Anglo

The term Anglo can be used as a prefix to indicate a relation to England and the United Kingdom, as in the phrases 'Anglo-American', 'Anglo-Celtic' or 'Anglo-Indian'.

It is also used, somewhat loosely, to refer to a person or people of English ethnicity in North America, Australia and Southern Africa. It is also used, in non-English-speaking countries, to refer to someone from any English-speaking country.

Anglo is a Late Latin prefix used to denote "English-" in conjunction with another toponym or demonym. The word is derived from Anglia, the Latin name for England, and still the modern name of its southeastern portion. Anglia and England both mean "Land of the Angles", a Germanic people originating in the north German peninsula of Angeln.

It is important to note that Anglo is not a technical term. There are linguistic problems with using the word as an adjective or noun on its own. For example, the 'o' in Anglo means 'and' (Anglo-Saxon means of Angle and Saxon origin), so there is only an apparent parallelism between Latino and Anglo. However, a semantic change has taken place in many English-speaking regions, so that in informal usage, the meanings listed below are valid.

Specialized usage

Australia

Main article: Anglo-Celtic Australian

In Australia, "Anglo" is the abbreviation of Anglo-Celtic, which refers to the majority of Australians who are of British and/or Irish descent. By the time of the 2001 Census of Australia, 38% of Australians identified their ancestry as simply "Australian". Because of the history of British settlement of Australia and modern Australian culture — which have been dominated by English-speaking people from the British Isles — this is also generally assumed to mean Australians of predominantly British and/or Irish descent, and is included in the Anglo-Celtic grouping.

In contemporary Australian usage "Anglo" is often used to denote the dominant ethnic group in Australia, either neutrally or as a slur. The slur equivalent is generally "Skip" taken from the title character of the Skippy the Bush Kangaroo television series who, as a kangaroo, fit stereotypical mainstream concepts of Australia.

Canada

In Canada, and especially in Canadian French, the term anglophone is widely used to designate someone whose everyday language is English, as contrasted to francophone (someone whose everyday language is French) and allophones (those with a different mother tongue). In Quebec, the word refers to English-speaking Quebecers in both English and French. Anglo-Metis is also sometimes used to refer to a historical ethnic group.

Ireland

Anglo-Irish is a historical term applied to many Protestants who made up the Irish professional and landed classes in the eighteenth and most especially the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were primarily of British origin, but there were also some Irish who had conformed, rather than converted, to the Anglican church in this category. They all shared that religion and by extension support for the Williamite settlement of the 1690s which had seen the dispossession of all the native Irish who remained Catholic. By the 1790s the Anglo-Irish were describing themselves as the 'Protestant Ascendency' and were a colonial community experiencing a crisis of identity akin to that experienced by their colonial cousins in the Thirteen Colonies. This resulted in many defining themselves as Irish and asserting the independence of Ireland from British rule and, particularly, British legislative control. Tom Bartlett and other historians of eighteenth-century Ireland have shown that the self-definition of those British settlers and their descendents in Ireland as 'Irish' arose as a result of a British insistence that they were not British, but rather Irish. This school of history views their embrace of an 'Irish' identity as a badge of defiance following their exclusion from mainstream British society.. Overall, though, Anglo-Irish refers first to a privileged colonial elite of primarily British extraction. They were, in the eighteenth century, an Ireland centred elite with their own parliament in Dublin. The breakdown in the Penal Laws resulted in Catholic ability to rent land from the 1780s and to own it from the 1790s. The 1798 rebellion against British rule, which was led by many men from a Protestant background, highlighted the dependence of the Anglo-Irish position on British rule, and resulted in a sharp decrease in radicalism in that community. Most importantly, the Anglo-Irish became a more anglocentric community than had hitherto been the case. This fundamental cultural change was symbolised by the end of the Irish parliament and the attendance of all Irish protestants in the British parliament(No Irish catholics could sit in parliament, even though 85% of Ireland's population were of that religion). Thereafter, the Anglo-Irish became a more solidified community, defined above all else by their support for British rule as the means to ensure their continued dominance in Ireland. Nonetheless, many Protestants continued the older eighteenth-century tradition and remained more closely identified with Ireland. In this role they became leaders of Irish nationalism like Thomas Davis and John Mitchel, the Irish Home Rule movement, like Issac Butt and Charles Stewart Parnell, and cultural nationalism like W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. This division of Irish Protestants between an anglocentric Anglo-Irish community and a hibernocentric Irish nationalist one remained the principal division in nineteenth-century Irish protestantism. It is reflected today in adherence to the respective unionist and nationalist positions.

Israel

Immigrants from English-speaking countries were referred to as Anglo-Saxonim, and now sometimes as simply Anglo. [1]

For the term's use in a global context, see Anglosphere

Scotland

In Scotland the term Anglo-Scot, often shortened to "Anglo", is used to refer to people born in England with Scottish ancestry such as Rod Stewart and Sandy Lyle.

United States

In the Southwest United States, Anglo, short for Anglo-American, refers to non-Hispanic European Americans, most of whom speak the English language but are not necessarily of English descent. The term was introduced by Mexicans speaking English as a second language, and has been regularly used by mainstream media such as the Los Angeles Times despite being considered ungrammatical and offensive to some. In the 2000 Census, 24.5 million Americans (8.7%) reported English ancestry. The figure is self-reported and is likely far higher in reality since partial English ancestry is common among Americans who, accordingly, tend to emphasize the more distinctive aspects of their heritage to census takers .

Anglo can simply refer to English-speaking population or media. The term is also used as a technically incorrect synonym for White. Non-hispanic Whites constitute roughly 70% of the total population. Also, Anglo is usually found in contrast with Jewish, even though most non-Anglo people do not see this contrast. [2]

Most non-Hispanics in the United States who speak English but are not of English ancestry generally do not identify themselves as "Anglo" and some of them find the term offensive. For instance, some Cajuns in south Louisiana use the term to refer to area whites who do not have Francophone backgrounds. Irish Americans, the second largest ethnic goup in the United States following German-Americans, also often take umbrage at being called "Anglo."[3] Additionally, other ethnic groups who do not identify as having English ancestary such as Italian Americans, Danish Americans, Greek Americans, Jewish Americans, Polish Americans, and Middle Eastern Americans tend not to identify themselves as Anglo. Americans of English descent may also be offended at being labeled "Anglo" (as opposed to Anglo-American or Anglo-Saxon).

See also

• Anglo-Burmese
• Anglo-Celtic
• Anglo-Indian
• Anglophile
• Anglo-Scottish border

External links

• Don't Call Me Late For Dinner, And Please Don't Call Me Anglo letter to the editor, The Arizona Republic, August 4, 1992