I’ve been playing with the term USonian for “US citizen” or “US resident”. Usono is the Esperanto word for the United States. It makes it immediately clear that
1. You’re talking about citizenship or membership in the political/geographic community called the United States of America and not (as with “American”), something vaguely linked to the Western Hemisphere.
2. You’re referring to one specific “United States” and not one of the several other countries that go by similar names (officially). You also don’t mean several states which happen to be united (say New England) in some way; you mean the whole 50-state plus territories shebang.
3. You are not referring to “Native Americans” as such. USonian doesn’t imply anything about when your ancestors or you arrived in the Western Hemisphere or this particualr part of the Western Hemisphere.
2. You’re referring to one specific “United States” and not one of the several other countries that go by similar names (officially). You also don’t mean several states which happen to be united (say New England) in some way; you mean the whole 50-state plus territories shebang.
3. You are not referring to “Native Americans” as such. USonian doesn’t imply anything about when your ancestors or you arrived in the Western Hemisphere or this particualr part of the Western Hemisphere.
It doesn’t clear up the thorny questions of citizenship by birth, citizenship by parentage, legal residency, non-legal residency, etc., but if we could clear that up with mere words, we’d have world peace!
In Ayola, we don’t coin names for countries the way Esperanto sometimes does; we treat them as foreign names. But I think the idea of having a short crisp way of referring to USonians makes a lot of sense. What do you think? Post a reply if you’re so inclined 