MEANING
A shared cultural identity, or a group linked by that identity through history, language, traditions, or common origins.
Use it for
analyzing cultural group membership; distinguishing ethnic identity from legal nationality; comparing classifications without assuming fixed biological boundariesDistinguishes shared cultural identity from citizenship and avoids treating social categories as fixed biological divisions. Academic functions: Theory / Conceptual Language.
Words that belong together
- ethnicities in a population
- self-reported ethnicity
- ethnicity and nationality
On the page
The survey records self-reported ethnicity separately from citizenship.
The historian examines how the boundaries of ethnicity changed under different political conditions.
Nearby words
Word forms
- Base
- ethnicity
Usage notes
Countable or uncountable: ethnicity, ethnicities. Count uses identify groups or identities; mass uses concern ethnic identity as a dimension. Register: neutral. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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