Journal 24 – Some Considerations about Terms Nationality and Ethnic Group

My English language teacher, Christina, announced that on Wednesday we will learn the unit 5 from our book Listening and Speaking. This unit mainly treats about Indians. I have little considerations which are related with this topic.

I consider that Americans in the different way than Europeans understand terms “nationality” and “ethnic group”. The American society consist of many different ethnic groups (people with different background), but all habitants who have lived in this beautiful country are Americans (nationality).

In my native country, Poland, is different. It can be more clearly when I will try to explain it on my personal example. I am from Poland, but I am not Pole (the Polish man). My nationality is Ukrainian, though that I was born in Poland. Additionally, my parents and grandparents were born in the Polish territory too. Poles clearly distingue three terms: “nationality”, “ethnic group” and “national minority”.

In Poland have lived 98% Poles; others 2% people called themselves “national minorities”. People from these sometimes small communities have a strong sense of belonging to their nationalities, for example, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews or Tatars.

A different term is “citizenship”, which is also called “nationality” (the American encyclopedia). I disagree with that kind of point of view. In my humble opinion, a person can have only one nationality but concurrently he can have citizenships of many countries. Of course, this is point of view a man from the Old Continent.
I sorry, my present journal is too long, but I couldn’t explain the above problem briefly.