acculturatev.
/əˈkʌltʃᵿreɪt/, U.S. /əˈkəltʃəˌreɪt/ Originally U.S.
1. transitive. To adapt or assimilate (an idea, object, etc.) to a culture different from the one in which it originated; to acquire through acculturation.
ΚΠ
1917 Sci. Monthly Sept. 230 The theory of militarism..has been fairly well acculturated throughout the country.
1973 Art Internat. Mar. 30/1 Often in Western artworks, masculinity seems to have been softened, acculturated by the impress of an ideal.
1993 College Lit. 20 28 Though to us it may serve as a perfectly integral emblem for the high artifice of the ancien régime, the hoop was never naturalized, never completely acculturated.
2008 M. L. Bachman Recovering ‘Yiddishland’ vi. 223 Sometimes the Yiddish student is an ethnographer, approaching the poem as an exotic ‘other’, which she intends to capture in her own words—trying not to acculturate it in the process.
2. Frequently with to, into.
a. transitive. To cause (a person or group) to adapt to or adopt a different culture, esp. that of a colonizing, conquering, or majority group; to subject to acculturation.
ΚΠ
1918 P. A. Means Racial Factors in Democracy v. 131 The Incas of Peru, on conquering a low-cultured tribe, would move it bodily into the midst of a civilized community ‘where they would be surrounded on all sides by faithful vassals of the Ynca’ and so would be acculturated upwardly.
1923 Amer. Jrnl. Sociol. 29 197 The immigrant who comes to this country is acculturated to a pattern different from the one which he finds here.
1959 V. Packard Status Seekers (1960) xvi. 232 They [sc. private schools] acculturate ‘the members of the younger generation..into an upper-class style of life’.
1999 S. L. Kasfir Contemp. Afr. Art i. 20 The French..tried consciously to acculturate Africans in their colonies, making them citizens of France.
b. intransitive. Of a person or group: to adapt to or adopt a different culture; to undergo acculturation.
ΚΠ
1943 Public Opinion Q. 7 564 They will determine the atmosphere toward which the children acculturate.
1966 G. A. De Vos & H. Wagatsuma in G. A. De Vos Japan's Invisible Race xiii. 271 Only some minority groups that acculturate to a new society undergo disruptive changes.
1992 R. Wright Stolen Continents (1993) x. 233 Like the Cherokees, the Iroquois were under intense pressure to acculturate.
2010 C. E. Murdock Changing Places ii. 55 More people may have been converting either as they acculturated into their communities or because they thought conversion would make naturalization more likely.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, December 2011; most recently modified version published online December 2021).
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