I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word “female”, is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?
I don’t know if this is the best place to ask, if it’s not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^
I mean you could argue americans aren’t native speakers either. But on the other hand, they did what the british wanted to but couldn’t, purge much of the french from their language.
I would argue that US-americans are native speakers of US-American english, which is a bit different from english spoken in england.
I know that this is popular especially among Latin American speakers, but the phrase “US-American” is very unidiomatic in English and makes you stand out quite significantly. In English, the term “American” means someone from the United States of America. It’s clear enough because “America” is always a shortened form of that country, while the large western hemisphere landmass is collectively “the Americas”, since the anglosphere almost universally uses a seven-continent model with North and South America being two continents (and with some more “enlightened” people preferring a six-continent model merging Eurasia—but you’ll rarely find a native English speaker who refers to “America” as a single continent).
You got it, I just happen to have quite some friends from south and middle America and since it was important to them and make sense to me I took it over in my vocabulary.
Fun fact (that I have heard and was not able to verify with a quick search so take this with a grain of salt): the English spoken in the US is closer to the way it was spoken in Britain in the 1700s. The gentry made an intentional change to their pronunciation in response to the rise of the middle class, which filtered down to the masses.