Yankee

For other uses, see Yankee (disambiguation).

The term Yankee has a variety of meanings. Generally, it refers to citizens of the United States, particularly northerners, especially those Americans from the Northeastern United States.

History

Origins

The Dutch theory is somewhat confused. The settlers of New Amsterdam and the settlers of Massachusetts Bay were totally unconnected and did not come into contact until both communities were sufficiently dense to carry on trade up and down the east coast. There is no reason why the British should call English settlers in a different location by a Dutch name when New Amsterdam was under Dutch jurisdication and always had been. Moreover, New York has never been "Yankee" except in the world wars of modern times. Most New Englanders never heard of this theory, and they are the ones who were yankees.

The prevalent theory in New England, original home of the yanks, holds that it originated among a group of Indigenous peoples of the Americas on the East Coast of the United States. They were unable to pronounce the word "English", rendering it as "yengis" or "yengeese." This later was Anglicised to "Yankees".

This theory is widely held, as descendants of those same indigenes are alive and well in Massachusetts as the Wampanoags and some others and are vociferous about their origin and are fairly well publicised. They still know the basic core of their former language and are able to say that in it there is no l. Their ancestors would not have pronounced it, rendering English to yengis. Students of the term might well research the local records of New England to try to discover its first use. This would be a rather large task. Meanwhile, we have local tradition and the views of the indigenes, which make this theory the strongest and most widely held.

In another theory, Indians who first learned of the English from the French people may have borrowed the French language name "Anglais" and rendered it as something that approximated "Yankee" in their own phonetic system. One contact area in which French, French-allied Indians, and British-descended Americans would have come into contact was the area of frontier warfare conducted during the French and Indian War (1754 - 1763). This is more or less consistent with the areas in which other derivations of the word would postulate its first use. If this is the origin of the term Yankee, it may originally have had a pejorative, anti-American connotation similar to that of Gringo, becoming transformed by being adopted as a matter of pride by British-descended Americans who had fought on the frontier during the French and Indian War. In the absence of researchers who are willing to find any evidence, this is purely a matter of speculation.

The "Yankee Doodle" song is certainly defiant enough. The British certainly were using it in a perjorative sense, but there is no indication of their adopting the animosity of the natives. They had enough animosity of their own! They regarded the colonists as bumpkins, not even able to pronounce their own name correctly. But if they did obtain the word from the natives and not from the yankees themselves, they would be most likely to use the name applied by natives closer to the English, who had escaped Massachusetts in King Philip's War, rather than the then distant French speakers. The first major dissatisfaction with the English came from that period, far earlier than either the French-and-Indian War or the Revolutionary War.

There are several other folk and humorous etymologies for the word.

One influence on the use of the term throughout the years has been the song Yankee Doodle, which was popular at the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775 - 1783). Though the British intended to insult the colonials with the song, following the Battle of Concord, it was adopted by Americans as a proud retort.

An early use of the term outside the United States was in the creation of Sam Slick, the "Yankee Clockmaker," in a column in a newspaper in Halifax, Canada in 1835. The character was a plain-talking American who served to mock both Canadian and American customs of that era. The stories were published in a book titled The Clockmaker, in 1836. The book was popular in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

The American Civil War

Contemporary uses

In the United States

Today Yankee is most often used to refer to a New Englander (in which case it may denote New England puritan and thrifty values). The term "Swamp Yankee" is used in rural Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut to refer to Protestant farmers, while plain Yankee implies wealthier, Waspish city dwellers. Today, "Yankee" can be used by Americans in any part of the country. In the American South it is still used as a derisive term for persons from any state north of the Mason-Dixon line. In recent years, though, particularly since the 2000 and 2004 elections, the term has expanded to include people from Maryland and Delaware, based in large part on those states' political affiliation. Thus, in either case the principal use of the term in the U.S. is as a means of distinguishing a group from those from living further south (i.e., in the southeastern states).

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the term has also been used by Americans to refer to the New York Yankees baseball team, or the fans of that team.

In other parts of the world

Then who, really, is a Yankee?

To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.

To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.

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.

-(an old definition)

A variation on the above has the last line as And in Vermont, a Yankee is someone who still uses an outhouse.

It is used by people from other countries as slang to mean Americans, both as a term of endearment and as an insult. Hence, the term has had various positive, negative, contextual and regional associations over the years, as books, media, troops, teams, and peoples have used it differently for different purposes.