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I am looking for a word that means that somebody only has one culture. For example, somebody immigrating from Country 1 to Country 2 would be bicultural. What is someone who has only one culture. I thought unicultural but I don't think that is correct.

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    Monocultural perhaps?
    – Matt Lacey
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 4:05
  • hmmmm apparently that is some sort of farming practice...
    – Sam Creamer
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 4:07
  • Well there is a whole family with words like that monomial-binomial, monosexual- bisexual. Don't even say you haven't heard of them there are in any language, we learn them in Math and ect. This is not a language question, more like cultural question - have I done my homework and heard monomial, polynomial, binomial and ect.
    – speedyGonzales
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 14:54

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Monocultural is what you want. One of the meanings of the noun monoculture is, in the OED’s definition, ‘A common culture or way of life; (now) especially a culture or way of life which is ascendant over a large (or global) area; a dominant cultural hegemony’ and it has been in use since 1968. The corresponding adjective monocultural is first recorded by the OED four years earlier.

The OED has no entry for unicultural.

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I go with Monoculture, as pointed out by LaceySnr's comment. Webster defines monoculture as

a culture dominated by a single element : a prevailing culture marked by homogeneity

There is also a reference to mono-culturalism in this article of Wikipedia.

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  • I understand what you're saying -- and it's a bit pedantic, but 'mono-' should go with words of Greek origin, like I said. Also, I don't think the questioner is asking about a society that is dominated by a single culture, but an individual who only "has" a single culture.
    – J D OConal
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 4:44
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    Culture is a word applying to a community. Even the OP's bicultural is defined as "Of or relating to two distinct cultures in one nation or geographic region." We simply have to tailor words for our requirements.
    – Bravo
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 5:00
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Uni-culture means Universal Culture, not mono-culture. Universal. I should know this, I coined it ten years ago,,, I thought...

Universal culture meaning the universal aspects of being a human are to be respected as a single unit of reality.. The rest of life is left to matters of taste. As in, no matter what your nationality is, you have the basic human/natural right to engage in matters of taste without criticism.

Matters of taste are inherent to the ability to do as one chooses as long as it does not harm another.

Universals are universally the same for each and every human being on this planet.

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The etymology of culture (meaning 'The distinctive ideas, customs, social behaviour, products, or way of life of a particular nation, society, people, or period. Hence: a society or group characterized by such customs, etc.') is rather complex. It essentially boils down to this: Latin via French and influenced by German.

We can use the uni- comb. form (which comes from Latin, we would not use mono- which is generally combined with words with Greek origins), which OED defines as:

Forming adjectives with the general sense ‘having, provided with, composed or consisting of, or characterized by one (thing specified or connoted by the second element)’.

Thus, I would say a person without only one culture would be unicultural, though one would be hard pressed to find this in any dictionary.

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  • The argument for prefixes is correct, but language does not always follow set patterns. As the OP and the answer notes, unicultural is not in use and so, not a good choice.
    – Bravo
    Commented Apr 24, 2012 at 5:02

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