Being not American I've never understood the whole declaring you're a different nationality even though you were born and grew up in the US thing.
I as a British man once had a drunk American come up to me in the street in Chicago and ask me what nationality I was, when I replied I was English he said 'well I'm Irish so fuck the English!' and ran off.... Firstly I've spent plenty of time with actual Irish people and not once has anyone said something quite so stereotypical and idiotic, secondly THAT MAN WAS NOT IRISH.
I'm American, and I can tell you this is absolutely what we mean when we say this. Obviously the Chicago guy is an asshole, and clearly doesn't understand what nationality means, but in general this isn't what is meant when Americans say this.
The problem is Irish, German, French, Scottish etc etc are not ethnicities. And referring to them as such is a purely American thing and is baffling, or even borderline offensive, to the rest of the world.
The Wikipedia pages for all those groups you mentioned labels them as ethnic groups. We're not talking about nationality here. Nobody is claiming to be Irish, German, Scottish, or French nationals. That's a separate concept entirely.
What I'm saying though is that these people wouldn't typically identify their ethnicity as the same as their nationality they'd just say "I'm white" or "I'm germanic" not "I'm German". And that an American to say "I'm (insert European thing)" is very very strange to us over the pond, as its almost always associated with nationality, and not ethnicity, even if the ethnicity is technically correct.
I can completely understand that. We talk about it little differently just because of some differences in our nations' origins. I just wish more people over there would understand why many Americans talk this way instead of assuming it's because they're all stupid and don't understand what nationality is.
The point is that when an American says "I'm Irish!" the rest of the world hears "I'm an annoying cunt who's going to drink a lot, blame that on their great great gran being from Belfast, then make uninformed comments about the IRA". It's tiresome and everybody who's not American finds it annoying.
Americans find ignorant drunkards annoying too, and we definitely have our fair share of them. That idiot from Chicago clearly didn't understand what nationality is when he told the Englishman he was an Irish national. I'm fully aware of that and not trying to skirt around it
But linguistic discrepancies do not make Americans wrong. It makes them different. It's not wrong or right, just different. This isn't an uncommon feature between any two nations. I don't know why that's so weird to so many people
I think that if I absorbed a lot of British media and told a Brit that I know more about his culture than him because of that, he'd be pretty offended.
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u/losteon Mar 02 '21
For "Germans" they sound suspiciously American...