IB Geography 5.2.1 the Global Spectrum of Cultural Traits and Identities Notes

Three Units, Three Instruments, and Three Counts That Do Not Agree

1. Counting culture anywhere means choosing one of three units: a cultural trait, an ethnicity or an identity.
2. Each of the three is produced by a separate instrument, so three counts taken over one population rarely match.
3. A Cultural Trait Is an Attribute of a Place
   1. A trait is one element of a shared system of meaning that can be written down as present or absent somewhere, such as a language spoken, a religion practised, a staple eaten or a roof built to a particular shape.
4. An Ethnicity Is a Category Printed on a Form
   1. An ethnicity is a category a person is placed in or claims, drawn from a list that a state statistical office writes before a single household is asked.
   2. The list is a national decision, so two states counting the same migrant family can place it in differently named groups.
5. An Identity Is a Self-Report That Can Be Plural
   1. An identity is what a person says about themselves when asked, so one person can hold several at once and report a different set at the next census.
6. The global spectrum of cultural traits, ethnicities and identities is prescribed for the higher level extension and nowhere else, so a standard level student never meets it, even though the same course teaches measures of diversity as a technique and sets ethnicity among the factors sorting residential areas wherever the urban environments option is studied.

Language Shows What a Trait Count Is Actually Counting

1. Language carries a global inventory anyone can consult, which makes it the place to see how a trait count is built.
2. UNESCO and Ethnologue both maintain that inventory, each on its own definition of what counts as a language and of when one is in danger.

One Atlas Gives Two Totals for One World

1. UNESCO's World Atlas of Languages records 8,324 languages, spoken or signed, documented by governments, public institutions and academic communities.
2. Of those 8,324, the same atlas states that around 7,000 are still in use, so more than a thousand entries are documented without a present community of users.
3. The gap between the two figures is a decision about what counts as a language, because a documented but unused language is still a distinct entry in the record.

Endangerment Is a Scale, and Three Thousand Languages Sit On It

1. Ethnologue, the language inventory maintained by SIL International, records 3,045 languages as endangered today.
2. It puts that at about 42 percent of languages on its EGIDS measurement tool, which grades each language by the uses it still has and the generations still speaking it.
3. Ethnologue defines the threshold by transmission, since a language becomes endangered when its users begin to teach and speak a more dominant language to the children in the community.
4. A language is called stable on the same scale when all the children in the community are still learning and using it, though Ethnologue notes that a stable language can still decline into endangerment if that changes.
5. Endangerment is therefore a judgement about who is being taught the language next, so it moves before any speaker count does.

Greenberg Turned Diversity Into One Number Between Zero and One

1. Joseph Greenberg set out the standard measure in The Measurement of Linguistic Diversity, published in the journal Language in 1956, volume 32, issue 1, pages 109 to 115.
2. The index subtracts from one the sum of the squared shares of each language in the population, written as 1 minus the sum of p squared.
3. What that returns is the probability that two people drawn at random from the population do not speak the same language.
4. The index is zero where everybody shares one language, because two random draws are then certain to match.
5. It approaches one as languages multiply and become equally sized, with the limit describing a population in which every person speaks a different language.

Ethnicity Is Counted by Whatever List the State Prints on the Form

1. No international classification of ethnicity exists, so each state writes its own list before anyone is counted.
2. Five arrangements across four states run from 19 tick boxes to an open write-in to no ethnic variable at all, a range that widens further where a state's largest category is as large as the 91.11 percent that China's 2020 census recorded for the Han.

England and Wales Offer Nineteen Boxes Inside Five Groups

1. The 2021 Census of England and Wales let respondents choose one out of 19 tick-box response categories, including write-in response options.
2. Those boxes roll up into five high-level ethnic groups, which the Office for National Statistics names as Asian, Asian British, Asian Welsh; Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean or African; Mixed or Multiple; White; and Other ethnic group.
3. The largest single category, White: English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British, was recorded at 74.4 percent, or 44.4 million people, in 2021.
4. The comparable figure for the same category was 80.5 percent, or 45.1 million, in 2011, against 87.5 percent, or 45.5 million, for White: British in 2001.
   1. The White: Other White category rose from 4.4 percent and 2.5 million in 2011 to 6.2 percent and 3.7 million in 2021, an increase the Office for National Statistics says may be partly explained by the search-as-you-type function introduced for Census 2021, which made it easier for people to self-define online.
5. Between 2011 and 2021 the White: English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British category lost about 0.7 million people while losing 6.1 percentage points of share, because the resident population grew underneath it.

