Hacker News Reader

Comment by phobosanomaly | Hacker News Reader

There's no other word for people from the United States because of the weird naming of the country.

Canada - Canadians, Mexico - Mexicans, Brazil - Brazilians.

United States - ......United Statesians?

That's like people from the DRC calling themselves 'Democratic Republic of the Congolesians.' Nope, they just shortened it to Congolese. The United States of America just did the same thing. 'Americans.'

They all use it, and for the most part so do their neighbors.

Until some clever soul figures out a better way for the bologna of the North American sandwich to refer to it's citizens, the largest collection of English speakers on the planet will probably keep on trucking with the same boring term.

View on HN

It's incredible how dense people can be when their world view is so narrow.

The point isn't there should be a word for it, the point is Africa is not a damn country. Such obvious facetiousness but thick skulls can only fixate on "wHuT amErIcAnS Are thE US"

South Africa has as much in common Sudan as the US has with Haiti

There are plenty of countries on the continent than can (and have been) mapped by Google Maps.

Saying that Africa is somehow inhospitable to Google Maps is exactly like acting like North America is inhospitable to Google Maps because Haiti has bad roads.

Hell I'd take driving on the roads in that Haiti picture over some in places like "Chiraq", probably less chance of a bad outcome in a Google Maps car.

This unitedstatesian exists in other languages. In Spanish: estadounidense (in broad use). In French: étatsunien (rarer).

> the largest collection of English speakers on the planet

Indians?

I wikipedia'd it before I posted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

United States - Total English Speakers: 283,160,411

India - Total English Speakers: 246,344,737

In that article the Indian pop is from the 2001 census at 1,028 M. Current population is 1,388 M, keeping the same percentage of English speakers would place it at +305M speakers, although doing the same for USA also place it at +310M.

That being said I think the table is wrong because the numbers don't add up to the total and also don't match the source. Based on that census India should have only 12.18% of English speakers, not 22.18%, so you should be correct in any cases.

US(-Amer)icans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com