Why is German the largest self-reported ancestry in the United States and not English if the US was a British colony?

Question

Why isn’t it English by far?

In: Other

Answer 1

If you treat all the ethnicities of what is now Britain as a single group, then it is the largest ethnicity in the United States… and if you add in Irish, then it is *by far* the largest group. Here’s the [breakdown by label](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Americans):

* English: 25.2 million
* “American”: 13.3 million
* This label can technically be anything. But it is most often used by people in the Upland South, who are primarily of various British origins.
* Scottish: 5.3 million
* “British”: 1.9 million
* Welsh: 1.8 million

This alone already adds up to; 47.5 million. The number for comparison for “German” is that 44.9 million Americans use that as their ancestry label… although even then, only 15.4 million choose that as their *only* label.

Note that there are also another 31.5 million for whom “Irish” is their label for their ethnicity.

So in some ways, the real answer is this: *because* the US was a British colony, and not a German colony, Americans have maintained a strong sense that Scottish and English people are different groups, and simply did not maintain a sense that Prussians and Bavarians are different groups. (Not even if it’s true.)

—

One thing remains unambiguously true, however: more Americans do take “German” as a label for their heritage, than specifically take “English” as a label for their heritage. This is true even if you add the “American” and “British” labels in.

The US really was a pan-British colony, and pan-British ethnic labels remain the majority; however, there really were *a lot* of people who immigrated to the United States from Germany.