British Americans are Americans whose ancestry stems, either wholly or in part, from the United Kingdom. The term is seldom used by people to refer to themselves (less than 1% chose it in the 2000 census), and is used primarily as a demographic or historical research tool. Terms such as White American or European American or simply American are more commonly used.

British Americans have English, Scottish, Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots) and/or Welsh family heritages, or came from Canada where their ancestors were of British descent. Catholic Irish-Americans are not usually categorized as having British ancestry; they do not usually consider themselves as being British Americans. Immigrants from Canada of British ancestry tend to call themselves Canadian Americans. Similarly, most British Americans tend to differentiate to being specifically English, Scottish, Welsh or ethnic minorities (eg. Pakistani Scottish) and do not identify with the UK as a whole, therefore tending not to refer to themselves as British American (see: English American, Scottish American, Welsh American, or Scots-Irish American) and settlers of British heritage from other former British territories like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa also consider themselves by their nationalities, Australian Americans, New Zealand Americans, and South African-Americans. Many recent immigrants to the US from the UK, such as Indians (some 17,000 people), Chinese (some 9,000 people), Mixed Race (some 14,000 people) or Black Caribbeans and or Africans (some 35,000 people, see Black British expatriates in the United States), who are not of indigenous British ethnicity may identify with Indian American, Chinese American, Multiracial, African American. This disparity of identification could be considered part of the overall trend in the United Kingdom whereby the term "British" is not tied to any specific ethnic group(s) but the population as a whole. Subsequently, British people who migrate to the United States generally identify with their specific ethnic group rather than the non-ethnic demonym of "British".

British American or American?

Many other Americans are uncertain about the relative proportions in their own ancestry or 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. Great Britain also provided millions of immigrants to America after 1776. They typically assimilated quite rapidly.

Number of British Americans

2000 U.S Census

The Twenty-Second United States Census, 2000, 36.4 million Americans reported British ancestry.