An ethnic majority describes the numerical dominance of individuals of an

ethnic group An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...

within the total population of a particular political or geographical entity.

Ethnicity An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people who identify with each other on the basis of shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include common sets of traditions, ancestry, language, history, ...

refers to genealogy, language, culture, identification with a historical social group and behavioral practices inherited from ancestors, among others, such as diet, art and religion. An ''ethnic majority'' generally contrasts with ''ethnic minorities'' within a certain population, such as

indigenous people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

, diasporas or immigrant ethnicities. The concept of the territorial

national state A nation state is a political unit where the state and nation are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group. A nation, in the sense of a common ethnicity, may inc ...

is derived from the idea to unite and integrate ethnicities into independent

nation A nation is a community of people formed on the basis of a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society. A nation is thus the collective identity of a group of people understood as defined by those ...

s. However, monoethnic countries are virtually non-existent. Modern people increasingly have multiple genealogical and ethnic roots. As a consequence, they often only loosely identify with distinct ethnic groups. Identification takes place within various multi-ethnic, societal and cultural categories . In Anglo-Saxon countries, ethnicity as well as race are registered in official statistics, based on self-reported identification by the individual, for example in view to discover discrimination. In for example Scandinavian countries, no official statistics is kept on ethnicity or race. According to the European

GDPR The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union regulation on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important component of EU privacy law and of human rights law, in partic ...

law, it is typically not allowed to register ethnicity or race. In the context of

genealogy Genealogy () is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kins ...

, for example

medical genetics Medical genetics is the branch tics in that human genetics is a field of scientific research that may or may not apply to medicine, while medical genetics refers to the application of genetics to medical care. For example, research on the caus ...

genealogical DNA tests A genealogical DNA test is a DNA-based test used in genetic genealogy that looks at specific locations of a person's genome in order to find or verify ancestral genealogical relationships, or (with lower reliability) to estimate the ethnic mix ...

, ethnicity is defined based on biological rather than cultural heritage. However, various genealogical DNA tests result in contradictory and insecure estimates of the ethnic mix of a person, since the result of each test depends on the reference group and how it is divided into ethnic groups. Thus, it is typically not possible to securely determine if a person belongs to the ethnic majority or not using genetic tests. Ethnicity is sometimes confused with

race Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to: * Race (biology), an informal taxonomic classification within a species, generally within a sub-species * Race (human categorization), classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, and/or s ...

, which however is defined based on heritage from a certain continent. The zoological meaning of race cannot be applied to humans since race can not be identified unambiguously from biological features such as skin color. It is disputed to what extent race can be identified using genetics. For example,

White Americans White Americans are Americans who identify as and are perceived to be white people. This group constitutes the majority of the people in the United States. As of the 2020 Census, 61.6%, or 204,277,273 people, were white alone. This represented ...

are the ethnic majority in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ethnic Majority Ethnicity

Further reading

See also

References