Number of Scottish Americans
The number of Americans of Scottish descent today is estimated to be 20 to 25 million (up to 8.3% of the total US population), and Scotch-Irish, 27 to 30 million (up to 10% of the total US population), the subgroups overlapping and not always distinguishable because of their shared ancestral surnames.
In the 2000 census, 4.8 million Americans self-reported Scottish ancestry, 1.7% of the total US population. Another 4.3 million self-reported Scotch-Irish ancestry, for a total of 9.2 million Americans self-reporting some kind of Scottish descent. According to American Community Survey in 2008 data, Americans self-reporting Scottish ancestry made up an estimated 1.9% of the total U.S. population. Self-reported Scottish and Scotch-Irish ancestry represented 3.1% of the U.S. population in 2008.
Self-reported numbers are regarded by demographers as massive under-counts, because Scottish ancestry is known to be disproportionately under-reported among the majority of mixed ancestry, and because areas where people reported "American" ancestry were the places where, historically, Scottish and Scotch-Irish Protestants settled in America (that is: along the North American coast and the Southeastern United States). Scottish Americans descended from nineteenth-century Scottish immigrants tend to be concentrated in the West, while others in New England are the descendants of immigrants from the Maritime Provinces of Canada, especially in the 1920s.
Americans of Scottish descent outnumber the population of Scotland, where 4,459,071 or 88.09% of people identified as ethnic Scottish in the 2001 Census.
| 1790 U.S Ancestry |
2000 U.S Ancestry |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ancestry group | Number |
% of total |
Ancestry | Number |
% of total |
| English | 1,900,000 | 47.5 | German | 42,885,162 | 15.2 |
| African | 750,000 | 19.0 | African | 36,419,434 | 12.9 |
| Scotch-Irish | 320,000 | 8.0 | Irish | 30,594,130 | 10.9 |
| German | 280,000 | 7.0 | English | 24,515,138 | 8.7 |
| Irish | 200,000 | 5.0 | Mexican | 20,640,711 | 7.3 |
| Scottish | 160,000 | 4.0 | Italian | 15,723,555 | 5.6 |
| Welsh | 120,000 | 3.0 | French | 10,846,018 | 3.9 |
| Dutch | 100,000 | 2.5 | Hispanic | 10,017,244 | 3.6 |
| French | 80,000 | 2.0 | Polish | 8,977,444 | 3.2 |
| Native American | 50,000 | 1.0 | Scottish | 4,890,581 | 1.7 |
| Spanish | 20,000 | 0.5 | Dutch | 4,542,494 | 1.6 |
| Swedish | 20,000 | 0.5 | Norwegian | 4,477,725 | 1.6 |
| Total | 3,929,326 | 100 | Scotch-Irish | 4,319,232 | 1.5 |
| British (Total) | 2,500,000 | 62.5 | British (Total) |
36,564,465 | 12.9 |
Read more about this topic: Scottish American
Famous quotes containing the words number of, number, scottish and/or americans:
“The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens and greater sphere of country over which the latter may be extended.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We’ll never know the worth of water till the well go dry.”
—18th-century Scottish proverb, collected in James Kelly, Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs, no. 351 (1721)
“The Americans are violently oral.... That’s why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all—isn’t respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)