Ethnic and religious composition of the world’s population
An ethnos is a historically formed group of people distinguished by territory, culture and way of life; its forms are the tribe, the narodnost (small people) and the nation. A tribe is the oldest simple association, surviving in parts of Amazonia, Oceania and Africa; a nation is a large ethnos with a common language, territory and culture. By national composition, countries are mono-national (Japan, Iceland), with one dominant nation (France, Türkiye), two-nation (Belgium, Canada) and multinational (India, Indonesia). Language is the core of an ethnos’s culture; languages are grouped into more than 20 families, and nearly half of humanity speaks Indo-European languages. Uzbek belongs to the Turkic group (the textbook puts it in the Altaic family; many linguists treat Turkic as a separate family). Chinese, English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian are the UN’s official languages. Religions are divided into primitive (totemism, animism, fetishism), local (Hinduism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Shinto, Judaism) and world religions (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam). Christianity (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox) has the most followers, Islam (Sunni, Shia) is second with roughly two billion, and Buddhism is widespread in East and South-East Asia.
“On the map”: colour the main regions of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam in three colours on an outline world map (and explain the uncoloured areas).