Puerto Rican-American??

[Arnold Zwicky]

david bergdahl asks:
 >is anyone able to state why some people achieve hyphenated-American
 >status and others don't?

although i'm hesitant to say this: surely someone's studied this
systematically...  the big generalization seems to be that the
first element X in "X-American" refers either to (what we view as)
an ethnicity or to a nation or region of family origin.  "Jewish-
American" works because we think of being jewish as, primarily,
an ethnic rather than a religious identification.

so we have "Arab-American" and don't have "Muslim-American".

there are plenty of complications.  american jews whose families
came from poland count as jewish-americans, not as polish-americans,
for example; this reflects, i think, polish ideas about ethnicity
and nationality.

there's also a system of beliefs about what counts as an ethnicity
and about how distant you can be from the old country X (and
identification with it) and still count as an X-american.
"African-American" is forever, though, so long as you're physically
recognizable; but you also have to be of slave descent.  (yes, i
know, it's more complicated than that, but the point here is that
there are special rules for being african-american.)

sometimes, but not always, plain old "X" can be used instead of
"X-American".  i grew up around a bunch of people who were referred
to, and referred to themselves, variously as italian, irish, polish,
and hungarian, though they were generations away from the old country
(and the relevant languages).

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)