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

2. Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Origin and diffusion of English
English is spoken by 328 million as a first language

3. English-Speaking Countries
Figure 5-2

4. Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Origin and diffusion of English
English colonies
Origins of English
German invasions
Norman invasions
Figure 5-3

5. Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Dialects of English
Dialect = a regional variation of a language
Isogloss = a word-usage boundary
Standard language = a well-established dialect

6. Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Dialects of English
Dialects
In England
Differences between British & American English
Figure 5-5

7. Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Figure 5-7
Dialects of English
Dialects in the US
Settlement in eastern US
Current differences in the eastern US
Pronunciation differences

8. Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?

9. Soft Drink Differences
Figure 5-8

10. Why Is English Related to Other Languages?
Indo-European branches
Language branch
Collection of related languages
8 branches
4 have many speakers:
Germanic
Indo-Iranian
Balto-Slavic
Romance

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

12. Why Is English Related to Other Languages?
Indo-European branches
Germanic
German invasion of England 1500 years ago
West
Most similar to English
High
Low
North
Scandinavia
Figure 5-10

13. Why Is English Related to Other Languages?
Indo-European branches
Indo-Iranian
Most speakers
Over 100 languages
2 Groups:
Indic (Eastern)
Hindi
Iranian (Western)
Figure 5-11

14. Why Is English Related to Other Languages?
Indo-European branches
Balto-Slavic
East Slavic & Baltic
Most widely used
Russian
West Slavic & South Slavic
Czechoslovakia
Polish, Czech, Slavic
Hostility between Bosnians, Croats, Serbs
3 distinct languages

15. Why Is English Related to Other Languages?
Indo-European branches
Romance
Latin origin
Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian
Mountains
Romance Language Dialects
Francien
Castilian

16. Romance Branch
Figure 5-12

17. Why Is English Related to Other Languages?
Indo-European branches
2 distinct languages or 2 dialects of the same language?
Creole
Mix of colonizer’s language & indigenous language

18. Why Is English Related to Other Languages?
Origin and diffusion of Indo-European
A “Proto-Indo-European” language?
Internal evidence

19. Nomadic Warrior Theory
Kurgans
4300BC
Nomadic herders of horses & cattle
Searched for grasslands
Figure 5-14

20. Sedentary Farmer Theory
Lived more than 2000 years before Kurgans
Language spread through agricultural practices
Figure 5-15

21. Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?
Classification of languages
Indo-European = largest language family
46% of the world’s population speak an Indo-European language

22. Language Family Tree
Figure 5-17

23. Language Families
Figure 5-16

24. Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?
Classification of languages
Sino-Tibetan = 2nd largest language family
21% of the world’s population speaks a Sino-Tibetan language
Mandarin: most used language in the world
Ideograms

25. Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?
Languages of East and Southeast Asia
Austronesian
Indonesia
Javanese = most widely spoken
Austo-Asiatic
Vietnamese = most widely spoken
Japanese
Uses phonetic symbols like Western languages
Korean

26. Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?
Languages of the Middle East and Central Asia
Afro-Asiatic
Arabic = most widely spoken
Altaic
Turkish = most widely spoken
Uralic
Estonian, Hungarian, and Finnish

27. Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?
African language families
Extensive linguistic diversity
1,000 distinct languages & thousands of dialects
Figure 5-19

28. Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?
African language families
Niger-Congo
95% of sub-Saharan Africans speak a Niger-Congo language
Nilo-Saharan
Khoisan
“Click” languages
San Bushmen
Figure 5-20

29. Why Do People Preserve Languages?
Preserving language diversity
Extinct languages
473 “endangered” languages today
Examples
Reviving extinct languages: Hebrew
Preserving endangered languages: Celtic

30. Why Do People Preserve Languages?
Preserving language diversity
Multilingual states
Walloons & Flemings in Belgium
Isolated languages
Basque
Icelandic
Figure 5-23

31. Why Do People Preserve Languages?
Global dominance of English
English: example of a lingua franca
Lingua franca = an international language
Pidgin language = a simplified version of a language
Expansion diffusion
Ebonics
Job opening

32. Why Do People Preserve Languages?
Global dominance of English
Diffusion to other languages
Franglais
French Academy (1635) = arbiter of French language
Spanglish
Denglish

33. The End.