Allan (26 Aug 13 - 12:43 PM), since the words "Frenchman" and "Frenchwoman" exist, these roles are - by mere convention - not covered by "French", but if my feeling does not betray me, all (or most) others are, so that "Frenchperson/s" is not needed as desperately as "chairperson". "They are French" sounds correct to me, grammatically.

There are some unfortunate subtleties though, in fact in many languages. "He was the first Frenchman to become director of the IMF" - would that mean that Frenchwomen may have preceded him or not? "... the first Spaniard ..." would not pose that question.

Likewise we wouldn't say Germanwoman we'd just say a German for either sex.

"Gerwoman" could be the idea of a hypothetical gender activist I was referring to - note the winker symbol ;)

Compared to all those strange but unavoidable problems, "US American" is pretty straightforward, though not really beautiful because of the abbreviation.

As for "UK citizens", they could adopt "British" as a synonym if they wanted, but some do not want, for varying reasons/pretexts.