What is your ethnic background?

[IceSpear]

Irish/Italian

[Gustaf]

Austrian Jewish and Swedish.

[SWE]

Italian, Irish, German, English

[RR1997]

Asian-Indian

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Greek and Serbian.

[politicus]

Greek and Serbian.

Ouch, no wonder you are such a crank.

[politicus]

Scandanavian, basically

What kind?

Also, is Scandanavian slang or just a common spelling error?

[Mechaman]

Look, I find ancestry/geneaology as fascinating as the next guy, but I am not "nearly half-Irish ethnically"or whatever just because three of my dad's grandparents were descended from 19th century Potato Famine refugees.

I am American. My parents were Americans. My grandparents, all Americans. My great-grandparents were Americans as well. Ok, I think I had a few great-great grandparents who were born in Switzerland on my maternal side....

The relevant part of my ancestry is that they were all light-skinned Europeans.

Just changed a few details and this describes me to a T lol.

But anyway, for the purposes for this exercise in no particular order: German, Irish, Dutch, Swiss, English, and Native American.

[Lief 🗽]

walloon, dutch, some sort of eastern german (though they moved to the rhineland when the soviets invaded), swedish, kurdish, persian

also some amount of jewish in there from an illicit affair some generations ago

[The Dowager Mod]

100% Scottish.

[Torie]

Rather boring. 1/16 Scottish, no more than 1/16 Welsh, the rest all English, all of which English stock settled in New England at first (thus Yankees), except for my surname line (my paternal grandfather's line), who settled in Virginia, probably sometime in the 18th century. The latest discovery as of this week via the witch disclosure (actually I have two witches in the line apparently), with respect to which someone else has researched the genealogy of all these famous people, is that apparently I am descended from Myles Standish, the military guy on the Mayflower (or maybe a relative of his, that is in dispute), and the Dickinson line (Emily), and the family tree on this original Pilgrim settler branch of the tree goes right back to England as far back as 1450 now in one instance. It's surreal really. One of the relatives in this branch is one Nathanial Foote, whom Wiki states has about a million descendants in the US now (having about six children seemed about the minimum, with often about 10 appearing). It's interesting, but not surprising,  that seemingly next to all of these early families intermarried, so I seem related to a bunch of the most of the early names in New England, from two elite families in Rhode Island, Greene and Browne, to Stoddard,  Standish and Averill (Averell) in Mass (name spellings were more casual then), and on and on (no Lodges yet sighted however ), absolutely nothing about which I knew a week ago.

[H.E. VOLODYMYR ZELENKSYY]

5/8 German, 1/4 Welsh, 1/8 Irish (my patrilineal great-grandpa, so I get the name).

[Oak Hills]

Primarily English, and that has the biggest influence on my cultural values.  However I also have New York Dutch ancestry on both sides of my family (in fact my mother's surname is anglicized Dutch), Seminole, and also Swedish, Norwegian, and northwest German.

So basically thoroughly Protestant and northern European.

[politicus]

100% Scottish.

Undiluted Scotch

[Bunwahaha [still dunno why, but well, so be it]]

Never been keen on all those genealogical quests, but, as far as I know:

Charentais (Aunis et Saintonge) et Haut-Normand (Eure).

On my mother side the family name could apparently be Jewish though, 'David'.

Once, as a kid, my uncle came back with a huge book called 'The book of the Davids', wich was supposed to repertory all the 'David' of the world, or France, but the book was huge and maybe wrote thinner than in a phonebook, then it could be world. Never tried to know more about that.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Greek and Serbian.

Ouch, no wonder you are such a crank.

Amen, sister.

[traininthedistance]

Half WASP, half Polack.

[Hash]

One of my great-great grandfathers was apparently from Ottawa.

!!! You can't just say that and not provide details

My ancestry is simple stuff: original stock Québécois (ancestors settled in mid-1600s in Nouvelle France, originally from Brittany) and Breton.

[Miles]

1/2 Irish, 3/8 Sicilian, 1/16 English, 1/16 Cherokee.

[politicus]

Look, I find ancestry/geneaology as fascinating as the next guy, but I am not "nearly half-Irish ethnically"or whatever just because three of my mom's grandparents were descended from 19th century Potato Famine refugees.

I am American. My parents were Americans. My grandparents, all Americans. My great-grandparents were Americans as well. Ok, I think I had a few great-great grandparents who were born in Switzerland on my paternal side....

The relevant part of my ancestry is that they were all light-skinned Europeans.

Using American as an ethnic label will always be impossible for obvious reasons. It will imply that old stock white & Christian Americans are somehow more American than descendants of other more recent immigrant groups.

But I agree that there is de facto an ethnic group that is (white) American. If you look at the status in the US in the 60s - the decade with the highest share of native born Americans - the majority of Americans of Northern and Western European descent had clearly merged into one common ethnc group regardless of ancestry by most valid definitions of ethnicity.

It just seems there lack a name for this as European American is associated with far right/supremacist groups and includes groups with a strong separate ethnic identity. White American is neutral, but even  broader and - again - includes groups with a specific ethnic identity (like Jews). WASP is incorrect as several Catholic and/or non-British groups are in the ethnically American group.

[Tender Branson]

Tyrolean
Really, my whole family can be traced back to two valleys 40 kms apart, meaning there's probably a great deal of incest involved

Basically what Cranberry said, just that you need to change "Tyrol-ean" to "Salzburg-ian".

So, white Austrian - for at least the past 500 years, if not longer.

[retromike22]

Hispanic going back several generations.

Are you sure you aren't Indonesian?

Yes, last time I checked

[Wake Me Up When The Hard Border Ends]

English, Irish, German and Welsh.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Scottish, Irish, German (Pennsylvania Dutch), and Canadian.  I may have some Scandinavian ancestry as well, but I don't know.