Anglo (prefiks)

Anglo is a prefix indicating a relation to, or descent from, the Angles, England, English culture, the English people or the English language, such as in the term Anglosphere. It is often used alone, somewhat loosely, to refer to people of British descent in Anglo-America, the Anglophone Caribbean, South Africa, Namibia, Australia, and New Zealand. It is used in Canada to differentiate between the French speakers (Francophone) of mainly Quebec and some parts of New Brunswick, and the English speakers (Anglophone) in the rest of Canada. It is also used in the United States to distinguish the White Latino population from the Non-Latino white majority.

Anglo is a Late Latin prefix used to denote English- in conjunction with another toponym or demonym. The word is derived from Anglia, the Latin name for England and still used in the modern name for its eastern region, East Anglia. Anglia and England both mean land of the Angles, a Germanic people originating in the north German peninsula of Angeln, that is, the region of today's Lower Saxony that joins the Jutland Peninsula. (There are various hypotheses for the origin of the name 'Angeln').

It is also often used to refer to British in historical and other contexts after the Acts of Union 1707, for example such as in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, where in later years agreement was between the British government and the Dutch, not an English government. Typical examples of this use are also shown below, where non-English people from the British Isles are described as being Anglo.

Anglo is not an easily defined term. For traditionalists, there are linguistic problems with using the word as an adjective or noun on its own. For example, the purpose of the -o ending is to enable the formation of a compound term (for example Anglo-Saxon meaning of Angle and Saxon origin), so there is only an apparent parallelism between, for example, Latino and Anglo. However, a semantic change has taken place in many English-speaking regions so that in informal usage the meanings listed below are common. The definition is changed in each region which defines how it is identified.