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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. Many of the earlier immigrants to the northeast from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and other regions of Europe, used Yankees to refer to English settlers in New England.
Outside the United States, Yank is used informally to refer to a person or thing from the US. 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. 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 Northeast or 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 Calvinism Puritans 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".
In the 19th century, Americans in the southern United States employed the word in reference to Americans from the northern United States. Historically, it has also been used to distinguish American-born Protestants from later immigrants, such as Catholics of Irish descent.
Janke was used as both a diminutive form of the Dutch name Jan () and as a surname in its own right. After the British replaced the Dutch administration in 1664, it would have been Anglicized as Yankee. Michael Quinion and Patrick Hanks posit that Yankee was therefore "used as a nickname for a Dutch-speaking American in colonial times".
Alternatively, the Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that Yankee may be derived from Jan Kees or Jan Kaas (lit. 'John Cheese'), originally a derogatory Flemish people nickname for the Dutch.Alinei, Mario. "Studies related to English: Yankee: A Dutch Etymology Revisited." In Heinrich Ramisch and Kenneth Wynne (eds.), Language in Time and Space: Studies in honour of Wolfgang Viereck on the occasion of his 60th birthday (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997; Bamberg, 2024), pp. 1–5. The Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam may have used this as a disparaging term for the English colonists in Connecticut.Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary: " Yankee". 2013. Accessed 13 Jul 2013.
The term was not used by New Englanders themselves until 1775. According to Merriam-Webster, New Englanders began to use the term as a self-descriptor after their successes in the battles of Lexington and Concord.
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 the word came from a tribe called the Yankoos (said to mean "invincible") who were defeated by New Englanders, and transferred their name to the victors as part of an "Indian custom". Sonneck found no evidence such a tradition existed, nor had any settlers ever adopted an Indian name to describe themselves, and concluded there was never a tribe called the Yankoos.
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.
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. Yankees typically lived in villages consisting of clusters of separate farms. Often they were merchants, bankers, teachers, or professionals.
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.Knights (1991)
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.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, Presbyterianism, 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.Kleppner p 55
Ivy League universities remained bastions of old Yankee culture until well after World War II, particularly Harvard and Yale University.
Yankee ingenuity was a worldwide stereotype of inventiveness, technical solutions to practical problems, "know-how," self-reliance, and individual enterprise.Eugene S. Ferguson, "On the Origin and Development of American Mechanical 'know-how'", American Studies 3.2 (1962): 3–16. online 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."quoted in Reynold M. Wik, "Some interpretations of the mechanization of agriculture in the Far West." Agricultural History (1975): 73–83. in JSTOR 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.Susan E. Gray, The Yankee West: community life on the Michigan frontier (1996) p. 3
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.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 Atlanta Campaign and Sherman's March to the Sea, or of an ancestral farmhouse burned by Quantrill's Raiders".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. 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.)"
Humorously drawn distinctions, often attributed to E. B. White:
Major League Baseball's New York Yankees acquired the name from journalists after the team was enfranchised in , though they were officially known as the Highlanders until . 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.
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. Scholars note that the famous Yankee "twang" survives mainly in the hill towns of interior New England, though it is disappearing even there.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)
Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court popularized the word as a nickname for residents of Connecticut, and Connecticut Air National Guard unit 103d Airlift Wing is nicknamed "The Flying Yankees."
In Australia, the term seppo, shortened from traditional rhyming slang yank ==> septic tank, is sometimes used as a pejorative reference to Americans.
In Finland, the word jenkki is sometimes used to refer to any American citizen, and Jenkkilä or Jenkit 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. Comments on H-South by Seppo K J Tamminen. h-net.msu.edu
Linguistic
In other countries
The shortened form Yank is used as a derogatory, pejorative, playful, or colloquial term for Americans in Britain,David Reynolds, Rich relations: the American occupation of Britain, 1942-1945 (1995) Australia,Eli Daniel Potts, and Annette Potts, Yanks Down Under, 1941-45: The American Impact on Australia (1985). Canada,J. L. Granatstein, Yankee Go Home: Canadians and Anti-Americanism (1997) South Africa, Ireland,Mary Pat Kelly, Home Away from Home: The Yanks in Ireland (1995) and New Zealand.Harry Bioletti, The Yanks are Coming: The American Invasion of New Zealand, 1942-1944 (1989) The full Yankee may be considered mildly derogatory, depending on the country.John F. Turner and Edward F. Hale, eds. Yanks Are Coming: GIs in Britain in WWII (1983) The Spanish variation yanqui is used in Latin American Spanish, often derogatorily. Venezuelan Spanish has the word pitiyanqui derived around 1940 from petit yankee or petit yanqui, a derogatory term for those who profess an exaggerated and often ridiculous admiration for anything from the United States.
Japan
In the late 19th century, the Japanese were called "the Yankees of the East" in praise of their industriousness and drive to modernization. In Japan, the term 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. Daijirin dictionary, Yahoo! Dictionary
South Korea
Around the American occupation of Korea and the Korean War periods, Korean black markets that sold smuggled American goods from military bases were called "yankee markets" (). The term "yankee" is now generally viewed as an anti-American slur in South Korea, and is often used in the exclamation "Yankee go home!" ().
See also
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