Is ethnicity more a matter of (birth) language or genetics?

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For example, if you had say, Syrian parents, but were abandoned by them, and adopted by Italian parents, and Italian was your birth language, and everyone you knew was Italian, would you be Italian by ethnicity or would you still be considered Syrian?

What about the Puritans who settled in the Netherlands in the 1600s. Eventually their grandchildren started speaking Dutch and forgetting their English heritage, even though genetically their roots were in England. Would they be considered English or would they be considered Dutch and of English descent?

Are people from a village in Germany on the Czech border closer to Germans on the far west side of the country, or to Czechs two miles over the border, genetically speaking? Culturally obviously they're more German, but is there a genetic basis to that?

Ethnicity is genetics. Culture, is well, cultural.

For instance, take the phrase 'African American', or 'Black British'. An African American is ethnically African and culturally American.

Ethnicity is a social construct with biological implications much like the concept of "family".

Members of a nuclear family are assumed to have a common biological heritage.
Members of a nuclear family also constitution a household - a social unit with its own little "corporate culture".

You have personality traits, aptitudes, and even neurosis, in common with family memebers. These are due the common household environment, but are also due to genetic similarity.

But there are such things as adoption, and blended families caused by remarriage.. A non biologically related person can join a family. They can aquire the "culure traits" of that family, without having the genetic heritage.

Likewise people of an ethnic group tend to be of the same ancestry, but outsiders can be "adopted". Shania Twain was an Ojibwe Indian by upbringing and by self identification because her mom married an Ojibwe and she grew up on a reservation(but she was racially a White Anglo Canadian), and there were numerous "Black Seminole Indians" at one time in Florida. Descended from escaped slaves who took up with Seminole Indians and fought alongside them against Whites.

As with family -genetics is not relevent to ethnicity-but it IS relevent to ethnicity ( to know if there is a history of an illness in your family is relevent, but an adopted child can be a full fledged member of your family). Its messy and not black and white.

Ethnicity, much like the closely related concept of nationality, is a matter of culture and has nothing to do with race/pseudogentics: This can be shown easily by the "Black" Seminoles, the Kaifeng Jews, the fact that the Chinese developed far more differently from the closely genetically related Inuit than they did from the more distantly related Persians, the fact that people can learn languages unrelated to their L1 and that all peoples can produce fertile offspring with any other people.

Apart from the fact that genetics doesn't actually support the notion of race in the way that it is used.

On a genetic level an awful lot of 'African Americans' are more closely related to a European with white skin that has never been to either Africa or America that they are with a black skinned African that lives next door but was born in the Congo.

Yes, you are right. Ethnicity is partly a social construct because of course lots of people are more mixed than they realise.

My definition is what ethnicity is taken to mean, as something distinct from culture. 'Ethnicity 'is not used to mean language or customs, that's what the word 'culture' covers. The word 'ethnicity' is used (however wrongly) to mean genetic heritage. It is very simplified and not supported by science, but there you go.

That's because Africa is where people (probably) originated hence there is more diversity there, but Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other groups that settled certain continents in small numbers and then expanded definitely have a clear 'racial' genetic profile.

Naturalplastic, I agree with you. In fact I would say most people of a certain ethnicity are partially 'adopted'.