These words refer to ethnic groups or subcultures that can be identified by specific acts or shared traits, whether physical or cultural. Folk is the most vague of these words and applies better to periods of history before the Industrial Revolution. It refers to the common people or peasants of those eras and is based on a class rather than an ethnic distinction. It would, in any case, be rarely used except as a combining form, referring to the products of this class of people: folk music, folk culture, folk tales. It has a modern informal use to refer to one’s nearest relatives or the community in which one may have grown up: the folks back home; I write regularly to my folks .

Nation can, of course, refer to any government, ancient or modern, but in this context it refers more particularly to nomadic groups that maintain a common culture, despite their being widely scattered: the gypsy nation ; the Red Indian nations of North America; the Jewish nation that somehow survived despite its scattering during the Diaspora. People is a less confusing term to describe a group, whether scattered or not, that share a common ethnic and cultural background: a people as conscious of individual liberty as the Greeks; the peoples of the earth, each with a distinctive contribution to make towards defining mankind. People is used also in the sense of one’s family and is more common than folk in this respect: My people were all on the land. Tribe is more specific than people or nation in referring exclusively to a closely-knit primitive culture group: the tribes of Africa and the Pacific.

Race refers to those large divisions of humans into physical types that are determined solely by some combination of skin colour, facial characteristics and other imponderables. Physical anthropologists have concluded that all such attempts to define clear-cut races are inexact, subjective and unscientific: the Caucasian or white race ; the Negro race ; the Oriental races .