What Is a People Group?
A people group is a significantly large sociological grouping of individuals who perceive themselves to have a common affinity with one another. For evangelization purposes, a people group is the largest group within which the Gospel can spread as a church planting movement without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance."

In many parts of the world lack of understandability serves as the main barrier and it is appropriate to define people group primarily by language with the possibility of sub-divisions based on dialect or cultural variations. In other parts of the world, most notably in portions of South Asia, acceptance is a greater barrier than understandability. In these regions, caste, religious tradition, location, common histories and legends, plus language may be used to define the boundaries of each people group.

We use the terms "people", "people group" and "ethnic people" synonymously. However, others may distinguish between the terms.

> Additional helpful terms and definitions from The Joshua Project

What Distinguishes One People Group from Another?
Ideally, "people group" would always be defined to mean (a) all individuals in the group understand each other reasonably well and (b) cultural/relationship barriers aren't so high that the transmission of the Gospel is seriously impeded. However, there are situations where compromises are in order.

Consider the most complicated case, India. If we strictly defined "people group" this way in India, all individuals in each people group would speak the same language and would be in the same caste or tribe. What would it lead to? We would immediately create over 16,000 people groups in India alone (some castes speak 50-60 languages). This would be overwhelming, from a ministry perspective.

Defining People Groups By the "Highest Barrier"
We feel an argument can be made for defining "people group" according to the highest of the two barriers (understandability and acceptance), in some circumstances. If understandability is the most important barrier, then a linguistic, or an ethno-linguistic, approach is used. With this approach, one people group doesn't speak more than one language (apart from occasional bi-lingual individuals), although more than one people group may speak a given language if cultural or dialect differences warrant. In most of the world, this is the approach we use.

If the cultural/relationship barrier is the most important barrier (as it often is in South Asia), then we treat caste/tribe as the first criterion for separation. With this approach, one people group may speak more than one language. And as with the first approach, one language may be spoken by more than one people group. (Note that multi-lingualism is not so much in view as the situation where some individuals in the group speak language A and others speak language B. Some may be multi-lingual, but that's not the main issue.)

Define People Groups by Language Only?
The likely alternative is to always present a list of language groups, with some sub-divisions of language groups (an ethno-linguistic list). The first cut is always on language, using this alternative. Consequently, church planters and disciplers focus on ethno-linguistic groups, attempting to plant churches (oftentimes) among castes and tribes that mistrust or dislike each other. People may understand each other, but do they accept each other?Allowing one people group to speak more than one language in the database is a compromise. It is a way to present a somewhat simplified picture of the church planting task, at the risk of over-simplifying the understandability barriers within people groups.

> More information on People Groups from The Joshua Project website

> Peoples Around the World from the International Mission Board