All About People
A person is usually a group of people considered to be a unit, as is true with a nationality, tribe or the population of a country. Historically speaking, each nationality, tribe or nation had its own set of people that made it distinct from the others. These people were usually divided into different groups based on their language or tribe. The idea of nationhood came later on, when many people from different countries tried to form one. But in the past, there were no nations. The groups that existed at the time of migration were more like family unions than groups of people.
As was the case with the earlier classification of people, today the boundaries between peoples are more fluid. Many experts believe that today in the twenty-first century, there are more identities than ever before. This is particularly true of issues such as race and ethnicity, which in years past were thought of as black and white, while sexual orientations and religious beliefs are now much more blurred. This article attempts to classify different types of people according to how they are viewed by society.
When it comes to nationality, there are four types, the first being the plurinational; these are the people in various parts of the world who can be considered as a generic population, regardless of whether they have roots in the same country or in another one. For instance, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese are considered to be plurinationals. The second type of nationality is the uniclassic; these are the peoples of Europe, in addition to Africa and Oceania, who can be considered as national groups even though they have roots elsewhere. The third, and most famous, is the multicultural, which includes those persons who have originated from a number of cultures and countries, and who are thus regarded as part of the same cultural group. The fourth and last is the caste-based, which includes such persons as prisoners of fortune and servants of gods, which were common in ancient Hinduism.
When it comes to gender, four types of genders exist, namely, the neutered male, the aromatized female, the feminized male, and the neutered male and female. While the above-mentioned four genders are found in ancient populations, nowadays only the females are more often depicted. Furthermore, if a person belongs to the third gender, he or she is known as a transgendered person. Transgendered people do not identify with either male or female, but they feel that neither sex has an exclusive right to be called ‘man’ or ‘woman,’ as what they call themselves.
Ethnicity, unlike nationality, is more rooted in history. Within a nation, peoples can be classified into numerous categories, the main ones being ethnic, tribal and linguistic. The former is mostly based on genealogical history while the latter two are due to political subdivision or language influences. The plurilingualization of language is also an example of cultural ethnogenesis, which happened during the migration from Middle East to Europe, resulting to the creation of several languages, such as English, French, German, Latin, Greek, and so on. Similarly, the linguistic pluralism is a result of different linguistic groups merging together due to political, ethnoramic and religious factors.
However, ethnic distinctions are still present even today. In North America, Native Americans and African Americans are ethnically diverse, while Europeans are a majority group, with many speakers of Latin and Eastern European ancestry. Furthermore, language is a main force that unifies people, although religious and ethnic lines do influence the way people decide to divide the world into ethnicities. As a matter of fact, at present, there are more ethnic groups and languages around the world than there have been in the past. The ancient peoples did not have the technological and academic infrastructure that we have today, and as a result, ancient people were forced to develop their own culture and identity.