And that's assuming that the word "race" has any value at all when describing humans.

It's definitely a culture! In america although, the concept of race still persists everywhere, including government forums which split people's choices into appearance strains and not ethnicities or cultures.

America has no single government and is a huge mixture of cultures, from Canadians to Argentinians. I hate the fact that the USA has no proper demonym in English.

> America has no single government and is a huge mixture of cultures, from Canadians to Argentinians. I hate the fact that the USA has no proper demonym in English.

Hi, I am an Argentinian. While in Spanish the word "americano" means that you were born somewhere in The Americas, in the English language the word "american" means that you were born in the USA (AKA: America).

It happens a lot that words which are quite similar mean different things in different languages. Let's just embrace and understand these differences.

Cheers!

In the English language the word American has more than one meaning. The most prevalent is of course the gentilic, but one of the other meanings is indeed "being native or inhabitant of the American continent."

The big problem with this word is that, being USA as influential in the western culture as it is, it helps corrupting the corresponding word in the languages that do have a proper gentilic like French and Spanish. Also, it promotes ignorance among the ignorants (I've met US people thinking America is just and only the country) without a tangible benefit.

See http://users.dcc.uchile.cl/~rbaeza/inf/american.html for a similar view.

People use the continent names (North America, South America) if they want to make the distinction between the USA and the continental regions.

To most of the world "American" means you are from the United States of America. If somebody wants to say Canadian, they do.