Different cultural features are distributed in different parts of planet Earth. By studying these features, the planet can be divided into more or less unified cultural environments.

Each cultural environment contains certain spiritual and material cultural factors. Spiritual cultural factors encompass things such as religion and intellectual traditions, whereas material cultural factors encompass things such as architectural styles and cuisines.

Most human geographers divide the planet's population into seven distinct cultural environments:

1. Western
2. African
3. Islamic
4. Indian
5. East Asian
6. Southeast Asian
7. Oceanian

Historical factors have contributed to the formation and development of these cultural environments. Natural conditions, economic factors, and social conditions have also shaped cultural environments significantly. The size of the different cultural environments has varied throughout human history. For example, the Western cultural environment has expanded from Europe to North America, Latin America, Australia and South Africa over the last 500 years. This process has taken place at the cost of other cultural environments, such as those of the native populations of these regions.

A cultural environment can be described by listing its most common languages, major religions and other shared factors. However, this does not mean that cultural environments are completely unified. In fact, most cultural environments contain significant amounts of regional variation. The staggering amount of cultural variation on our planet can be understood by studying a list of the world's languages.

Major world religions (Wikipedia)

Cultural environments.​