Yankee

The term "Yankee" and its contracted form "Yank" have several interrelated meanings, all referring to people from the United States. Its various senses depend on the scope of context. Most broadly:

The informal British and Irish English "Yank" refers to Americans in general. It is especially popular among Britons and Australians and sometimes carries pejorative overtones. The Southern American English "Yankee" is typically uncontracted and at least mildly pejorative.

The root of the term is uncertain. In 1758, British General James Wolfe made the earliest recorded use of the word Yankee to refer to people from what became the United States. He referred to the New England soldiers under his command as Yankees: "I can afford you two companies of Yankees, and the more because they are better for ranging and scouting than either work or vigilance". Later British use of the word often was derogatory, as in a cartoon of 1775 ridiculing "Yankee" soldiers. New Englanders themselves employed the word in a neutral sense; the "Pennamite–Yankee War," for example, was the name given to a series of clashes in 1769 over land titles in Pennsylvania, in which the "Yankees" were the claimants from Connecticut.

The meaning of Yankee has varied over time. In the 18th century, it referred to residents of New England descended from the original English settlers of the region. Mark Twain used the word in this sense the following century in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, published in 1889. As early as the 1770s, British people applied the term to any person from what became the United States. In the 19th century, Americans in the southern United States employed the word in reference to Americans from the northern United States, though not to recent immigrants from Europe. Thus, a visitor to Richmond, Virginia commented in 1818, "The enterprising people are mostly strangers; Scots, Irish, and especially New England men, or Yankees, as they are called".

Many faulty etymologies have been devised for the word, including one by a British officer in 1789 who said that it was derived from the Cherokee word eankke ("coward"), but no such word exists in the Cherokee language. Etymologies purporting an origin in languages of the Indians are not well received by linguists. One such surmises that the word is borrowed from the Wyandot (called Huron by the French) pronunciation of the French l'anglais (meaning "the Englishman" or "the English language"), sounded as Y'an-gee. Linguists, however, do not support any Indian origins. James Fenimore Cooper included a non-fiction footnote in The Deerslayer stating, "There can be little doubt that the sobriquet of 'Yankees' is derived from 'Yengees,' the manner in which the tribes nearest to New England pronounced the word 'English.' The change from 'English' to 'Yengees' is very trifling." Fenimore Cooper's suggested etymology is rejected by professional linguists writing for the Merriam-Webster book of word histories, despite his being a prominent writer from the early 1800s and living comparatively close to the time when the word originated.

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