Ethnicity means a large group of people who share race, culture, and possibly religion and language.
More census information came from Statistics NZ this week. This time, the information showed that New Zealand has 240 ethnicities. There are about 200 countries in the world so we have more people from different ethnic backgrounds than there are countries in the world. New Zealand is very multi-cultural.
How is this possible? A simple example is New Zealand 100 years ago. There were two main ethnicities in one country at that time, Maori and European. Australia also had two main ethnicities: Aborigine and European. Because there are many different aborigine groups who speak their own language, perhaps they feel they belong to a different ethnic group. North America has a number of Indian tribes with different language and culture.
When we filled in the census form, we could tick more than one box for ethnicity. For example, a person who had a Maori mother and a Samoan father would tick both Maori and Samoan.
The biggest Asian group in NZ is Chinese with a 16% increase since the last census in 2006. Next is Indian which increased 45% and then Filipino up more than 100%. Many Filipinos are here to rebuild Christchurch after the earthquake.
Vocabulary
census – StatsNZ counts the number of people in the country, usually every 5 years