Austrian American

Austrian Americans (German: Austroamerikaner) are European Americans of Austrian descent. According to the 2000 U.S. census, there were 735,128 Americans of full or partial Austrian descent, accounting for 0.3% of the population. The states with the largest Austrian American populations were New York (93,083), California (84,959), Pennsylvania (58,002) (most of them in the Lehigh Valley), Florida (54,214), New Jersey (45,154), and Ohio (27,017). This may be an undercount, as many German Americans have ancestors from Austria, the Austrian Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was a major source of immigrants to the United States before World War I. Before World War I, by which time a large percentage of Germans had immigrated to the United States, Austrians were often categorized as German people, largely because of their shared cultural-linguistic and ethnic origin and Austria being one of many historical German states of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.