Though my first association with the word Yankee will always be baseball's New York Yankees, the word "yankee" has existed much longer than the team and is used in many ways.
The word Yankee (noun or adjective) 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 U.S. in general.
Outside the United States, Yank is used informally to refer to an American person or thing. It has been especially popular in the United Kingdom, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand where it may be used variously in an uncomplimentary overtone, endearingly, or even cordially.[
In the Southern United States, Yankee is a derisive term that 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 Northeastern states, but especially those with New England cultural ties, such as descendants of colonial New England settlers, wherever they live.
It can also be used as a more cultural than geographical usage. In that usage it emphasizes Calvinist Puritan 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"
The origin is somewhat in question but it is commonly said to be from the Dutch Janneke, a diminutive form of the given name Jan which would be Anglicized by New Englanders as "Yankee" due to the Dutch pronunciation of J being the same as the English Y.
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. "I can afford you two companies of Yankees, and the more, because they are better for ranging and scouting than either work or vigilance."
Later British use of the word was in a derogatory manner,
as seen in this cartoon published in 1775 ridiculing "Yankee" soldiers.
There are several odd foreign applications of the word. One comes from the late 19th century when the Japanese were called "the Yankees of the East" in praise of their industriousness and drive to modernization. But less flattering is the term yankī (ヤンキー) which 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.
During the American occupation of Korea and the Korean War, black markets in the country that sold smuggled American goods from military bases were called "yankee markets." (Korean: 양키시장).[66] The term "yankee" is now generally viewed as an anti-American slur in South Korea, as in the exclamation "Yankee go home!"
