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TheSámi people have been victim to forced assimilation tactics by the governments ofNorway,Sweden,Finland, andRussia during the 19th and first half of the 20th century. Today, their culture and languages are instead promoted, legally protected, and taught in schools.

Forced assimilation is the involuntarycultural assimilation of religious orethnicminority groups, during which they are forced by a government to adopt thelanguage,national identity,norms,mores,customs,traditions,values,mentality,perceptions,way of life, and often thereligion andideology of an established and generally largercommunity belonging to adominant culture.

The enforced use of a dominant language in legislation,education, literature, and worship also counts as forced assimilation. Unlikeethnic cleansing, the local population is not outrightdestroyed and may or may not be forced to leave a certain area. Instead, the assimilation of the population is made mandatory. This is also calledmandatory assimilation by scholars who studygenocide andnationalism.

Mandatory assimilation has sometimes been made a policy of new or contested nations, often during or in the aftermath of a war. Some examples are both theGerman andFrench forced assimilation in the provincesAlsace and (at least a part of)Lorraine, and some decades after the Swedish conquests of the Danish provincesScania,Blekinge andHalland the local population was submitted to forced assimilation, or even the forced assimilation ofethnic Teochews inBangkok by theSiam government duringWorld War I until the1973 uprising.

Forced assimilation is a mode ofassimilation that occurs by force, when one society conquers another society. It may manifest through the establishment of different types of colonies and tends to take place during the process of colonization. Forced assimilation may persist into the postcolonial era.^[1]

Numerous societies have undergone forced assimilation following the establishment of plantation, occupation, or settler colonies. This process often intersects with broader historical events such as enslavement, forced immigration, or foreign conquest. Forced assimilation occurs when a society is deprived of the ability to preserve its cultural or societal institutions and customs, potentially resulting in either full or partial assimilation.^[2]

Full forced assimilation entails the complete adoption of another society'slanguage,religion, and social practices, accompanied by full integration into the dominant society. Conversely, partial forced assimilation may involve the adoption of aspects of another society's language, religion, and social norms, yet without the acquisition of equivalent privileges enjoyed by the dominant society. Such incomplete assimilation is marked by the perpetuation of hierarchical relationships between the dominant and subordinate societies.^[2]

If astate puts extreme emphasis on a homogeneousnational identity, it may resort, especially in the case of minorities originating from historical foes, to harsh, even extreme measures to 'exterminate' the minority culture, sometimes to the point of considering the only alternative its physical elimination (expulsion or evengenocide).

States, mostly based on the idea of nation, perceived the presence of ethnic or linguistic minorities as a danger for their ownterritorial integrity. In fact minorities could claim their own independence, or to be rejoined with their own motherland. The consequence was the weakening or disappearing of several ethnic minorities.

The latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century saw the rise of Euro-Christiannationalism, which asserts theright to homeland for each nation with a common heritage throughrace, religion, and language. Previously, a country consisted largely of whatever peoples lived on the land that was under the dominion of a particular ruler. Thus, as principalities and kingdoms grew through conquest and marriage, a ruler could wind up with peoples of many different ethnicities under his dominion. This also reflected the long history of migrations of different tribes and peoples throughout Europe. Much ofEuropean history in the latter half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century can be understood as efforts to realign national boundaries with this concept of "one people, one nation".

InJapan andKorea, as each country stated themselves as a single-nation country, ethnic minorities had to hide their national identity for centuries, and many resulted in assimilation, migrants ofPeninsular Japonic andTungusic peoples in Korea.

Ainu andRyukyuan people in Japan were subject to forced assimilation.^[3][4]

Thailand sought to assimilate its manyChinese immigrants by only granting Thai citizenship if they renounced all loyalty to China, learned to speak Thai, changed their names, and sent their children to Thai schools.^[5]

During theCambodian genocide,Cham Muslimswere persecuted by theKhmer Rouge regime, first through forced assimilation, but later through direct violence (mass killing, raiding and destroying their villages).^[6]

At least one million members ofChina's MuslimUyghur minority have been detained inmass detention camps inXinjiang, termed "reeducation camps", aimed at changing the political thinking of detainees, their identities, and their religious beliefs.^[7] Approximately one millionTibetan minority children are experiencing the impacts of Chinese government policies designed to assimilate Tibetan people culturally, religiously, and linguistically, primarily through a residential school system.^[8]

