英语国家概况(英国部分Unit2)

2. ImmigranΒιβλιοθήκη Baidus
The Irish have long made homes in Great Britain. Many Jews arrived in Britain toward the end of the 19th century and in the 1930s. After 1945 large numbers of other European refugees settled in the country. The large immigrant communities from the West Indies and South Asia date from the 1950s and 1960s. There are also substantial groups of Americans, Australians, and Chinese, as well as various other Europeans, such as Greeks, Russians, Poles, Serbs, Estonians, Latvians, Armenians, Turkish Cypriots, Italians, and Spaniards. Beginning in the early 1970s, Ugandan Asians and immigrants from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Sri Lanka have sought
What are the ethnic groups in the UK? An aging country How is the population distributed in the UK? An English-speaking country? Class consciousness What are the elements of the British identity?
• Be informed of the statistics about the British population • Know something about the languages in Britain • Understand the class structure in Britain • Know about Britishness
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes
The Angles is a modern English word for a Germanicspeaking people. The Angles were one of the main groups that settled in Britain in the post-Roman period, and their name is the root of the name “England”.
West Indies
Do you know where “West Indies” is?
West Indies is a group of islands that extends in an arc from near southern Florida to the coast of Venezuela. The West Indies archipelago, which includes thousands of tiny islands, forms a breakwater 3,200-km long against the Atlantic Ocean, separating it from the Caribbean Sea. European explorer Christopher Columbus gave the region that name in error when he arrived in 1492. He assumed that the islands were near the coast of India.
The Saxons were a confederation of Old Germanic tribes. Their modern-day descendants are generally considered ethnic Germans, Dutch, or English. Saxons participated in the Germanic settlement of Britain during and after the 5th century.
1. Ethnic origins
In historic times, migrants from the European mainland joined the indigenous population of Britain during the Roman Empire and during the invasions of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings and Normans from Northern and Western Europe.
Do You Know? Focus In
Do You Know?
From the following video clip, can you tell the elements of Britishness?
Do You Know?
II ■
Focus In
• Have a general idea of the ethnical composition of the British people
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes
The Jutes were a Germanic people who were one of the three most powerful Germanic peoples of their time. The Jutes, along with some Angles, Saxons and Frisians, sailed across the North Sea to raid and eventually invade Great Britain from the late 4th century onwards, either displacing, absorbing, or destroying the native Celtic peoples there. They finally settled in Kent, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight.
Ethnicity in England and Wales
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings in Europe and around the Mediterranean. The term is used to describe the Roman state during and after the time of the first emperor, Augustus. Because of the Empire’s vast extent and long endurance, the institutions and culture of Rome had a profound and lasting influence on the development of language, religion, architecture, philosophy, law, and forms of government in the territory it governed, particularly Europe, and by means of European expansionism throughout the modern world.
Normans
The Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They played a major political, military, and cultural role in medieval Europe and even the Near East. They were famed for their martial spirit and Christian piety. They quickly adopted the Romance language of the land they settled off, their dialect becoming known as Norman, an important literary language. The Duchy of Normandy, which they formed by treaty with the French crown, was one of the great large fiefs of medieval France. Norman adventurers established a kingdom in Sicily and southern Italy by conquest, and a Norman expedition on behalf of their duke, William the Conqueror, led to the Norman Conquest of England.
Vikings
The term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse (Scandinavian) explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th century. These Norsemen used their famed longships to travel as far east as Constantinople and the Volga River in Russia, and as far west as Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, and as far south as Al Andalus. This period of Viking expansion — known as the Viking Age — forms a major part of the medieval history of Scandinavia, Britain, Ireland and the rest of Europe in general.
2. Immigrants
refuge in the UK. People of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi origin account for more than half of the total ethnic minority population, and people of West Indian origin are the next largest group. The foreign-born element of the population is disproportionately concentrated in inner-city areas, and more than half live in Greater London.