2. Language Key issues Where are English – language speakers distributed?
Why is English related to other languages?

3. Language Earth has 7,299 languages
Only 10 are spoken by 100 million people
(English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, German, Mandarin, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic, Japanese)

4. How Geographers View it
1st look at where different languages are used, and how these languages can be logically grouped in space
2nd and 3rd why languages have distinctive distributions
Language is spread through migration – they bring it with them and when they arrive they merge theirs with the new language.
Distribution is due to interaction and isolation

5. Key issue #1 Where are English Language Speakers distributed?
Origins of Diffusion of English
Compare pg. 172 to 274
Classified as a Germanic Language
Celts arrived in 2000BC
450 AD European tribes invaded
German Invasion
Angles, Jutes, Saxons
Viking invasion
Norman Invasion
England conquered by the Normans who spoke French

7. Differences Between British and American English (New English)
Vocabulary and spelling
Result from isolation
200 years of little contact allowed them to develop independently
Names borrowed by Native Americans
New inventions were given new names
Want of separation created American Dictionary
Webster believed that spelling and grammar reforms would help establish a national language.
Pronunciation

8. Dialects in the United States
Change due to original settlers
Settlements in the East
Originally, majority were from England
Came from all different parts of England and merged their accents
Current dialect differences in the East
Northern, Midlands, and Southern
Language differences are more common in rural areas
Pronunciation differences
New England and Southern accents sound odd to the rest of the states because most Western settlers came from the Mid-Atlantic regions
Gold rush is credited with the relatively uniform language in the West

9. Key question #2 Why is English Related to other Languages?
Part of the Indo European language family
World’s most extensive spoken language family

11. Indo European Branches; pg 150
Indo-Iranian; South Asia
Romance; southwestern Europe and Latin America
Germanic; northwestern Europe and North America
Balto-Slavic; Eastern Europe
4 others are Albanian, Armenian, Greek, and Celtic

12. Indo-Iranian Branch
Most speakers – more than 100 individual languages and over 1 billion people
Divided into Eastern and Western group
Eastern = Indic
Western = Iranian

13. Indic (Eastern) India, Pakistan, Bangladesh
India; Hindi – Devanagari (written)
Pakistan; Urdu – Arabic (written)
Turn to page 151
India has 18 official languages and 10 million other people in India don’t speak any of these

14. Iranian Persian (Farsi) – Iran Pashto – Afghanistan and Pakistan
Kurdish – Western Iran, Northern Iraq, eastern Turkey
All written in Arabic

15. Romance Evolved from Latin with the Romans
Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian
Separated by mountains
Intervening obstacle

16. Germanic Branch West Germanic; English and German North Germanic
Low Germanic; Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans
High Germanic; English and German
North Germanic
Scandinavia; Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic,

17. Balto Slavic Eastern Europe East West South
Russian, Ukrainian, Belarus
West
Polish, Czech, Slovak
South
Slavic - Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia

19. Origin and diffusion of the Indo-European Language page 156-157
Gimbuta’s Kurgan Hearth theory
Renfrew’s Anatolia Hearth theory
Kurgan people were the 1st to speak Indo-European in 4300 B.C.
Lived between Russia and Kazakhstan
Nomadic herders, domesticated cattle, went West in search of grazing lands
diffused through warfare and conquests using their domesticated horses
Anatolian people were the 1st to speak Indo-European 6700 B.C.
Lived in Turkey
Went West because speakers became more numerous due to farming practices, which lead to migration
Diffused through peaceful sharing of food

20. Proto-Indo-European

21. Chapter 5 continued Key Issue #3
Where are other Language Families Distributed?

22. Classification of Languages
Pg. 145
Highest is Indo-European – 48%
2nd is Sino-Tibetan (China) 26% Pg
Language Families form the trunks of the trees, and individual languages form the leaves. The branches represent language branches

23. Distribution of Language Families
Sino-Tibetan Family
Sintic Branch
Mandarin – ¾ of China; most used in the world
420 one-syllable words. Humans cannot make that many different syllables, therefore there are multiple words for each syllable
Can combine syllables Shanghai – above and sea
Written language; 1,000s of characters. Some represent sounds, others are ideograms – represent ideas or concepts (pg 147)
Austro-Thai and Tibeto-Burman Branches
Thailand and Vietnam

24. Afro-Asiatic Language Family; 4th largest
Arabic and Hebrew
Languages were used to write the holiest books of the 3 major religions; Judeo Christian Bible and the Islamic Quran

25. African Language Families; pg 149
More than 1,000 languages and several thousand dialects
Pg. 165 shows why it can be a problem
Reason; 5,000 years of minimal interaction among thousands of cultural groups
Groups developed their own culture independently
Researchers continue to add newly discovered African languages to the list from the Niger-Congo language family

26. Nigeria 493 languages; 3 have widespread use
55% of the population use 490 languages
Leads to political unrest; wars, wanting to secede, discrimination, etc
Speakers of one language are unlikely to understand any of the others in the same family, let alone languages from other families

27. Key issue #4 Why do people preserve local languages?
English has become the principal language of communication and interaction around the world due to globalization, however, local languages are also being protected and preserved

28. Preserving Language Diversity
Extinct languages- ones used in the recent past but no longer spoken or read
Peru went from and 14 of those fewer than 100 people speak them
European Union – European Bureau for lesser Used Languages (EBLUL)

29. Nearly Extinct languages
Hebrew
Kept due to religion and the creation of Israel in Palestine after WWII
Celtic
Political reasons dismantled it, additionally job prospects
Survives through music
Wales has gone to extremes to preserve it

30. Global Dominance of English
English has become the most universal language
Lingua Franca; language of international communication to facilitate trade between two individuals who cannot speak each others main language.
Pidgin language; no native speakers, always spoken in addition to ones own native language

31. Ways to Preserve Local Languages
Factor Promoting Revival
Process/Example
Groups resist diffusion of English
 Government gives power to small groups. Those groups can operate separately from that Government.
 Government policies promote unity in multicultural state
Nationalism – policies to increase patriotism.
Improved communication allows small groups to keep in touch
Tourism
Government policies support
Language passed down through oral traditions
Government allows for a minority within the state to use a different language or nationalist use it to separate and resist the central government.
Government adopts an official language
States gain independence and re-establish old languages.
Phone, internet, photocopier, TV, specialized newspapers and magazines all in the original folk language
People visit from around the world to experience these minority languages and cultures
European Union’s Bureau for Little Used Languages. End forced assimilation of Native Americans