clannish
/ˈklanɪʃ
/adjective chiefly derogatory
(Of a group or their activities) tending to exclude others outside the group: they are a clannish lot with no time for foreigners...
- They are insular, cliquey and clannish.
- I can't stand how limited, how clannish, how narrow-minded they are!
- The county is notorious for clannish thinking when it comes to the outside world.
Synonyms
cliquey, cliquish, insular, exclusive;
unfriendly, unwelcoming;
narrow, parochial, provincial
Derivatives
clannishly
- Although she is an Irish Catholic, Delia has fallen in love with a Protestant, married him, and moved away from the ethnic enclave where the rest of her family clannishly resides.
- Many nationalities are here represented - mixed in some localities, clannishly separated in others.
- While it is true that professionals stick together clannishly, the US system is superior on paper if not on the ground.
clannishness
- It's just as hard to penetrate the clannishness of islanders who've lived and played apart from the world for generations.
- It's a nasty world, Scorsese agrees - a world of too much passion and too little sense, of ancient blood feuds and perilous clannishness.
- One of the most infamous examples in America of the Scottish tendency to clannishness is the Hatfield and McCoy feud of the 1880s in the Tug River Valley along the West Virginia and Kentucky border.