The term Yankee and its contracted form Yank have several interrelated meanings, all referring to people from the United States. Their various meanings depend on the context, and may refer to New Englanders, the Northeastern United States, the Northern United States, or to people from the US in general.[2][3][4]
Outside the United States, Yank is used informally to refer to an American person or thing. It has been especially popular in the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand where it may be used variously, either with an uncomplimentary overtone, endearingly, or cordially.[5][6] In the Southern United States, Yankee is a derisive term which refers to all Northerners, and during the American Civil War it was applied by Confederates to soldiers of the Union army in general. 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.[7] Its sense is sometimes more cultural than geographical, emphasizing the CalvinistPuritan 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".[8]
Most linguists look to Dutch language sources, noting the extensive interaction between the Dutch colonists in New Netherland (parts of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware) and the English colonists in New England (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut).[9] 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 Janneke, a diminutive form of the given name Jan[10] which would be Anglicized by New Englanders as "Yankee" due to the Dutch pronunciation of J being the same 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.[10] The Oxford English Dictionary calls this theory "perhaps the most plausible".
Alternatively, the Dutch given names Jan (Dutch:[jɑn]) and Kees (Dutch:[keːs]) have long been common, and the two are sometimes combined into a single name (Jan Kees). 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.[11]
The Online Etymology Dictionary gives its origin as around 1683, attributing it to English colonists insultingly referring to Dutch colonists. English privateer William Dampier relates his dealings in 1681 with Dutch privateer Captain Yanky or Yanke. Linguist Jan de Vries notes that there was mention of a pirate named Dutch Yanky in the 17th century.[12]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."[13] According to this theory, Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam started using the term against the English colonists of neighboring Connecticut.[11]
British General James Wolfe made the earliest recorded use of the word "Yankee" in 1758 when he referred to the New England soldiers under his command. "I can afford you two companies of Yankees, and the more, because they are better for ranging and scouting than either work or vigilance".[14] Later British use of the word was in a derogatory manner, as seen in a cartoon published in 1775 ridiculing "Yankee" soldiers.[14] 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 settlers from Connecticut Colony 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 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. 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".[15]
Historically, it has also been used to distinguish American-born Protestants from later immigrants, such as Catholics of Irish descent.[16][17]
Rejected etymologies
Many etymologies have been suggested for the word Yankee, but modern linguists generally reject theories that suggest it originated in any Indian languages.[9] This includes a theory put forth by a British officer in 1789, who said that it was derived from the Cherokee word eankke meaning "coward"—despite the fact that no such word existed in the Cherokee language.[9] Another theory surmised that the word was borrowed from the Wyandot[18] pronunciation of the French l'anglais, meaning "the Englishman" or "the English language", which was sounded as Y'an-gee.[9][19]
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 that claimed 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.[20] Sonneck concludes by pointing out that there was never a tribe called the Yankoos.[21]
The original Yankees diffused widely across the northern United States, leaving their imprints in New York, the Upper Midwest, many taking advantage of water routes by the Great Lakes, and places as far away as Seattle, San Francisco, and Honolulu.[22]
Yankees settled other states in various ways: some joined highly organized colonization companies, others purchased groups of land together; some joined volunteer land settlement groups, and self-reliant individual families also migrated.[23] Yankees typically lived in villages consisting of clusters of separate farms. Often they were merchants, bankers, teachers, or professionals.[24][25]
Village life fostered local democracy, best exemplified by the open town meeting form of government that still exists today in New England. Village life also stimulated mutual oversight of moral behavior and emphasized civic virtue. The Yankees built international trade routes stretching to China by 1800 from the New England seaports of Boston, Salem, Providence, Newport, and New London, among others. Much of the profit from trading was reinvested in the textile and machine tools industries.[26]
Yankeeism is the general character of the Union. Yankee manners are as migratory as Yankee men. The latter are found everywhere and the former prevail wherever the latter are found. Although the genuine Yankee belongs to New England, the term "Yankee" is now as appropriate to the natives of the Union at large.[23]
Yankee politics
After 1800, Yankees spearheaded most American reform movements, including those for the abolition of slavery, temperance in use of alcohol, increase in women's political rights, and improvement in women's education. Emma Willard and Mary Lyon pioneered in the higher education of women, while Yankees comprised most of the reformers who went South during Reconstruction in the late 1860s to educate the Freedmen.[27]
Historian John Buenker has examined the worldview of the Yankee settlers in the Midwest:
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.[28]
Yankees dominated New England, much of upstate New York, and much of the upper Midwest, and were the strongest supporters of the new Republican party in the 1860s. This was especially true for the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists among them. A study of 65 predominantly Yankee counties showed that they voted only 40 percent for the Whigs in 1848 and 1852, but became 61–65 percent Republican in presidential elections of 1856 through 1864.[29]