Ethnic minorities inAzerbaijan, includingTalyshis (seeTalysh assimilation),Lezghins,Kurds,Tats andGeorgian-Ingilois, are subjected to forced assimilation intoAzerbaijani Turkic identity and ethnic discrimination by the Azerbaijani government since the Soviet era.^{[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]}

France practiced forced assimilation ofOccitans and otherethnic minorities whose native language was notFrench, such asAlsatians,Basques andCatalans.^[17] This process extended during the 19th and 20th centuries and was known asVergonha. It included "being made to reject and feel ashamed of one's (or one's parents') mother tongue through official exclusion, humiliation at school and rejection from the media" and was endorsed by French political leaders fromHenri Grégoire onward.^[18] The number ofOccitan speakers in France was reduced from 39% of the French population in 1860 to 7% in 1993.^[19][20]

To this day, France has also continuously refused to ratify theEuropean Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and native non-French languages in France continue to be denied official recognition, withOccitans,Basques,Corsicans,Catalans,Flemings,Bretons,Alsatians, andSavoyards still having no explicit legal right to conduct public affairs in their regional languages within their home lands.^[21]

As part of the ongoingRussian invasion of Ukraine the Russian government forcibly relocated thousands of Ukrainian children toRussia and adopted them out to Russian families,^[22] a process that is in violation of the forced assimilation prohibition of theGenocide Convention. On March 17, 2023, theInternational Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian PresidentVladimir Putin and Russian Children's Rights CommissionerMaria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova for their roles in this alleged war crime.^[23]

The denial of Kurds was the official state policy of Turkey for several decades, which denied thatKurds constituted an ethnic group and instead alleged that they are a subgroup ofTurks. The words 'Kurd' and 'Kurdistan' were omitted by state institutions, and during the 20th century, Kurds were referred to as Mountain Turks (Turkish:Dağ Türkleri). To this day, Turkey does not recognize Kurds as an ethnic group, though theKurdish languages are now permitted to be used.^[24][25]

It was denied that a Kurdish nation had ever existed; according to theTurkish History Thesis, the Kurds migrated fromTuranic Central Asia in the past.^[26][24] During the 1920s and 1930s, merchants were fined separately for every word of Kurdish they used.^[24] In school, students were punished if they were caught speaking Kurdish and during the 1960s Turkish language boarding schools were established in order to separate the students from their Kurdish relatives^[27] andTurkify the Kurdish population.^[28]

Enslaved Africans in the 16th to 19th centuries throughout North America,^[29][30][31] South America,^[32] and the Caribbean^[32] were forced to abandon their native languages, religions, and cultural practices.Many communities descending from these groups formed traditions and linguistic dialects^[33][34] that still face discrimination^[35] and attempts at forced assimilation.^[36][37]

In the United States and Canada, forced assimilation had been practiced against indigenous peoples through theAmerican Indian boarding schools andCanadian Indian residential school system.^[38][39] The same assimilation was also faced by French and Spanish speaking peoples populating the U.S. and Canada, through language bans, violence, and extreme prejudice by anglophones into and throughout the 20th century.^{[citation needed]}

DuringWorld War I andWorld War II, people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent faced societal and political pressure to stop speaking their native languages and abandon their cultural practices in the United States and Canada, even being interred in concentration camps (SeeJapanese American internment,^[40]Japanese Canadian internment,German American internment,^[41]German Canadian internment,Italian American internment,Italian Canadian internment).

As a part of itsgenocide of Indigenous Australians, the Australian government enacted policies of forced assimilation that included removingAustralian Aboriginal andTorres Strait Islander children from their families throughout the twentieth century.^[42]

Assimilation also includes the (often forced)conversion orsecularization^{[citation needed]} of religious members of a minority group.

Throughout the Middle Ages and until the mid-19th century, mostJews inEurope were forced to live in small towns (shtetls) and were restricted from entering universities or high-level professions.

In theKingdom of Hungary, most ethnicRomanians,Croatians,Czechs, and other non-Hungarians were forcibly converted toCatholicism, and those who resisted conversion were usually arrested.^[43]

• Danver, Steven L., ed. (2015).Native Peoples of the World: An Encyclopedia of Groups, Cultures and Contemporary Issues.Routledge.ISBN 9780765682222.
• Embrick, David G.; Rodríguez, Néstor P.;Sáenz, Rogelio, eds. (2015).The International Handbook of the Demography of Race and Ethnicity. Springer Netherlands.ISBN 9789048188918.

• Bibliography of genocide studies

• Cultural assimilation
• Cultural genocide
• Political and cultural purges

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