Scotland's Six Broad Headings Cut the Same Population a Different Way

1. Scotland's Census 2022 grouped its tick boxes under six broad headings: White; Mixed or multiple; Asian, Asian Scottish or Asian British; African, African Scottish or African British; Caribbean or Black; and Other.
2. Scotland gives African a heading of its own, where England and Wales folds Caribbean and African into a single Black heading, so one household can appear under different top-level labels on either side of the border.
3. National Records of Scotland puts 77.7 percent of people in Scotland in the White Scottish category and 9.4 percent in White Other British, which together made up 87.1 percent of the population in 2022.
4. The share of people in Scotland with a minority ethnic background rose from 8.2 percent in 2011 to 12.9 percent in 2022, a heading National Records of Scotland defines to take in Irish, Polish, Gypsy/Traveller, Roma and Showman/Showwoman respondents who ticked a box inside the White category.
5. The two censuses were also taken on different days, since England, Wales and Northern Ireland were enumerated on 21 March 2021 while Scotland moved to 20 March 2022.

Canada Asks an Open Question and Keeps Six Answers per Person

1. The 2021 Census of Canada collected origins as an open write-in, which returned more than 450 ethnic or cultural origins in the published data.
2. Respondents could report more than one origin for their ancestors, with up to six origins retained per person.
3. More than one origin was reported by 35.5 percent of the population, a share that a single-answer form can only compress into one mixed category.
4. An instrument that keeps six answers and one that keeps one are measuring different things, so the Canadian and the English tables answer different questions.

France Records Origin and Refuses to Record Ethnicity

1. France's official statistical system does not classify the population by ethnicity, because the prohibition is constitutional.
2. The Conseil constitutionnel, in decision 2007-557 DC of 15 November 2007, forbade the processing of personal data indicating directly or indirectly the racial or ethnic origins of persons, and ruled an a priori ethno-racial classification unconstitutional.
3. INSEE instead publishes a person's country of birth, nationality at birth and current nationality, and asks in surveys about the country of birth and nationality at birth of their parents.
4. That yields a count of immigrants and their descendants, which is a statement about origin and says nothing about how anyone identifies.
5. Studies using subjective data on a feeling of belonging are permitted, as in the 2009 Trajectories and Origins survey run by INSEE with INED, which asked about belonging and religion on a voluntary basis.

The United States Rewrote the Question and the Numbers Moved

1. The 2020 Census counted 33.8 million people in the Two or More Races group, against 9 million in 2010, an increase the Census Bureau reports as 276 percent.
2. Over the same decade the White alone population fell 8.6 percent, from 223.6 million and 72.4 percent of the country to 204.3 million and 61.6 percent.
3. Of the observed changes in the White, Some Other Race and Multiracial populations, the last of these being the Two or More Races group, the Bureau writes that they could be attributed to a number of factors including demographic change since 2010, but that it expects they were largely due to the improvements to the design of the two separate questions for race and ethnicity, data processing and coding.
4. The Bureau therefore names both a demographic change and a redesigned instrument arriving in the same decade, which its own table cannot separate.
5. That instrument is itself being replaced, because the Office of Management and Budget revised Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 on 28 March 2024.
6. The revision requires a combined race and ethnicity question and adds Middle Eastern or North African as a new minimum reporting category, which takes the minimum set to seven.
7. Existing federal record keeping has until 28 March 2029 to comply, so the next decennial count will be taken on a classification the 2020 count never used.

Identity Moves When the Question Moves, and Canada Measured How Far

1. Canada changed one feature of its origins question between 2016 and 2021, moving the reported figures by millions.
2. The 2016 long-form questionnaire printed a list of 28 examples of ethnic or cultural origin, with Canadian first in that list.
3. For 2021 the printed list was removed and replaced, in the electronic versions of the questionnaire, with a link to a list of over 500 examples.
4. Reports of Canadian, alone or with other origins, fell from 11.1 million people and 32.3 percent of the population in 2016 to 5.7 million and 15.6 percent in 2021.
5. Statistics Canada says that fall of 5.4 million reports is consistent with the results its own 2019 quantitative tests anticipated.
6. Reports of Québécois rose from 195,000 in 2016 to 982,000 in 2021, roughly five times, in the same redesign.
7. Reports of Jewish as an origin rose from 144,000 to 282,000 across the same two censuses, after a 2016 list of examples that had not included it.

