assimilation

Plural: assimilations

Noun

• the state of being assimilated; people of different backgrounds come to see themselves as part of a larger national family
• the social process of absorbing one cultural group into harmony with another
• the process of absorbing nutrients into the body after digestion
• a linguistic process by which a sound becomes similar to an adjacent sound
• the process of assimilating new ideas into an existing cognitive structure
• in the theories of Jean Piaget: the application of a general schema to a particular instance
• The act of assimilating or the state of being assimilated.
• The metabolic conversion of nutrients into tissue.
• The absorption of new ideas into an existing cognitive structure.
• A sound change process by which the phonetics of a speech segment becomes more like that of another segment in a word (or at a word boundary), so that a change of phoneme occurs.
• The adoption, by a minority group, of the customs and attitudes of the dominant culture.

Examples

• After centuries of British cultural assimilation, a majority of Irish now speak English instead of Irish.

Synonyms

absorption, acculturation

Antonyms

dissimilation

Related Words

acculturation, liaison, mutation, rendaku, sandhi