1. The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography
Chapter 5: Language

2. Language: Where and Why
A system of communication through speech
A collection of sounds a group of people understand to have the same meaning
Literary tradition
Many languages have a written system of communication
Many more through out time do NOT have a written system, which makes it difficult to document language distribution
Official Language
Most countries designate one language to conduct business in
Countries with more than one official language may need both languages present in written form on documents, etc.
Language Families
Links between languages that show common origins

3. Key Issue 1: Where are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Origin and Diffusion of English
Dialects of English

4. Key Issue 1: Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Origin and diffusion of English
English is spoken by 328 million as a first language
Spoken fluently by another half billion
English colonies
1607 England began migration to North America
Colonized Ireland in 17th Century
Asia in the 18th Century
Africa in the 19th Century
Origins of English
German invasions
Germanic Tribes: Angles (Southern Denmark), Saxons Northwestern Germany), and Jutes (Northern Denmark)
Norman invasions (1066)
Came from Normandy in France
People of rank and nobility used old French as a language

5. English-Speaking Countries
Figure 5-2

6. Invasions of England
Figure 5-3

7. Key Issue 1: Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Dialects of English
Dialect = a regional variation of a language
Isogloss = a word-usage boundary
When people migrate to other areas regional differences blend
Standard language = a well-established dialect
Dialects
In England: Five major dialects emerged based on location
Northern, East Midland, West Midland, Southwestern, and Southeastern or Kentish
Differences between British and American English
Early settlers brought English
Later English settlers brought regional variations based on their region of origin
Pronunciation has changed more in England than in North America
Spelling variations between British and North American English (colour, color)
Vocabulary variations between British and North American English
Settlers rapidly adopted other words from other languages into their daily language

8. English Dialects
Figure 5-5

9. Key Issue 1: Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Dialects of English
Dialects in the United States
Settlement in the eastern United States
Current differences in the eastern United States
Three distinct isoglosses in the Eastern US
Northern, Midlands, Southern
Dialectical Differences: daily activities, food, and rural life
Word differences: soft Drink Example
Pronunciation differences
Three branches of migration that carried Eastern dialects westward
South of the Ohio River Valley settled by migrants from Virginia and other southern states
Midland/Mid Atlantic went to the North Ohio River Valley
New England went to the Great Lakes

10. Dialects in the Eastern United States
Figure 5-7

11. Soft Drink Differences
Figure 5-8

12. Key Issue 2: Why is English related to other languages?
Indo-European branches
Origins and Diffusion of Indo-European

13. Key Issue 2: Why is English related to other languages
Indo-European branches
Language branch = collected related languages
Common Ancestral Language
Indo-European = eight branches
Four branches have a large number of speakers:
Germanic: Northwestern Europe
Low German: Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian, Low Germanic
North German: English, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic,
Indo-Iranian: South Asia
Eastern Group: Indic (Hindi and many other variations [see book], Urdu)
Western Group: Iranian (Persian or Farsi in Iran, Pashto in Afghanistan and Western Pakistan, Kurdish in Western Iran, Iraq and Eastern Turkey)
Balto-Slavic: Eastern Europe
East: Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusan
West: Polish, Czech, and Slovak
South: Serbo-Croation is the original name, but since the Balkan wars the preferred names are, Bosnian, Serbian, and Croation
Romance: Southern Europe
Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian

14. Key Issue 2: Why is English related to other languages

15. Branches of the Indo-European Family
Figure 5-9

16. Linguistic Differences in Europe and India
Figure 5-10
Figure 5-11

17. Romance Branch
Figure 5-12

18. Key Issue 2: Why is English related to other languages
Origin and diffusion of Indo-European
A “Proto-Indo-European” language?
Difficult to prove: it would have existed prior to written language
Internal evidence
Common physical attributes of words in different languages
Shows common experience in daily life (Linguistic theory)
Disagreement on how Proto Indo-European evolved
Nomadic warrior theory: Marija Gimbutas
First Proto Indo European Speakers were Kurgan nomadic herders from the steppes near the border between Russia and Kazakhstan. Conquered much of the territory from Siberia to Europe, using horses as weapons
Sedentary farmer theory: archaeologist Colin Renfrew and biologist Russell D. Gray
Argues that the first speakers lived long before the Kurgans in eastern Anatolia (Turkey) and diffused westward to Greece and onward into other areas around the Mediterranean Sea.

19. Nomadic Warrior Theory
Figure 5-14

20. Sedentary Farmer Theory
Figure 5-15

21. Key Issue 3: Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?
Classification of languages
Distribution of Language families

22. Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?
Classification of languages
Indo-European = the largest language family
46 percent of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language
Sino-Tibetan = the second-largest language family
21 percent of the world’s population speaks a Sino-Tibetan language
Mandarin = the most used language in the world
Middle East and Central Asia
Afro-Asiatic: Arabic = most widely spoken
Altaic: Turkish = most widely spoken
Uralic: Estonian, Hungarian, and Finnish
African language families
Extensive linguistic diversity: 1,000 distinct languages + thousands of dialects
Niger-Congo: 95 percent of sub-Saharan Africans speak a Niger-Congo language
Nilo-Saharan
Khoisan : “Click” languages

23. Language Families
Figure 5-16

24. Language Family Tree
Figure 5-17

25. African Language Families
Nigeria’s Main Languages
Figure 5-19

26. Key Issue 4: why do people preserve local languages?
Preserving language diversity
Global dominance of english

27. Why Do People Preserve local Languages?
Preserving language diversity
Extinct languages
473 “endangered” languages today
Only a few older speakers remain
46 in Africa, 182 in the Americas, 84 in Asia. 9 in Europe, and 152 in the Pacific
Examples
Reviving extinct languages: Hebrew
Preserving endangered languages: Celtic (politics)
Multilingual states
Walloons and Flemings in Belgium
Isolated languages
Basque/
Icelandic/

28. Languages in Belgium
Figure 5-23

29. Why Do People Preserve Languages?
Global dominance of English
English: An example of a lingua franca
Lingua franca = an international language
Original meaning: Two languages mixed to create a trade language
Means: Language of the Franks, ascribed to Arab traders during the Middle Ages as they traded with Europeans, whom they referred to as “Franks”
Modern Meaning: A language common to many (English) used for International relations
Pidgin language = a simplified version of a language or Lingua Franca
Pidgin Languages have no native speakers
The language is spoken in addition to the native language
Expansion diffusion of English
In the past spread through migration and conquest
Recent growth has to do with Expansion Diffusion (snowballing of an idea rather than relocation of people
Ebonics: (Ebony+ Phonics)
Term coined to describe the ‘language’ of African Americans from the south to large urban areas

30. Why Do People Preserve Languages?
Global dominance of English
Like other cultural traits people are at times accepting and resistant to the Western tendency to dominate
Diffusion to other languages
Franglais
The French Academy (1635) = the supreme arbiter of the French language
The French are upset about the dominance of English
The diluting of the language by the addition of English words and phrases
Spanglish
The diffusion of English into the Spanish language
Denglish
The diffusion of English into the German language (Deutsch)

31. English–French Language Boundary
Figure 5-27

32. The End.
Up next: Religion