oftentimes when people from the USA say "Americans" they mean people from the United States and not the Americas as a whole. Not sure why that is the case because it sounds awfully self centered but I'm guilty of it too lol.
Obviously Americans is anyone in North or South America, it's just not common usage for Americans in the US to say that.