Forced assimilation is the involuntary cultural assimilation of religious or ethnic minority groups, during which they are forced by a government to adopt the language, national identity, norms, mores, customs, traditions, values, mentality, perceptions, way of life, and often the religion and ideology of an established and generally larger community belonging to a dominant culture.
States, mostly based on the idea of nation, perceived the presence of ethnic or linguistic minorities as a danger for their own territorial integrity.
[5] During the Cambodian genocide, Cham Muslims were persecuted by the Khmer Rouge regime, first through forced assimilation, but later through direct violence (mass killing, raiding and destroying their villages).
[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] France practiced forced assimilation of Occitans and other ethnic minorities whose native language was not French, such as Alsatians, Basques and Catalans.
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).
[24][25] It was denied that a Kurdish nation had ever existed; according to the Turkish History Thesis, the Kurds migrated from Turanic Central Asia in the past.
Many communities descending from these groups formed traditions and linguistic dialects[33][34] that still face discrimination[35] and attempts at forced assimilation.
[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.
[42] Assimilation also includes the (often forced) conversion or secularization[citation needed] of religious members of a minority group.
Throughout the Middle Ages and until the mid-19th century, most Jews in Europe were forced to live in small towns (shtetls) and were restricted from entering universities or high-level professions.
In the Kingdom of Hungary, most ethnic Romanians, Croatians, Czechs, and other non-Hungarians were forcibly converted to Catholicism, and those who resisted conversion were usually arrested.