All social scientists (including sociologists) face mounting ambiguity in their use of keywords because new meanings are continuously stipulated for them by scholars unwilling to coin new terms and face resulting criticisms. The established procedure for handling this situation is to apply semantic analysis of texts in order to identify the various important meanings of any given term, hoping that users will be able to keep them in mind when they find these words in their various theoretical and research contexts, and in the context of diverse discourse communities. The ‘onomantic’ method, which seeks to add unambiguous terms to the ambiguous ones, provides a procedure for disambiguating texts: in addition to whatever terms a writer would naturally wish to use, it becomes possible to provide a supplementary term that can easily remove the ambiguity. In order to illustrate this procedure and, at the same time, to contribute to the development of the vocabulary for ethnicity research, concrete examples are offered. Five important meanings of ethnicity are identified, in a hierarchical relationship to each other: the generic concept; modern and pre-modern senses; the main pre-modern sense, and one of the modern senses. Unequivocal terms for each of these meanings of ethnicity are proposed. Overlapping terms like minority, race, and nationalism are also examined. The distinctions between numerical minority/majority; and politically dominant/marginalised are clarified so as to propose terms that can be used, for example, to refer to dominant minorities, marginalised minorities, and ‘non-ethnic minorities’. Similarly, the many overlapping senses of nationalism and race will be discussed and unequivocal terms suggested for each of them in Part Two, in the next issue. © 1991, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.