President Calvin Coolidge exemplified the modern Yankee stereotype. Coolidge moved from rural Vermont to urban Massachusetts and was educated at elite Amherst College. Yet his flint-faced, unprepossessing ways and terse rural speech proved politically attractive. "That Yankee twang will be worth a hundred thousand votes", explained one Republican leader.[30] Coolidge's laconic ways and dry humor were characteristic of stereotypical rural "Yankee humor" at the turn of the 20th century.[31]
Yankee ingenuity was a worldwide stereotype of inventiveness, technical solutions to practical problems, "know-how," self-reliance, and individual enterprise.[32] The stereotype first appeared in the 19th century. As Mitchell Wilson notes, "Yankee ingenuity and Yankee git-up-and-go did not exist in colonial days."[33] The great majority of Yankees gravitated toward the burgeoning cities of the northeast, while wealthy New Englanders also sent ambassadors to frontier communities where they became influential bankers and newspaper printers. They introduced the term "Universal Yankee Nation" to proselytize their hopes for national and global influence.[34]
Loyalist newspaper cartoon from Boston ridicules "Yankie Doodles" militia who have encircled the British forces inside the city
A pervasive influence on the use of the term throughout the years has been the song "Yankee Doodle" which was popular during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). The song originated among the British troops during the French and Indian or Seven Years' War, creating a stereotype of the Yankee simpleton who stuck a feather in his cap and thought that he was stylish,[35] but it was rapidly re-appropriated by American patriots after the battles of Lexington and Concord. Today, "Yankee Doodle" is the official state song of Connecticut.[36]
Canadian usage
An early use of the term outside the United States was in the creation of Sam Slick the "Yankee Clockmaker" in a newspaper column in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1835. The character was a plain-speaking American who becomes an example for Nova Scotians to follow in his industry and practicality; his uncouth manners and vanity were qualities that his creator detested. The character was developed by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, and it grew between 1836 and 1844 in a series of publications.[37]
Damn Yankee
A Yankee cavalry raid
American Civil War map, Federal Union and Southern States
The damned Yankee usage dates from 1812.[14] Confederates popularized it as a derogatory term for their Northern enemies during and after the American Civil War (1861–1865). Rhode Island Governor Bruce Sundlun had been a pilot in World War II, and he named his B-17F bomber Damn Yankee because a crewman from North Carolina nicknamed him with that epithet.[38][39]
Contemporary uses
In the United States
The term Yankee can have many different meanings within the United States that are contextually and geographically dependent. Traditionally, Yankee was most often used to refer to a New Englander descended from the settlers of the region, thus often suggesting Puritanism and thrifty values.[40] By the mid-20th century, some speakers applied the word to any American inhabiting the area north of the Mason–Dixon Line, though usually with a specific focus still on New England. New England Yankee might be used to differentiate.[41] However, within New England itself, the term still refers more specifically to old-stock New Englanders of English descent. For example:
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'.
In the Southern United States, the term is used in derisive reference to any Northerner, especially one who has migrated to the South and maintains derisive attitudes towards Southerners and the Southern way of life. Alabama lawyer and author Daniel Robinson Hundley describes the Yankee as such in Social Relations in Our Southern States:
Yankee with all these is looked upon usually as a term of reproach—signifying a shrewd, sharp, chaffering, oily-tongued, soft-sawdering, inquisitive, money-making, money-saving, and money-worshipping individual, who hails from Down East, and who is presumed to have no where else on the Globe a permanent local habitation, however ubiquitous he may be in his travels and pursuits.[45]
Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas pointed out as late as 1966, "The very word 'Yankee' still wakens in Southern minds historical memories of defeat and humiliation, of the burning of Atlanta and Sherman's March to the Sea, or of an ancestral farmhouse burned by Quantrill's Raiders".[46]Ambrose Bierce defines the term in The Devil's Dictionary as: "In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown. (See DAMNYANK.)"
E. B. White humorously draws his own distinctions:
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.[47]
Major League Baseball's New York Yankees acquired the name from journalists after the team moved from Baltimore in 1903, though they were officially known as the Highlanders until 1913. The regional Yankees–Red Sox rivalry can make the utterance of the term "Yankee" unwelcome to some fans in New England, especially to the most dedicated Red Sox fans living in the northeastern United States.[48]
The term Swamp Yankee is sometimes used in rural Rhode Island, Connecticut, and southeastern Massachusetts to refer to Protestant farmers of moderate means and their descendants, although it is often regarded as a derogatory term.[7] Scholars note that the famous Yankee "twang" survives mainly in the hill towns of interior New England, though it is disappearing even there.[49]
"Yankee, go home", anti-American banner in Liverpool, United Kingdom
The shortened form Yank is used as a derogatory, pejorative, playful, or colloquial term for Americans in Britain,[50] Australia,[51] Canada,[52] South Africa,[53] Ireland,[54] and New Zealand.[55] The full Yankee may be considered mildly derogatory, depending on the country.[56] The Spanish variation yanqui is used in Latin American Spanish,[57] often derogatorily.[58] Venezuelan Spanish has the word pitiyanqui derived around 1940 from petty yankee or petit yanqui,[59] a derogatory term for those who profess an exaggerated and often ridiculous admiration for anything from the United States.
