People from the United States of America are known as and refer to themselves as Americans. Different languages use different terms for citizens of the United States. All forms of English refer to US citizens as Americans, a term deriving from the United States of America, the country's official name. In the English context, it came to refer to inhabitants of British America, and then the United States. There is some linguistic ambiguity over this use due to the other senses of the word American, which can also refer to people from the Americas in general. Other languages, including French, Japanese, and Russian, use cognates of American to refer to people from the United States, while others, particularly Spanish and Portuguese, primarily use terms derived from United States or North America. There are various other local and colloquial names for Americans. The name America came from the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci.
Development of the term American
Amerigo Vespucci first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern outskirts as conjectured by Christopher Columbus, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to the peoples of the Old World. Martin Waldseemüller coined the term America (in honor of Vespucci) in a 1507 world map.
First uses of the adjective American referenced European settlements in the New World. Americans referred to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and subsequently to European settlers and their descendants. English use of the term American for people of European descent dates to the 17th century, with the earliest recorded appearance being in Thomas Gage's The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies in 1648. In English, American came to be applied especially to people in British America and thus its use as a demonym for the United States derives by extension.
The United States Declaration of Independence of 1776 refers to "the thirteen States of America", making the first formal use of the country name, which was officially adopted in 1777 by the nation's first governing constitution, the Articles of Confederation. The Federalist Papers of 1787–1788, written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison to advocate the ratification of the United States Constitution, use the word American in both its original Pan-American sense, but also in its United States sense: Federalist Paper 24 refers to the "American possessions" of Britain and Spain (i.e. land outside of the United States) while Federalist Papers 51 and 70 refer to the United States as "the American republic". People from the United States increasingly referred to themselves as Americans through the end of the 18th century and the 1795 Treaty of Peace and Amity with the Barbary States refers to "American Citizens" while George Washington spoke to his people of "[t]he name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity" in his 1796 farewell address. Eventually, this usage spread through other English-speaking countries and the unqualified noun American in all forms of the English language now chiefly refers to natives or citizens of the United States, though other senses are generally specified with a qualifier such as Latin American or North American.
International use
International speakers of English generally refer to people from the United States as Americans while equivalent translations of American are used in many other languages, namely Italian (), Dutch (), Afrikaans (), Japanese (, rōmaji: amerika-jin), Filipino (), Hebrew ( or ), Arabic (), Russian () and Hindi (अमरीकी transliteration: Amreeki).
In French, is used in an official and colloquial way. , derived from (United States), while much rarer, is occasionally used, including by some scholars.
In Portuguese, both the terms and (United Statesian) are frequently used.
In Italian, both and are used, although the former is more common.
In German, the designation and its adjective form are sometimes used, though (adjective: ) is more common in scientific, official, journalistic, and colloquial parlance. The style manual of the , a leading German-language newspaper, dismisses the term US-amerikanisch as both "unnecessary" and "artificial" and recommends replacing it with . The respective guidelines of the foreign ministries of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland all dictate for official usage. Ami is common in colloquial speech.