What makes North America a region

The word, and what it was first put on

The book printed at Saint-Dié on 25 April 1507 gave its reason in a single passage: the land had been reached by Amerigo Vespucci and could carry a form of his name. The wall map issued with it letters the word once, low on the southern continent. Nothing north of the Caribbean held it then. The word moved north over the following decades with nobody fixing where it should stop, which is why a page under this heading is a filing decision before it is a fact about the ground.

Where the edges are argued

The M49 scheme published by the UN Statistics Division puts Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon and the United States in Northern America, and files Mexico under Central America with Belize and Guatemala. This catalogue keeps Mexico here, files Greenland under Northern Europe, and files Bermuda and Saint Pierre and Miquelon under the North Atlantic. A reader working from the continental definition, which runs North America south to the Colombian border, will find Central America and the Caribbean filed as regions of their own instead. Each reading is on the record and none of them is settled here.

What the records hold in common

Two of the members are federal unions whose official names say so, Estados Unidos Mexicanos and the United States of America. The third has no longer form behind it: Canada is the official name and the common one.

The land borders close the group. Canada's only land neighbour is the United States, whose only land neighbours are Canada and Mexico, and Mexico's remaining neighbours are filed under Central America. Each of them drives on the right, and each writes its currency with the dollar sign, the Canadian dollar and the United States dollar beside the Mexican peso.

Every one of them belongs to the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the OECD, APEC, the G20 and the World Trade Organization. The dates separate them where the lists do not: Canada became a full member of the OAS on 8 January 1990, after 28 years as an observer, while the other two were there from the founding. NATO, in force from 4 April 1949, covers Canada and the United States, and so does the G7. Mexico holds what neither of the others does, in CELAC and the Non-Aligned Movement.

The trade agreement all of them signed carries a name in each capital. It entered into force on 1 July 2020 as the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, as CUSMA in Canada and as T-MEC in Mexico. The Commission for Environmental Cooperation, set up under an agreement in force from 1 January 1994, sits in Montreal and has these members and no others.

The languages

Canada's Official Languages Act gives English and French equal standing in federal institutions, a settlement first legislated in 1969. Mexico's General Law of Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples, published on 13 March 2003, made the indigenous languages national languages beside Spanish and created the institute that keeps the catalogue of them, which is why the record here carries Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya. The record for the United States lists Spanish, Hawaiian, Chamorro, Samoan and Carolinian, each of them carried in the law of a state or a territory.