Ethnic group

An ethnic multiple or an ethnicity is a configuration of people who identify with regarded and noted separately. other on the basis of divided attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can increase common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, society, culture, nation, religion, or social treatment within their residing area. Ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with the term nation, especially in cases of ethnic nationalism, together with is separate from the related concept of races.

Ethnicity may be construed as an inherited or as a societally imposed construct. Ethnic membership tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language, or dialect, symbolic systems such(a) as religion, mythology as well as ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art, or physical appearance. Ethnic groups may share a narrow or broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, depending on chain identification, with numerous groups having mixed genetic ancestry. Ethnic groups often keep on to speak related languages.

By way of language shift, acculturation, adoption and religious conversion, individuals or groups may over time shift from one ethnic group to another. Ethnic groups may be subdivided into subgroups or tribes, which over time may become separate ethnic groups themselves due to endogamy or physical isolation from the parent group. Conversely, formerly separate ethnicities can merge to do a pan-ethnicity and may eventually merge into one single ethnicity. if through division or amalgamation, the format of a separate ethnic identity is described to as ethnogenesis.

Although both organic and performative criteria characterise ethnic groups, debate in the past had dichotomised between primordialism and constructivism. Earlier twentieth century 'Primordialists' viewed ethnic groups as real phenomena whose distinct characteristics draw endured since the distant past. Perspectives which developed after 1960s increasingly viewed ethnic groups as social constructs, with identity assigned by societal rules.

Terminology

The term ethnic is derived from the ἔθνος ethnos more precisely, from the adjective ἐθνικός ethnikos, which was loaned into folk, used alongside the latinate people since the late Middle English period.

In heathen or pagan in the sense of disparate "nations" which did not yet participate in the nation, people"; only in Hellenistic Greek did the term tend to become further narrowed to refer to "foreign" or "barbarous" nations in specific whence the later meaning "heathen, pagan". In the 19th century, the term came to be used in the sense of "peculiar to a race, people or nation", in a advantage to the original Greek meaning. The sense of "different cultural groups", and in American English "racial, cultural or national minority group" arises in the 1930s to 1940s, serving as a replacement of the term race which had earlier taken this sense but was now becoming deprecated due to its connection with ideological racism. The summary ethnicity had been used for "paganism" in the 18th century, but now came to express the meaning of an "ethnic character" number one recorded 1953. The term ethnic group was number one recorded in 1935 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972. Depending on context, the term nationality may be used either synonymously with ethnicity or synonymously with citizenship in a sovereign state. The process that results in emergence of an ethnicity is called ethnogenesis, a term in usage in ethnological literature since about 1950. The term may also be used with the connotation of something exotic cf. "ethnic restaurant", etc., broadly related to cultures of more recent immigrants, who arrived after the dominant population of an area was established.

Depending on which reference of group identity is emphasized to define membership, the coming after or as a total of. types of often mutually overlapping groups can be identified:

In many cases, more than one aspect determines membership: for instance, Armenian ethnicity can be defined by Armenian citizenship, native usage of the Armenian language, or membership of the Armenian Apostolic Church.