British Americans

British Americans are citizens of the United States of British or partial British ancestry. British Americans commonly have English, Scottish, or Welsh family heritage, although some Americans of Irish descent prefer to recognize themselves as British since Ireland was part of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1922 and Northern Ireland is still part of the UK.

British American or American?

Many British Americans have ancestry in the United States that dates back to the 13 colonies in the seventeenth century. With ancestry so "American," some British Americans have begun recognizing themselves as only American. In an historical context, that terminology would be correct. For instance, today's southern Italians don't consider themselves Greeks or partially Greek because their ancestors came from Greece. Today's English population doesn't consider themselves to be German because their ancestors were Anglo-Saxons from Germany. American society tends to believe in hyphenated-Americanism, despite the fact that one's ancestry may date back to the foundations of this nation.

Many Americans with Irish, Scots, or Welsh background identify with those "nations" and not with the UK as a whole and do not refer to themselves as British. In the 2000 Census, over one million people identified their ancestry as British but 24.5 million identifed as English (almost 9 percent of the country), 4.9 million as Scottish, 4.3 million as Scots-Irish, 1.8 million as Welsh. Another 30.5 million identified as Irish. Some 20 million identified themselves only as American or United States. These self-identification numbers would make British (consisting British, English, Welsh, Scottish and some Northern Irish) would make the second largest ethnic group in the U.S., after German and before Irish.