languages French, German, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian speakers may use cognates of American to refer to inhabitants of the Americas or to U.S. nationals. They generally have other terms specific to U.S. nationals, such as the German , French , Japanese , and Italian . These specific terms may be less common than the term American. In French, , or , from ("United States of America"), is a rarely used word that distinguishes U.S. things and persons from the adjective , which denotes persons and things from the United States, but may also refer to "the Americas". Likewise, German's use of and observe this cultural distinction, solely denoting U.S. things and people. Note that in normal parlance, the adjective "American" and its direct cognates are usually used if the context renders the nationality of the person clear. This differentiation is prevalent in German-speaking countries, as indicated by the style manual of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (one of the leading German-language newspapers in Switzerland) which dismisses the term as both 'unnecessary' and 'artificial' and recommends replacing it with amerikanisch. The respective guidelines of the foreign ministries of Austria, Germany and Switzerland all prescribe Amerikaner and amerikanisch in reference to the United States for official usage, making no mention of or . Portuguese has , denoting both a person or thing from the Americas and a U.S. national. For referring specifically to a U.S. national and things, some words used are (also spelled , "United States person"), from , and ("Yankee")—both usages exist in Brazil, but are uncommon in Portugal—but the term most often used, and the only one in Portugal, is , even though it could, as with its Spanish equivalent, apply to Canadians and Mexicans as well. In Spanish, denotes geographic and cultural origin in the New World, as well as (infrequently) a U.S. citizen; the more common term is ("United States person"), which derives from ("United States of America"). The Spanish term ("North American") is frequently used to refer things and persons from the United States, but this term can also denote people and things from Canada and Mexico. Among Spanish-speakers, North America generally doesn't include Central America or the Caribbean. In other languages, however, there is no possibility for confusion. For example, the Chinese word for "U.S. national" is () is derived from a word for the United States, , where is an abbreviation for Yàměilìjiā