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.