| Term | Definition |
| Culture | Group of belief systems, norms, and values practiced by a people |
| Folk Culture | Small, homogenous population that is typically rural and cohesive in cultural traits that are passed down from generation to generation. |
| Popular Culture | Cultural traits such as dress, diet, and music that identify and are part of today’s changeable, urban-based, media-influenced, global society. |
| Local culture | People who see themselves as a collective or a community, share experiences, customs, and traits, and work to preserve their traits and customs in a place. |
| Material culture | Physical aspects of culture, including art, tools, buildings, and clothing that are made by people. |
| Nonmaterial culture | Non physical aspects of culture, including beliefs, practices, aesthetics, and values that are defined by people. |
| Hierarchical diffusion | Spread of an idea or innovation from one person or place to another person or place based on a hierarchy of connectedness. Specific type of expansion diffusion. |
| Hearth | Area or place where an idea, innovation, or technology originates. |
| Customs | Common practice or routine way of doing things in a culture. |
| Assimilation | When a minority group loses distinct cultural traits, such as dress, food, or speech, and adopts the customs of the dominant culture. Can happen voluntarily or by force. |
| Indigenous local cultures | People who see themselves as a community and also identify as indigenous, or original, to a place. |
| Context | The physical and human geographies creating the place, environment, and space in which events occur and people act. |
| Neolocalism | Conscious effort to define a sense of place for local or regional culture. Often used by local businesses, such as microbreweries, to identify local products with local or regional culture. |
| Ethnic neighborhoods | Area within an urban area where a relatively large group of people from one ethnic group or local culture lives. |
| Gentrification | Renewal or rebuilding of a lower income neighborhood into a middle- to upper-class neighborhood, which results in driving up property values and rents and the dispossession of lower income residents. |
| Cultural appropriation | When one culture adopts customs and knowledge from another culture and uses them for its own benefit. |
| Commodification | Transformation of goods and services into products that can be bought, sold, or traded. |
| Authenticity | The idea that one place or experience is the true, actual one. |
| Distance decay | Decreasing likelihood of diffusion with greater distance from the hearth. |
| Time-space compression | Increasing connectedness between world cities from improved communication and transportation networks. |
| Music festival | Concert event featuring multiple performers and additional entertainment that often lasts more than one day. |
| Hallyu (Hanryu) | South Korean waves of popular culture, especially in music, television, and movies. |
| Reterritorialization | When a local culture shapes an aspect of popular culture as their own, adopting the popular culture to their local culture. |
| Stimulus diffusion | A process of diffusion where two cultural traits blend to create a distinct trait. |
| Relocation diffusion | Spread of an idea or innovation from its hearth by the act of people moving and taking the idea or innovation with them. |
| Cultural landscape | The visible human imprint on the landscape. |
| Placelessness | Loss of uniqueness of a location so that one place looks like the next. |
| Convergence of cultural landscapes | Merging of cultural landscapes that happens with broad diffusion of landscape traits. |
| Urban morphology | The layout of a city, including the sizes and shapes of buildings and the pathways of infrastructure. |
