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Concept
German Canadians
Summary
German Canadians (Deutsch-Kanadier or Deutschkanadier, ˈdɔʏtʃkaˌnaːdi̯ɐ) are Canadian citizens of German ancestry or Germans who emigrated to and reside in Canada. According to the 2016 census, there are 3,322,405 Canadians with full or partial German ancestry. Some immigrants came from what is today Germany, while larger numbers came from German settlements in Eastern Europe and Imperial Russia; others came from parts of the German Confederation, Austria-Hungary and Switzerland.
In modern German, the endonym deutsch is used in reference to the German language and people. Before the modern era and especially the unification of Germany, "Germany" and "Germans" were ambiguous terms which could at times encompass peoples and territories not only in the modern state of Germany, but also modern-day Poland, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria, France, the Netherlands, and even Russia and Ukraine. For example, in the Middle Ages, the Latin term Theodiscus was used to refer to West Germanic languages in general, and in English, "Dutch" was sometimes used as a shorthand for any broadly Germanic people. Early Anglophone historians and contemporary travellers in Canada rarely mentioned the ethnic identity, primary language, or place of origin of early settlers at all, and even later historians in the 19th and 20th centuries were prone to using ambiguous terms such as "Pennsylvania Dutch". This term is sometimes described as a "misnomer" for Germans, but in its usage by English colonial authorities, "Dutch" was often an umbrella term which included people whose Germanic ancestry was in regions as widely separated as Switzerland, the Palatinate (and broader Rhineland), and Holland.
A few Germans came to New France when France colonized the area, but large-scale migration from Germany began only under British rule, when Governor Edward Cornwallis established Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1749. Known as the Foreign Protestants, the continental Protestants were encouraged to migrate to Nova Scotia between 1750 and 1752 to counterbalance the large number of Catholic Acadians.
Official source
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