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Concept
Cultural assimilation
Summary
Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society's majority group or assimilate the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group whether fully or partially.
The different types of cultural assimilation include full assimilation and forced assimilation. Full assimilation is the more prevalent of the two, as it occurs spontaneously. When used as a political ideology, assimilationism refers to governmental policies of deliberately assimilating ethnic groups into the national culture.
During cultural assimilation, minority groups are expected to adapt to the everyday practices of the dominant culture through language and appearance as well as via more significant socioeconomic factors such as absorption into the local cultural and employment community.
Some types of cultural assimilation resemble acculturation in which a minority group or culture completely assimilates into the dominant culture in which defining characteristics of the minority culture are less obverse or outright disappear; while in other types of cultural assimilation such as cultural integration mostly found in multicultural communities, a minority group within a given society adopts aspects of the dominant culture through either cultural diffusion or for practical reason like adapting to another society's social norms while retaining their original culture. A conceptualization describes cultural assimilation as similar to acculturation while another merely considers the former as one of the latter's phases. Throughout history there have been different forms of cultural assimilation examples of types of acculturation include voluntary and involuntary assimilation.
Assimilation could also involve the so-called additive acculturation wherein, instead of replacing the ancestral culture, an individual expands their existing cultural repertoire.
Cultural assimilation may involve either a quick or a gradual change depending on the circumstances of the group.
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