Why a Self-Report Is Still Worth Collecting

1. An identity question records something no administrative file holds, since nationality, birthplace and language of the home each miss people who claim a heritage they cannot document.
2. Statistics Canada found in its 2022 Canadian Social Survey that 79.5 percent of immigrants place importance on their ethnic or cultural origins against 47.6 percent of non-immigrants.
3. A self-report measured on a stable question across several censuses is the instrument best placed to show identity changing, so the value lies in holding the wording still.

Diversity Is Widening and Narrowing at the Same Time, at Different Scales

1. Whether diversity is widening or narrowing has an honest answer only once the area the count is taken over has been named.
2. Three instruments point in different directions across the recent past, each of them right about its own scale.

The World Is Losing Traits While Individual Places Gain Them

1. Only a language that ends in its last community leaves the world inventory, so Ethnologue's 3,045 endangered languages are a count of transmission stopping rather than of languages already gone.
2. At national and local scale the same movement of people raises the count, since a language arriving in a new country is an addition to that country even though it is a subtraction from the village it left.
3. The 2021 Census of England and Wales recorded 91.1 percent, or 52.6 million usual residents aged three and over with English, or Welsh in Wales, as a main language.
4. Romanian was listed as a main language by 472,000 people, or 0.8 percent, in 2021, up from 68,000 and 0.1 percent in 2011.
5. Computed on England and Wales the index rises when a new main language joins the mix, while on the world the same arrival moves nothing, because no language has been created.

A Flow Large Enough to Remake a City Barely Moves the Global Ratio

1. The number of international migrants worldwide stood at 304 million in 2024, nearly double the estimated 154 million of 1990.
2. The share of humanity that is an international migrant rose only from 2.9 percent in 1990 to 3.7 percent in 2024.
3. Europe hosted more international migrants than any other region, with 94 million in 2024, ahead of Northern America on 61 million.
4. International migrants made up 21 percent of the residents of Oceania, out of a total regional population of 46 million.
5. One flow therefore reads as a near doubling at world scale, as a fifth of the residents of Oceania at regional scale, and as a changed street at local scale, without any of the three being wrong.

Religion Shows a Group Growing and Shrinking in the Same Decade

1. The Pew Research Center compared religious affiliation across 201 countries and territories using more than 2,700 sources, including national censuses, demographic surveys and population registers.
2. The number of Christians rose by 122 million between 2010 and 2020, reaching 2.3 billion, while the Christian share of world population fell 1.8 percentage points to 28.8 percent.
3. The number of Muslims increased by 347 million, more than all other religions combined, while the Muslim share rose 1.8 points to 25.6 percent.
4. The religiously unaffiliated rose by 270 million to 1.9 billion, with their share climbing nearly a full percentage point to 24.2 percent.
5. The number of Hindus rose by 126 million to 1.2 billion while the Hindu share held steady at 14.9 percent.
6. The number of Buddhists dropped by 19 million to 324 million, the only one of those five counts to fall, while the Buddhist share slipped 0.8 points to 4.1 percent.
7. A Christian population that gained 122 million people and lost 1.8 points of share is the scale problem in a single row of a table.

Two Counts of One Population Compare Only When Instrument, Date and Area Match

1. A published figure on diversity carries an instrument, a date and an area, so a comparison survives only when all three match.
2. Where they do not match, a defensible comparison states what would have to be true of the instrument, the date or the area for the two figures to describe the same thing.

What Would Settle a Disagreement About Diversity

1. A disagreement between two national tables would be settled by a shared classification applied in both, which does not exist for ethnicity.
2. A stable question asked twice would settle a disagreement about identity, which is what Statistics Canada lost when it redesigned its prompt.
3. A fixed area would settle a disagreement about scale, since the same people yield a different diversity index depending on the boundary drawn around them.
4. Naming which of the three is missing, whether a shared classification, a stable question or a fixed area, makes a disagreement about diversity answerable by evidence.