Countries like people have names. Sometimes those names are long and sometimes they have shorter versions for common use.

There are some countries, however, that have multiple names and the names can be radically different from each other.

They might want everyone to call it by one name

or by a certain name in a certain language but no one does. Why do some countries

have multiple names and does it really make a difference? Learn more about

countries with confusing or multiple names on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. I might as well start this discussion with my country, the United States.

I previously did a full episode on the naming of the country and how some people wanted to call it something totally different, like Fredonia.

What I want to talk about today is the use of the term

Americans to discuss people from the United States. There are many people often in

South America who bristle at the fact that Americans are called Americans and that the United States is called America

when there is an entire hemisphere called the Americas and there are two continents called

North and South America.

Why should the people in the United States get to hog the term?

After all, there is no one country that gets to hog the term African, Asian, or European.

This all goes back to the quirks of history and language.

Very early when Europe, in particular Spain, was setting up colonies in the new world, the term America and Americans was used generically for kind of everything.

Over time, individual colonies began to develop their own identities. In England they referred to

their colonies collectively as the American colonies, referring to the British

colonies not the colonies from other countries. When the United States became

independent, the name they picked was the generic United States of America, and

the Demonym they selected was American.

They were the first independent country in the Americas, so they just sort of got to pick first.

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