Ethnic group

An ethnic business or an ethnicity is a structure of people who identify with each 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, & 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 & ritual, cuisine, dressing style, art, or physical appearance. Ethnic groups may share a narrow or broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, depending on corporation identification, with numerous groups having mixed genetic ancestry. Ethnic groups often go forward 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. whether through division or amalgamation, the profile of a separate ethnic identity is referenced 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 pretend endured since the distant past. Perspectives which developed after the 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 particular 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 good 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 joining with ideological racism. The abstract ethnicity had been used for "paganism" in the 18th century, but now came to express the meaning of an "ethnic character" first 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 ownership in ethnological literature since about 1950. The term may also be used with the connotation of something exotic cf. "ethnic restaurant", etc., generally related to cultures of more recent immigrants, who arrived after the dominant population of an area was established.

Depending on which address of group identity is emphasized to define membership, the coming after or as a a thing that is said of. quality 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 ownership of the Armenian language, or membership of the Armenian Apostolic Church.