Armenian American
| Total population | |
|---|---|
|
483,366 (2011 ACS) 800,000 — 1,500,000 (estimates) 0.15–0.5% of the US population |
|
| Regions with significant populations | |
|
|
|
| Languages | |
| Armenian · American English | |
| Religion | |
| Christianity (predominantly Armenian Apostolic, Catholic & Evangelical minorities) |
Armenian Americans (Armenian: ամերիկահայեր, amerikahayer) are citizens or residents of the United States who have total or partial Armenian ancestry. They form the second largest community in the Armenian diaspora after Armenians in Russia. The first major wave of Armenian immigration to the US took place in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thousands of Armenians settled in the US following the Hamidian massacres of the mid-1890s and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire. Between the 1960s and 1980s Armenians from Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Turkey migrated to America as a result of political instability in those countries. At around the same time immigration from the Soviet Union began. It accelerated in the late 1980s and has continued after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 due to socio-economic and political reasons.
The 2011 American Community Survey estimated that 483,366 Americans held full or partial Armenian ancestry. Various organizations and media criticize these numbers as an underestimate, proposing 800,000 to 1,500,000 Armenian Americans instead. The highest concentration of Americans of Armenian descent is in the Greater Los Angeles area, where 166,498 people have identified themselves as Armenian to the 2000 Census, comprising over 40% of the 385,488 people who identified Armenian origins in the US at the time. The city of Glendale in the Los Angeles metropolitan area is widely thought to be the center of Armenian American life.
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