British American
Categories: Ethnic groups of the United States
British Americans are citizens of the United States whose ancestry stems, either wholly or in part, from one of the four constituent nations of the United Kingdom.
British Americans commonly have English, Scottish, Scotch-Irish (Ulster), or Welsh family heritages. Irish-Americans are not usually categorized as having British ancestry and many, but not all, do not consider themselves as being British Americans (although the Republic of Ireland was formerly part of the United Kingdom until 1922). Similarly, most Americans with a Scottish or Welsh background identify with those specific countries and not with the island of Great Britain as a whole, and therefore tend not to refer to themselves as British American (see Scottish American). It could therefore be argued that most people identifying themselves as British American are actually English American.
British American or American?
Many British Americans have ancestry in America that dates back to colonial times in the 17th and 18th centuries. With their roots being in America for such a long period, many British Americans and a significant number of Irish Americans have begun to think of themselves ancestrally simply as "Americans". This is especially true in the South. Worldwide that line of thinking is often found. For instance, today's southern Italians don't consider themselves Greeks or partially Greek because their ancestors came from Greece, and today's English don't consider themselves to be Germans because their ancestors were Anglo-Saxons from continental Europe. But in American society, hyphenated-Americanism prevails because so much of the population has relatively recent roots elsewhere.
Many other Americans have forgotten the origins of their distant ancestors, or prefer to identify with the ethnicity of ancestors who arrived more recently, which provide more distinctive folkways than the general American culture. People of English ancestry are especially predominant in much of coastal New England, Upstate New York, and the Tidewater areas of the South from Virginia to Georgia, as well as Utah.
Number of British Americans
In the 2000 Census, 36.4 million Americans reported British ancestry. These include:
- 24.5 million English
- 4.9 million Scottish
- 4.3 million Scotch-Irish (Ulster)
- 1.7 million Welsh
- 1 million British (answered "British" as ancestry on the Census)
These figures make British Americans one of the largest "ethnic" groups in the U.S. when counted collectively (although the Census Bureau does not count them collectively, as each of the above is a separate ethnic group, that is English or Scottish or Welsh or Scotch-Irish). The Germans and Irish are the largest self-reported ethnic groups in the nation but British ancestry is considered the most common by experts.