In the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, the term seppo, shortened from traditional rhyming slangyank ==> septic tank, is sometimes used as a pejorative reference to Americans.[60]
In Finland, the word jenkki is sometimes used to refer to any American citizen, and Jenkkilä refers to the United States itself. It is not considered offensive or anti-American, but rather a colloquial expression. In Sweden, the word jänkare is a derivative of Yankee that is used to refer to both American citizens and classic American cars from the 1950s that are popular in rural Sweden.[61]
Japan
A man dressed as a 1990s Japanese yankī (2015)
In the late 19th century, the Japanese were called "the Yankees of the East" in praise of their industriousness and drive to modernization.[62] In Japan, the term yankī (ヤンキー) has been used since the late 1970s to refer to a type of delinquent youth associated with motorcycle gangs and frequently sporting dyed blond hair.[63][64][65][66]
^Luis Lug; Sandra Stencel; John Green; Gregory Smith; Dan Cox; Allison Pond; Tracy Miller; Elixabeth Podrebarac; Michelle Ralston (February 2008). "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey"(PDF). Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Pew Research Center. Retrieved February 12, 2012.
^Aristide R. Zolberg (2006). A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America. Harvard University Press. p. 520.
^Barbara Handy-Marchello (2005). Women of the Northern Plains: Gender and Settlement on the Homestead Frontier, 1870-1930. Minnesota Historical Society. p. 205.
^Francesco Cordasco; David Nelson Alloway (1981). American Ethnic Groups, the European Heritage: A Bibliography of Doctoral Dissertations Completed at American Universities. Scarecrow Press. p. 119.
^Bird, Kim (2012). "250, 100, 280 class railcars of the South Australian Railways". Proceedings of the 2012 Convention. Modelling the Railways of South Australia. Adelaide. p. 3‑390. One of the drawing office staff relates how they spent months reading "Yankee magazines and extracting all the articles on Budd Rail Diesel Cars".
^This is not to be confused with adopting an Indian name for a geographical location.
^Sonneck, O. G. (2001). Report on "The star-spangled banner", "Hail Columbia", "America", "Yankee Doodle. Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific. p. 83. ISBN0898755328.
^Cogswell, F. (2000).Haliburton, Thomas Chandler. Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, Volume IX 1861–1870. University of Toronto/Université Laval. Retrieved on: 2011-08-15.
^Fulbright's statement of March 7, 1966, quoted in Randall Bennett Woods, "Dixie's Dove: J. William Fulbright, The Vietnam War and the American South," The Journal of Southern History, vol. 60, no. 3 (Aug., 1994), p. 548.
^"Yankee". National Geographic Society. 2012-11-19. Retrieved 2018-09-23.
^Fisher, Albion's Seed p. 62; Edward Eggleston, The Transit of Civilization from England to the U.S. in the Seventeenth Century. (1901) p. 110; Fleser (1962)
^David Reynolds, Rich relations: the American occupation of Britain, 1942-1945 (1995)
^Eli Daniel Potts, and Annette Potts, Yanks Down Under, 1941-45: The American Impact on Australia (1985).
^J. L. Granatstein, Yankee Go Home: Canadians and Anti-Americanism (1997)
Kleppner; Paul. The Third Electoral System 1853–1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures University of North Carolina Press. 1979, on Yankee voting behavior
Knights, Peter R.; Yankee Destinies: The Lives of Ordinary Nineteenth-Century Bostonians(1991) online
Mathews, Lois K. The Expansion of New England (1909).
Piersen, William Dillon. Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England (1988)
Power, Richard Lyle. Planting Corn Belt Culture (1953), on Indiana
Rose, Gregory. "Yankees/Yorkers", in Richard Sisson ed, The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (2006) 193–95, 714–5, 1094, 1194,
Sedgwick, Ellery; The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb(1994) online
Smith, Bradford. Yankees in Paradise: The New England Impact on Hawaii (1956)
Taylor, William R. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1979)
WPA. Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People. Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration of Massachusetts (1937).
Linguistic
Davis, Harold. "On the Origin of Yankee Doodle", American Speech, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Apr., 1938), pp. 93–96 in JSTOR
Fleser, Arthur F. "Coolidge's Delivery: Everybody Liked It." Southern Speech Journal 1966 32(2): 98–104. ISSN0038-4585
Kretzschmar, William A. Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (1994)
Lemay, J. A. Leo "The American Origins of Yankee Doodle", William and Mary Quarterly 33 (Jan 1976) 435–64 in JSTOR
Logemay, Butsee H. "The Etymology of 'Yankee'", Studies in English Philology in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, (1929) pp 403–13.
Mathews, Mitford M. A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles (1951) pp 1896 ff for elaborate detail
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