Ethnic and Cultural Diversity

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An ethnic group or ethnicity is a category of people who identify based on common language, ancestral, social, cultural, or national experiences. Unlike most other social groups, ethnicity is primarily an inherited status. Membership of an ethnic group tends to be defined by a shared cultural heritage, ancestry, origin myth, history, homeland, language or dialect, symbolic systems.

The map below was created by ChartsBin, shows the ethnic and cultural diversity of the countries based on cultural fractionalization.

Cultural fractionalization Index is approximated by a measure of similarity between languages, varying from 1 = the population speaks two or more unrelated languages to 0 = the entire population speaks the same language. This index of cultural diversity is biased towards linguistic variations instead of genetic diversity and other variations.

Ethnic and cultural diversity index

Cultural diversity is the quality of diverse or different cultures instead of monoculture, the global monoculture, or a homogenization of cultures akin to cultural decay. The map below shows countries with mono-ethnicity where 85% of the population is a single ethnic group.

The phrase cultural diversity can also refer to having different cultures respect each other’s differences. The phrase “cultural diversity” is also sometimes used to mean the variety of human societies or cultures in a specific region or the world.

Top 10 the most diverse countries by Ethnic Fractionalization Index

Rank	Country	Ethnic Fractionalization
1	Uganda	0.93
2	Liberia	0.91
3	Madagascar	0.88
4	DR Congo	0.87
5	Congo	0.87
6	Cameroon	0.86
7	Chad	0.86
8	Kenya	0.86
9	Nigeria	0.85
10	The central African Republic	0.83

Religious diversity by country

The map below created by Vox shows religious diversity by country using data from Pew Research Center.