Identification: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the formal name of the sovereign state governed by Parliament in London. The term United Kingdom normally is understood to include Northern Ireland; the term Great Britain refers to the island of Britain and its constituent nations of England, Wales, and Scotland but does not include Northern Ireland. Any citizen of Great Britain may be referred to as a Briton.
Location and Geography: The land area of Great Britain is 89,000 square miles, with an additional 5,400 square miles in Northern Ireland, giving it one of the highest population densities in the Western world. Although the country lies mostly at the latitude of Labrador in the western Atlantic, the climate is tempered by the Gulf Stream and does not have extremes of summer heat or winter cold. Except for some areas of barren upland and bog, most of the land is suitable for agriculture and has been grazed or cultivated since the Bronze Age. The natural vegetation is mixed oak woodland, but most of the terrain has been cleared for agriculture or for shipbuilding and charcoal for smelting. The earliest evidence of human settlement is at Boxgrove, Sussex, and the island may have been continuously occupied for 500,000 years.
Demography: The population is approximately 55 million: 46 million in England, 5 million in Scotland, 2.5 million in Wales, and 1.5 million in Northern Ireland.
The nation's cultural diversity has been increased by migration within the British Isles and by immigration from Europe and overseas. Until 1920, Ireland was incorporated within the United Kingdom. Movement across the Irish Sea had existed since the eighteenth century, even among Ireland's poorest people. In the nineteenth century, there was a regular pattern of seasonal migration of farm workers from Ireland to Britain. Irishmen volunteered for the Royal Navy and British Army regiments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and saw service in all parts of the empire. A wide variety of other Irish people spent periods in Britain, which had a more highly developed economy than Ireland. From 1841 onward, the censuses of Scotland, England, and Wales have enumerated Irish-born people in every part of the country. Similarly, Scottish and Welsh people have settled in England. Most British people have ancestries that are mixtures of the four nationalities of the British Isles.
Before and after World War II, political and religious refugees and displaced persons from the Baltic countries, Poland and Hungary were offered shelter in Britain and remained, along with some prisoners of war. Other immigrants of European ancestry who were born in Canada, New Zealand and South and East Africa, along with Greek and Turkish Cypriots, also settled in Britain. After the late 1940s, many of non-European overseas immigrants arrived, predominantly from the colonies, including people of Indian and African ancestry from the West Indies and Guyana; people from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; and Chinese from Hong Kong and Singapore. The 1991 census, the first to include ethnic background, enumerated three million Britons of non-European birth or ancestry.
Linguistic Affiliation: Regional and cultural relationships are expressed in marked linguistic differences. Although the language has been modified by a gradual convergence toward estuary English a United Kingdom.
United Kingdom less formal variety of southeastern speech, and educational and socioeconomic factors, it is possible to determine people's geographical origins by the way they speak. In some areas, there are significant differences in speech patterns from one city or county to its neighbor. These differences are associated with loyalties to one's place of birth or residence and for many people are important aspects of self-identity; non-English native languages are little spoken but in recent years have gained significance as cultural and political symbols. These languages include Scots Gaelic and Irish, there is also the Old Norse language of the Northern Isles and the Norman French patois of the Channel Islands. In Wales, 80 percent of the people speak English as their first or only language and those who speak Welsh as their first language are bilingual. In Scotland, Gaelic is not a national symbol because it was never spoken in some parts of that country. People in the Northern Isles are bilingual in English and an unwritten creolized form of Old Norse, in the Channel Islands, the Norman French patois is nearly extinct and in Cornwall, although the language has been reconstructed. In Northern Ireland, the Irish language has been reintroduced as a means of revitalizing Celtic pride among Belfast Catholics.
Symbolism: Symbolic attachment may reinforce localism or take the form of personal commitments that extend across socioeconomic strata. Support for soccer and rugby teams became significant during the twentieth century, and teams now command fierce local loyalties as sport has come to symbolize male pride and self-image in a society where mining and manufacturing have declined. Forms of personal commitment that transcend locality include vegetarianism and environmentalism: the first is predominantly middle class and female, and the second is identified less with gender and socioeconomic status. On the fringes of society, there has been a significant growth in new religious movements, which include radical environmentalist cults, New Age paganism, anticapitalist and antinuclear groups and adopted Far Eastern and South Asian religions and belief systems, including martial arts cults. Cults based on popular music and performers engender personal commitment in culturally patterned ways.
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