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.

[5][6] 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.

Michael Quinion and Patrick Hanks argue that the term comes from the Dutch Janneke, a diminutive form of the given name Jan[10] which would be Anglicized by New Englanders as "Yankee" due to the Dutch pronunciation of J being the same as the English Y. Quinion and Hanks posit that it was "used as a nickname for a Dutch-speaking American in colonial times" and could have grown to include non-Dutch colonists, as well.

[11] British General James Wolfe made the earliest recorded use of the word "Yankee" in 1758 when he referred to the New England soldiers under his command.

Thus, a visitor to Richmond, Virginia, commented in 1818, "The enterprising people are mostly strangers; Scots, Irish, and especially New England men, or Yankees, as they are called".

[9] Another theory surmised that the word was borrowed from the Wyandot[18] pronunciation of the French l'anglais, meaning "the Englishman" or "the English language", which was sounded as Y'an-gee.

[9][19] American musicologist Oscar Sonneck debunked a romanticized false etymology in his 1909 work Report on "The Star-Spangled Banner", "Hail Columbia", "America", "Yankee Doodle".

[21] The original Yankees diffused widely across the northern United States, leaving their imprints in New York, the Upper Midwest, many taking advantage of water routes by the Great Lakes, and places as far away as Seattle, San Francisco, and Honolulu.

[24][25] Village life fostered local democracy, best exemplified by the open town meeting form of government that still exists today in New England.

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.

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.

[31] Yankee ingenuity was a worldwide stereotype of inventiveness, technical solutions to practical problems, "know-how," self-reliance, and individual enterprise.

"[33] 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.

The song originated among the British troops during the French and Indian or Seven Years' War, creating a stereotype of the Yankee simpleton who stuck a feather in his cap and thought that he was stylish,[35] but it was rapidly re-appropriated by American patriots after the battles of Lexington and Concord.

[36] An early use of the term outside the United States was in the creation of Sam Slick the "Yankee Clockmaker" in a newspaper column in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1835.

The character was a plain-speaking American who becomes an example for Nova Scotians to follow in his industry and practicality; his uncouth manners and vanity were qualities that his creator detested.

Rhode Island Governor Bruce Sundlun had been a pilot in World War II, and he named his B-17F bomber Damn Yankee because a crewman from North Carolina nicknamed him with that epithet.

[40] By the mid-20th century, some speakers applied the word to any American inhabiting the area north of the Mason–Dixon Line, though usually with a specific focus still on New England.

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.

[47] Major League Baseball's New York Yankees acquired the name from journalists after the team moved from Baltimore in 1903, though they were officially known as the Highlanders until 1913.

The shortened form Yank is used as a derogatory, pejorative, playful, or colloquial term for Americans in Britain,[50] Australia,[51] Canada,[52] South Africa,[53] Ireland,[54] and New Zealand.

In the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia, the term seppo, shortened from traditional rhyming slang yank ==> septic tank, is sometimes used as a pejorative reference to Americans.

[62] In Japan, the term yankī (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.