this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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32
Is it true that many Americans have German ancestry? And is that something that affects Americans, like do they talk about it etc.? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm from Germany and after noticing that many American personalities have German backgrounds I recently looked up that apparently German is the biggest ethnic group in America and that like 12% of all Americans have German ancestry so basically more than 1 out of every 10 people.

I knew that there are some people in America with German ancestry but I never thought it's that many. I always thought that there were other way more common ethnic groups such as UK, Irish or something Asian/African and thought Germans are a minority. I never thought that Germans are so prevalent in America though and that they're actually the biggest ethnic group. I wonder if that is a topic in American conversation cause I assume many Americans are curious about their ancestry and many might even have had contact to family members that are directly from Germany. And I wonder if they identify as American or German or both? (For example I always hear "African-American" being used but I'm not sure that I heard "European-American" that often)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

They do. There was a big wave of emigration from Germany after the conservative clampdown of 1848, which included religious minorities such as Mennonites and those with progressive and radical views. (The latter bolstered sentiment for the abolition of slavery in the run-up to the Civil War.)

They even had a dialect of German in Texas (Texasdeutsch), which was spoken in various communities until WW2. Some linguists from a German university travelled to Texas about 20 years ago to interview the handful of (then elderly) speakers and study the dialect.