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 context. Outside the United States, 'Yank' is used informally to refer to any American, including Southerners. Within the Southern United States, 'Yankee' is a derisive term which refers to all Northerners, or specifically to those from the region of New England. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is 'a nickname for a native or inhabitant of New England, or, more widely, of the northern States generally'; during the American Civil War, it was 'applied by the Confederates to the soldiers of the Federal army'.Because they arrived first and had a strong sense of community and mission, Yankees were able to transplant New England institutions, values, and mores, altered only by the conditions of frontier life. They established a public culture that emphasized the work ethic, the sanctity of private property, individual responsibility, faith in residential and social mobility, practicality, piety, public order and decorum, reverence for public education, activists, honest, and frugal government, town meeting democracy, and he believed that there was a public interest that transcends particular and stock ambitions. Regarding themselves as the elect and just in a world rife with sin and corruption, they felt a strong moral obligation to define and enforce standards of community and personal behavior…. This pietistic worldview was substantially shared by British, Scandinavian, Swiss, English-Canadian and Dutch Reformed immigrants, as well as by German Protestants and many of the Forty-Eighters.Certainly the Irish have for years complained of Yankee discrimination against them.There were no civil rights groups then. Even the Federal Government was controlled by bigoted Yankees and Irish who banded together against the Italian immigrant.The one anomaly of this era was the election of Yankee Republican Leverett Saltonstall as governor in 1938, and even then Saltonstall jokingly attributed his high vote totals in Irish districts to his 'South Boston face'.To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast. 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 context. Outside the United States, 'Yank' is used informally to refer to any American, including Southerners. Within the Southern United States, 'Yankee' is a derisive term which refers to all Northerners, or specifically to those from the region of New England. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is 'a nickname for a native or inhabitant of New England, or, more widely, of the northern States generally'; during the American Civil War, it was 'applied by the Confederates to the soldiers of the Federal army'. Elsewhere in the United States, it largely refers to people from the Northeastern states, but especially those with New England cultural ties, such as descendants of colonial New England settlers, wherever they live. Its sense is sometimes more cultural than geographical, emphasizing the Calvinist Puritan Christian beliefs and traditions of the Congregationalists who brought their culture when they settled outside New England. The speech dialect of Eastern New England English is called 'Yankee' or 'Yankee dialect'. Outside the US, the informal 'Yank' refers to Americans in general. It is especially popular among Britons, Irish, and Australians and sometimes carries pejorative overtones. The root of the term is uncertain. British General James Wolfe made the earliest recorded use of the word Yankee in 1758 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 a series of clashes in 1769 over land titles in Pennsylvania between 'Yankee' settlers from Connecticut and 'Pennamite' settlers from Pennsylvania. 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 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 etymologies have been suggested for the word Yankee, but modern linguists generally reject theories which suggest that it originated in any Indian languages. This includes a theory purported by a British officer in 1789, who said that it was derived from the Cherokee word eankke ('coward')—despite the fact that no such word existed in the Cherokee language. Another theory surmised that the word was borrowed from the Wyandot pronunciation of the French l'anglais, meaning 'the Englishman' or 'the English language', which was sounded as Y'an-gee. American musicologist Oscar Sonneck debunked a romanticized false etymology in his 1909 work Report on 'The Star-Spangled Banner', 'Hail Columbia', 'America', 'Yankee Doodle'. He cited a popular theory which claimed that the word came from a tribe who called themselves Yankoos, said to mean 'invincible'. The story claimed that New Englanders had defeated this tribe after a bloody battle, and the remaining Yankoo Indians transferred their name to the victors—who were 'agreeable to the Indian custom'. Sonneck notes that multiple American writers since 1775 had repeated this story as if it were fact, despite what he perceived to be holes in it. It had never been the tradition of any Indian tribe to transfer their name to other peoples, according to Sonneck, nor had any settlers ever adopted an Indian name to describe themselves. Sonneck concludes by pointing out that there was never a tribe called the Yankoos. Most linguists look to Dutch language sources, noting the extensive interaction between the Dutch colonists in New Netherland (now largely New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and western Connecticut) and the English colonists in New England (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and eastern Connecticut). The exact application, however, is uncertain; some scholars suggest that it was a term used in derision of the Dutch colonists, others that it was derisive of the English colonists. Michael Quinion and Patrick Hanks argue that the term comes from the Dutch name Janke, a diminutive form of Jan (John) which would be Anglicized as 'Yankee' due to the Dutch pronunciation of J as the English Y. Quinion and Hanks posit that it was 'used as a nickname for a Dutch-speaking American in colonial times' and could have grown to include non-Dutch colonists, as well. Alternatively, the Dutch given names Jan (Dutch: ) and Kees (Dutch: ) have long been common, and the two are sometimes combined into a single name (e.g., Jan Kees de Jager). Its Anglicized spelling Yankee could, in this way, have been used to mock Dutch colonists. The chosen name Jan Kees may have been partly inspired by a dialectal rendition of Jan Kaas ('John Cheese'), the generic nickname that Southern Dutch used for Dutch people living in the North. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives its origin as around 1683, when English colonists used it insultingly in reference to Dutch colonists (especially freebooters). Linguist Jan de Vries notes that there was mention of a pirate named Dutch Yanky in the 17th century. The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760) contains the passage, 'Haul forward thy chair again, take thy berth, and proceed with thy story in a direct course, without yawing like a Dutch yanky.' According to this theory, Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam started using the term against the English colonists of neighboring Connecticut.