They should be called United Statesians in English. I know États-Uniens is the official name in French.
What is it in other langages? How can we promote such use?
Why am I asking? The US administration is currently a disgrace on the world stage, and I am thinking how it unjustly hurts people from the rest of the American continent.
Also Canadian. Europeans are weird about this. They’ve always been Americans to us and it doesn’t refer to the continent.
This may be a proximity thing. A word can have a different meaning in context, and when the context spans a continent-length border, it can be easy to see it as a global default.
Take the example of the word “Asian”: An Australian using the term (advisedly, because it’s often (mis)used or interpreted as a pejorative) is probably talking about someone from South East Asia. A Brit using the same word usually means someone from the Indian subcontinent.
I realise there’s no border proximity with that example, but if you consider immigration and the percentage of population each Asian group makes up in each place, that physical proximity is why the word means what it does where it does.