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

4. Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Origin and diffusion of English
English is spoken by 380 million as a first language
(1.8 million as secondary)
English colonies
Origins of English
German invasions
Norman invasions

5. English-Speaking Countries
Figure 5-2

6. Invasions of England
Figure 5-3

8. Where Are English Language Speakers Distributed?
Dialects of English
Isogloss = a word-usage boundary (“ya’ll” in the South)
Dialects = a regional variation of a language
In England
Differences between British and American English

9. English Dialects
Figure 5-5

10. 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
Pronunciation differences

11. Quick Think-Pair-Share
You and your teammate(s) quickly write down every weird pronunciation or funny words you have heard or funny phrases spoken by people from a different state or area.

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

13. Soft Drink Differences
Figure 5-8

15. Language Family Tree
Figure 5-17

16. Why Is English Related to Other Languages?
Indo-European branches
Language branch = collected of related languages
Indo-European = eight branches
Four branches have a large number of speakers:
Germanic
Indo-Iranian
Balto-Slavic
Romance

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

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

19. Romance Branch
Figure 5-12

21. Why Is English Related to Other Languages?
Origin and diffusion of Indo-European
A “Proto-Indo-European” language?
Internal evidence – similar root words: beech, oak, bear, deer, bee, etc.
Nomadic warrior theory
Sedentary farmer theory

22. Nomadic Warrior Theory - Marija Gimbutas
KURGAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Kurgan!!!!!! hypothesis (also theory or model) is one of the proposals about early Indo- European language origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" (a term grouping the Yamna, or Pit Grave, culture and its predecessors) in the Pontic steppe (present day Kazakhstan – very nice!) were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo- European language. They were “nomadic” herders and migrated for greener grass…

23. Sedentary Farmer Theory - Colin Renfrow
The Anatolian hypothesis is also called Renfrew's Neolithic Discontinuity Theory (NDT); it proposes that the dispersal (discontinuity) of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia (present day Turkey – gobble, gobble). The hypothesis suggests that the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) lived in Anatolia during the Neolithic era, and associates the distribution of historical Indo-European languages with the expansion during the Neolithic revolution during the seventh and sixth millennia BC. It theorizes that the languages diffused as farmers migrated into Europe.

24. 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 – From Where?

25. Language Families
Figure 5-16

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. Language Family Tree
Figure 5-17

28. Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?
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

29. African Language Families
Figure 5-19

30. Nigeria’s Main Languages
Figure 5-20

31. Why Do People Preserve Languages?
Preserving language diversity
Extinct languages
473 “endangered” languages today
Examples
Reviving extinct languages: Hebrew
Preserving endangered languages: Celtic
Multilingual states
Walloons and Flemings in Belgium
Isolated languages
Basque
Icelandic

32. Languages in Belgium
Figure 5-23

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

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

35. English–French Language Boundary
Figure 5-27

36. American Accent Interactive Map

37. The End.
Up next: Religion