Many cite the US as the worlds most diverse nation as far as the racial and cultural backgrounds of its population, I’m wondering what the other “most diverse” nations in the world are.
As far as racial diversity goes, the United Nations tried to survey this very topic:
UN Statistics Division - Demographic and Social Statistics - Ethnocultural characteristics
They found it difficult because different countries had different surveying techniques; because there are many different ways to measure diversity (race, language, nationality, etc.); because people reported belonging to more than one category, etc.
The statistics are all there if you’re interested. The CIA World Factbook offers a similar chart.
As for cultural diversity, well, that’s probably more subjective and thus difficult to quantify. But let’s see what the others here say.
I would not assume that the United States is the most diverse, because on many measures other countries are far more diverse.
The first question is whether you are measuring native-born diversity (i.e., ethnic groups, languages, religions, etc., of people born within the country) or you are measuring immigrant diversity (i.e., the proportion of the country’s population from other countries, and the diversity of those source countries). The United States has both, and they get conceptually mixed up together.
The second is what kind of diversity you are measuring: ethnic group, race, language, country of origin, religion, etc. On one of these measures, language, the most diverse country in the world is Papua New Guinea – but you would not consider that country particularly diverse on any other measure.
So, agree on what “diversity” means, and then you can work out which countries come first, second, third, etc.
I would say that Australia was possibly number one. But I have no stats to back it up. I would not make a statement that USA was necessarily the most diverse.
The United States wouldn’t be number two on the language measure, either - India and Nigeria (at least - there may be others) have substantially more linguistic diversity than the United States.
The question is unanswerable without a specific definition of “diversity”. Is it the number of different cultures? languages? ethnicities? What about areas that are historically home to many, many ethnic groups - is that more or less diverse than a place like the United States which has immigration from most parts of the world but is native territory for substantially fewer ethnic groups? Does the percentage belonging to the majority matter? Because imagine a country that was 99% ethnically homogeneous but had very small populations of a huge number of different groups - to me, that strikes me as “less diverse” than a place without a clear majority, but how do you properly measure and evaluate that? Do the people have to come in different colors? That generally would require fairly recent immigration from far away - but is it less diverse to count the numerous cultures of Papua New Guinea, many of which are very different from one another?
I figured there would be some hitches in asking this question, but I’m now seeing that its a little more vague than I had realized.
Come to think of it, I don’t know *exactly *what I mean by diversity. I think I meant people coming from all over the world to settle in one place, but then would that mean that I was basing my definition of “diversity” just on immigration.
You see, I hear people from all over the world saying that the US is the most diverse nation in the world, so I think I assumed there had been some agreed definition of what’s diverse and there were facts to back up such a statement.
So, what do people mean by diverse when they say that the US is the most diverse nation in the world. There are people who say that…please tell me I didn’t make that up too.
I guess I’ve always thought of Russia as one of the most diverse countries. It spans so many time zones and icorporates so many ethnic groups, from eastern europeans to turks to the various Siberian groups.