Total population | |
---|---|
Self-identified "Scotch-Irish" 3,007,722 (2017)[1] 0.9% of the US population Estimate of Scots-Irish total 27,000,000 (2004)[2][3] Up to 9.2 % of the U.S. population (2004)[4] | |
Regions with significant populations | |
California, Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania | |
Languages | |
English (American English dialects), Ulster Scots, Scots | |
Religion | |
Predominantly Calvinist (Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker, Congregationalist) with a minority Methodist, Anglican, or Episcopalian | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Ulster Protestants, Ulster Scots, Anglo-Irish, English, Huguenots, Welsh, Manx, Irish Americans, Scottish Americans, English Americans, American ancestry |
Scotch-Irish (or Scots-Irish) Americans are American descendants of Ulster Protestants who immigrated from northern Ireland to America during the 18th and 19th centuries, whose ancestors had originally migrated mainly from the Scottish Lowlands and northern England (and sometimes from the Anglo-Scottish border).[5][6]
The term [Scotch-Irish] had been in use during the eighteenth century to designate Ulster Presbyterians who had emigrated to the United States. From the mid-1700s through the early 1800s, however, the term Irish was more widely used to identify both Catholic and Protestant Irish. As long as the Protestants comprised the majority of the emigrants, as they did until the 1830s, they were happy to be known simply as Irish. But as political and religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants both in Ireland and the United States became more frequent, and as Catholic emigrants began to outnumber Protestants, the term Irish became synonymous with Irish Catholics. As a result, Scotch-Irish became the customary term to describe Protestants of Irish descent. By adopting this new identity, Irish Protestants in America dissociated themselves from Irish Catholics... The famine migration of the 1840s and '50s that sent waves of poor Irish Catholics to the United States together with the rise in anti-Catholicism intensified this attitude. In no way did Irish Protestants want to be identified with these ragged newcomers.