We have to specify so that Jessica Simpson doesn't get confused with Chicken.

I prefer to stick to soylent human when I’m hungry

Tuna fish is the chicken bird of the sea water.

I love bull beef burgers

The American English language is wierd... Two to four instances of one word to mean different things or to put emphasis on plurals or not... Plus certain connotations depending on who you're talking to. So trying to go and learn different languages, especially when they only have one instance of something, I have found.

Tuna is just the dish, tuna on a plate.

Tuna Fish is actually Tuna Salad. You would order a tuna fish sandwich (tuna salad), but you would not go to a restaurant and say "I will have the tuna fish" because that is just tuna.

"Tuna fish" is a phase used primarily for canned tuna, but not for the live fish or things like tuna steak. It's because when canned tuna was created in the US in the early 1900's people who were not right next to the sea (like the majority of the US) did not know what "tuna" was. Firstly, the word is a of Spanish origin and secondly, its a salt water only fish. So in order to sell this to middle America, which was where most of the consumers were at the time but was also made up of people who have never seen the ocean, they added the word "fish" to show like other tinned fish that was commonly purchased: codfish, bluefish, and whitefish, this is also a fish and that is what you can expect when you open this can.

What's the difference between a tuna and a piano?

Well, where I live, Tuna is also a cactus. Prickly pear is often called tuna. So yeah, tuna (fish) and tuna (fruit) can need disambiguation.

Don't want to confuse it with a guitar tuna

This entire thread is /c/badlinguistics.

There's no one single reason, but the top theories:

1. Tuna oil was a thing before "tuna fish". Yes, people could have said "tuna" but they didn't. That's language for you. People say "ATM machine" and "PIN number", too.
2. "Tuna fish" has a slightly sing-song pattern to the stressed/unstressed syllables that probably contributed
3. For whatever reason, "tuna fish" tends to refer to canned tuna, whereas "tuna" can include fresh (or frozen) tuna.

It's… just how language evolves.

I think, however, that "tuna fish" is slowly dying out in favour of just "tuna". As a 50 year old, anecdotally I have seen the usage decrease in my lifetime.

A Czech reporter's name is Jan Tuna. Please keep saying "tuna fish" for his* sake.

* he/him, Jan is a common male name here derived from John, the female counterpart is Jana

Colloquially tuna fish refers to the shredded salt brined tins of fish like this:

Which I do think is worth distinguishing from the actual whole pieces of tuna

"吞拿魚"

[transliteration of "tuna"] + ["fish"]

When I hear tuna fish I think stuff in the can. When I hear Tuna I think the filet. I know that’s just me.

I think it's mostly for the dad joke:

You can tune a piano, but you can't tune a fish.

Also soda-pop.

Americans do love redundancies. e.g Just barely, only just, just a bit, true facts, free gift, end result, advance warning etc.

If we didn't say that, we wouldn't have the joke about the difference between a piano and a fish.