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Seeking an authentic multicultural encounter? Explore Chad, located in north-central Africa, with 8.6 million inhabitants representing over 100 ethnic groups, or Togo, which is home to 37 tribal groupings speaking 39 different languages and lacking much in common with each other’s culture or history.
However, if you find a plethora of different cultures overwhelming, you might choose to visit Argentina, Haiti, or the remote Comoros islands located off the southeast coast of Africa. They are among the nations with the least diversity of cultures worldwide.
This global multicultural map is derived from an examination of information presented in a recent study by German researcher Erkan Gören of the University of Oldenberg on cultural variety and economic growth.
Goren measured the degree of cultural diversity in each of the more than 180 countries he covered in his article. He used information on race and ethnicity together with a metric based on language similarity spoken by significant racial or ethnic groupings to arrive at his estimates. According to Goren’s email, “the hypothesis is that groups speaking the same or highly related languages should also have similar cultural values.”
He calculated a cultural diversity score for each nation using his metrics of language and ethnicity combined. The scores varied from 0 to 1, with higher scores denoting greater diversity and lower values denoting less.
The list of nations with various cultures includes the typical suspects, including Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, Togo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These and other African nations, with their plethora of ethnic groupings and languages, usually score well on any diversity ranking. Canada is the only western nation to rank in the top 20 most diversified. In terms of diversity, the US comes in about in the middle, being marginally more diverse than Russia but somewhat less diverse than Spain.
The least diverse nations in the world include Uruguay, Argentina, the Comoros, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Rwanda, and the Dominican Republic. Given the influx of Germans and Italians into Argentina following the world wars, the country might come as a surprise. However, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, 97% of Argentines are white, virtually all of them speak Spanish, and over 90% of them identify as Roman Catholics.
Rwanda’s low ranking on the list is perhaps partly a somber reminder of the genocide that occurred there in 1994 when the Hutu majority massacred thousands of Tutsis, an event that became known as the Rwandan Genocide.
A word of caution: ethnic diversity and cultural variety are two separate things. Because of this, a map of the world that depicts ethnic variety is somewhat different than one that uses Goren’s cultural diversity metric, which combines a nation’s language and ethnicity profiles.
Based on Goren’s research, the Harvard Institute of Economic Research created a map that looks similar to the one that was previously posted. (View it by clicking here).
Africa is home to the world’s most diverse nations, according to a comparison of the Harvard and Goren maps. Additionally, it appears from both maps that Canada and Mexico have greater diversity than the US, with the US falling somewhere in the middle.
South America is where there are the most differences between the two analyses. Brazil is ranked slightly above the upper-middle range of the Harvard group’s diversity scale, partly due to the country’s sizable mixed-race population. Nonetheless, Brazil is ranked by Goren as one of the least diverse nations in the world, largely due to the fact that almost all Brazilians, regardless of race or ethnicity, speak Portuguese.