Ethnicity Definition: Shared Roots, Shared Culture

Define ethnicity: the main ingredients

When people define ethnicity, they usually point to some mix of these shared features:

• Ancestry: a belief in common origins or descent.
• Culture: food, dress, festivals, music, values and everyday customs.
• Language: a mother tongue or a dialect passed down in families.
• History and homeland: memories of a place and of events that shaped the group.
• Religion: sometimes, though many ethnic groups include people of several faiths.
• Self-identification: people seeing themselves, and being seen by others, as part of the group.

No single feature is required. A group may lose its original language and still feel strongly united by history and custom.

Ethnicity definition next to race and nationality

One person can be of Indian nationality, Gujarati ethnicity and any religion. Another can hold US citizenship while identifying with a Korean or Mexican ethnic background. Ethnicity is about cultural belonging; nationality is about passports and legal status. Many scholars describe race as a social grouping too, though how it should be defined is debated. See our pages on racism and discrimination for related terms.

Ethnicity meaning example in real life

Sentences that use the word

• The survey asked people to describe their ethnicity in their own words.
• The neighborhood is home to families of many ethnicities, and its street fair shows it.
• Her research looks at how ethnicity shapes food choices among second-generation immigrants.
• Employers may not lawfully treat applicants differently because of their ethnicity in many countries.
• He is ethnically Armenian but grew up speaking Arabic in Beirut.

How forms and surveys use it

Different countries collect this information in different ways. For many decades the US census treated Hispanic or Latino origin as a question of ethnicity, asked separately from race, and the wording of these questions has been revised over time. The UK census asks an ethnic group question with broad categories. India's census does not have an ethnicity box; it records language, religion, and listed tribes and castes, which together cover much of what other countries call ethnicity.

These categories are tools for counting, not final answers about identity, and people sometimes feel none of the boxes fit them.

Why definitions vary

Scholars disagree about how fixed ethnicity is. Some stress shared descent and long tradition. Others stress that ethnic identity is built and changed by people over time, through migration, marriage, politics and choice. Most agree that both history and self-identification matter. In everyday use, the word is neutral and respectful; the adjective ethnic is also neutral when used precisely (ethnic minority, ethnic group), though some people dislike calling food or clothes simply "ethnic", since everyone has an ethnicity.

Origins of the word

The root is Greek ethnos, a people or nation, which reached English through Latin ethnicus. In older English, ethnic meant pagan or non-Christian. Its modern sense of belonging to a cultural group took hold in the 1900s, and ethnicity in its present sense is recorded from 1953. An older, unrelated use of the noun for paganism, from the 1700s, has died out.

The law, politics and society group has more social terms, for instance indigenous and diversity.