2 ms·

Yeah, the way Americans mean "I'm X nationality" and the way the rest of the world means it are different. I don't think when Americans say "I'm Italian" they m

Yeah, the way Americans mean "I'm X nationality" and the way the rest of the world means it are different. I don't think when Americans say "I'm Italian" they mean "I was born and raised in Italy and Italian is my native language", as we do, they just mean "I have distant Italian ancestry", and that's widely understood to mean that in the US. If an American said to another American "I'm Italian", I don't think the latter would ask "oh, how was your childhood in Italy?".

skissane 2y ago
> Yeah, the way Americans mean "I'm X nationality" and the way the rest of the world means it are different. I don’t think this is uniquely American - I know people in Australia who identify as Italian despite the fact their parents were born here. And I wonder if you’d find something similar in other places where large numbers of Italians emigrated, such as Argentina. And the same applies to various other groups too, mutatis mutandis. A word like “Italian” can variously describe legal nationality/citizenship, ethnicity, ancestry, language, self-identification - and different combinations of those possibilities in different contexts or as used by different speakers