CHAT: US ancestry [was Re: FWD [OT but interesting] Arctic people seek common alphabet]

Quoting Adrian Morgan <morg0072@...>:

> Quoting Clint Jackson Baker:
>
> > The common factor here is not race but language.  The
> > most common ethinc heritage in the United States is
> > German, but we speak English.  Therefore, we more
>
> As a non-American, this is new to me, and surprising.
Yeah, it's certainly one of the larger ones, yes. Germans made
up a large percentage of the immigrants coming to what is now the
US from the earliest colonial times until sometime in the 20th
century. According to the US Census bureau's 2000 estimate
(i.e., that made *before* the 2000 Census figures became
available), there appear to be around 32 million Americans who
list German ancestry as "first", and another 14 million who
list it second:

<http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTTable?
ds_name=D&geo_id=D&mt_name=ACS_C2SS_EST_G2000_PCT024&_lang=en>
<http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DTTable?
ds_name=D&geo_id=D&mt_name=ACS_C2SS_EST_G2000_PCT025&_lang=en>

This is not including specifically delineated groups like Germans
whose families once lived in Russia, and the Pennsylvania Germans,
who together constitute another 320 thousand first-ancestries.
(FWIW, Irish are listed as second with over 20 million first ancestry
entries, and English third with just over 19 million.) These figures
can be confusing, because they are based on *self-reported*
figures, and many people have either a hazy or only partial idea
about their family's ancestry, and give their best guess. This
partly explains why nearly 20 million people list "American" or
"United States" as their first ancestry, though this latter number
also includes those who for some ideological reason do not want to
acknowledge their forbears before America.

Perhaps most curious of all about these two lists is the glaring
absence of some category to represent African Americans', Hispanics'
and many Asians' ancestries, who seem to be lumped into an "Other
groups" category with a whopping 83,110,113 people in it, while
Germans and French both have three categories, and Scots have two.
Since there are around 35 million African Americans, and 32 million
Hispanics, both of these are good contenders for being the largest
ethnic group in the US. (Some of these figures are surely out of
date, since when the 2000 census figures actually came in, they
realized there were about 11 million more people living in the US
than they had estimated that same year, the 1990s being the most
explosive decade of population growth in America's history.)

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Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
1010 E. 59th Street   eundum est, sed qua itur." -- Seneca
Chicago, IL 60637