[DavidAdams]

I'm also a US-native, and didn't take it as an attempt to offend. I used to live in South America, where people tend to get a little prickly about the US having laid claim to the term "American." They always call people from the US "Estadounidense," literally, UnitedStatsian.

It's really our own fault: we have a country that has an extremely awkward name. We're the United States of America, so "America" is, grammatically speaking, the name of our country, but we're also part of a set of continents that's also called "America." We could actually use a better term like Unitedstatsians or USAians.

[zephjc]

I've heard about that about people from South America before, but it doesn't make much sense to me - the USA is the only country with "America" in its name. Every other use is for the names of continents, which have no actual political meaning (except maybe the EU, but not even all of Europe belongs to the EU, and how many Europeans refer to themselves as that before referring to themselves as a member of their country?)

[saranagati]

well at least we're claiming to be the "united states of" america. those damned australians aren't even trying to be polite about it, claiming the entire continent themselves. those poor new zealanders can't even use the name of their continent to describe where they're from for fear people thinking they're from the country australia. instead they have to resort to being called the sheep fuckers of australia because that sounds better than being australian.

[AgentConundrum]

I had never considered upon which continent New Zealand is considered to reside before reading your comment. After consulting Wikipedia, I've discovered that the answer is a lot less straight-forward than I had originally thought.

Before doing my (minimal) research, I would have assumed they were part of Asia, if for no other reason than that I considered Australia the continent and Australia the country to be essentially one and the same (i.e. a continent consisting of just one country), but that doesn't seem to be the case.

According to Wikipedia's article on the continent of Australia [1], "New Zealand is not on the same continental shelf and so is not part of the continent of Australia but is part of the submerged continent Zealandia. Zealandia and Australia together are part of the wider region known as Oceania or Australasia."

Similarly, Wikipedia's "list of sovereign states and dependent territories by continent" page [2], does not use "Australia" as a continental group, and instead uses "Oceania" to encapsulate states in that region.

So I guess New Zealanders don't really have any right to complain about not being able to call themselves Australian, since they're not even technically part of the Australian continent. They could refer to themselves as Oceanians, Australasians, or even Polynesians [3], but not as Australians.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_%28continent%29

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de...

[3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oceanias_Regions.png

[mvalle]

I find that calling Americans "Unitedstatesians" is like calling the French "Republicans".