Data source: Gina A. Zurlo, ed., World Religion Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2025).
| Glossary item | Definition |
|---|---|
| creole | Hybrid or pidgin language that has now consolidated into a language with its own mother-tongue speakers. |
| Daoists | Followers of the philosophical, ethical and religious traditions of China, sometimes regarded as part of Chinese folk-religion. Also spelt Taoists. |
| death rate | The number of deaths per year in a population expressed as a percentage or per thousand of the total population. |
| diaspora | A people of one country dispersed to other countries; the migration, spread, scattering and exile of a people abroad. |
| disaffiliated Christians | Formerly Christian persons; baptised Christians enumerated as affiliated by a majority or state-linked church but who have formally withdrawn or disaffiliated themselves from Christianity and now profess to be non-religious. |
| Druze | Members of an 11th-century Muslim Shia Ismaili schism with Christian and Jewish elements. |
| Eastern Orthodox | Referring to Chalcedonian Christians and their congregations and denominations that are in communion with the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. Excludes Oriental Orthodox. |
| emigration | The movement of migrants out of one country into another. |
| Ethnic religionists | Followers of a pre-Christian religion tied closely to a specific ethnic group, with membership restricted to that group; usually animists, polytheists or shamanists. |
| ethnolinguistic people | Distinct homogeneous ethnic or racial group within a single country, speaking its own language (one single mother tongue). A large people spread across two, three, four or several countries is treated here as being two, three, four or several distinct ethnolinguistic peoples. |
| Evangelicals | Affiliated church members calling themselves Evangelicals, or all persons belonging to Evangelical congregations, churches or denominations; characterised by commitment to personal religion (including new birth or personal conversion experience), reliance on Scripture as the only basis for faith and Christian living, emphasis on preaching and evangelism and usually on conservatism in theology. |
| folk-religionists | Adherents of local traditions or religions, often rural, in which elements of major world religions are blended with local beliefs and customs. |
| Hindus | Followers of the main Hindu traditions: Vaishnavism; Shaivism; Shaktism; neo-Hindu movements and modern groups; and other Hindu reform movements. |
| immigration | The movement of migrants into a destination country in which they are not native. |
| Independents | Churches or individual Christians separated from, uninterested in and independent of historic denominationalist Christianity. |
| infants | Children or babies under five years old. |
| Islamic schismatics | Followers of Islam, in other than its 2 main branches of Sunni or Shia. Islamic schismatics include Kharijite and other orthodox groups; reform movements (Sanusi, Mahdiya), also heterodox groups (Ahmadiya, Druzes, Sabbateans). |
| Ismailis | Followers of Ismailiya (also known as Seveners). Second largest part of Shia Islam and itself divided into Nizari Ismailis (Khojas) and Mustali Ismailis (Bohras). |
| Jains | Followers of the two traditions, Svetambara and Digambara; originating in India as a reform movement from Hinduism in the 5th or 6th century BCE. |
| Jews | Followers of the various schools of Judaism: in the United States: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform; in Israel: Haredi, Orthodox, Traditional, Observant and secular; ethnically, Ashkenazi (Eastern Europe), Mizrachi (Middle Eastern), Sephardic (Iberian Peninsula). |
| Lamaists | Lamaism. Tantrayana, or the Tantrism school of Buddhism (qv). |
| Mahayanists | Mahayana. The Greater Vehicle school of Buddhists (qv), or Northern Buddhism (China, Japan, et alia). |
| Mandaeans | Gnostics (Mandaiia), followers of 2nd-century CE Jewish-Christian fertility religion (Christians of St John, Followers of John the Baptist, Dippers, Sabaeans, Nasoreans), regarding John the Baptist as the Messiah. |
| Methodists | A tradition formed out of the Church of England in 1795. Many Methodist denominations are called ‘Wesleyan’, ‘Holiness’, or ‘United’, although most belong to the World Methodist Council. |
| mother tongue | Main language of a person’s home or childhood; the first language spoken in an individual’s home in early or earliest childhood. |
Data on 18 categories of religion, including non-religious, by country, province, and people.
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Membership data, year begun, and rates of change.
Population and religion data on all major cities & provinces.
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