AP Human Geography

GEOGRAPHY OF LANGUAGES
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction
A. Language is at the heart of culture
1. Without language, culture could not be transmitted
2. Cultures of all sizes fiercely protect their language
3. In 1975, France banned the use of foreign words in advertisements, television and radio
broadcasts, and official documents
4. Preliterate societies–those without a written language–do not accrue a time-spanning
literature to serve as a foundation for ethnic preservation
5. Linguists estimate between 5,000 and 6,000 languages are in use today
6. Research is reconstructing the paths of linguistic diversification and throwing new light on
ancient migrations

II. Defining language

A. Defined–A systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized
signs, gestures, marks, or especially articulate vocal sounds
1. Vocalization is the crucial part of the definition
2. Animals use symbolic calls, but only humans have developed complex vocal communication
systems
3. Potential vocabulary of any language in infinite
4. Languages change continuously
B. Standard language
1. Sets the quality, which is a matter of cultural identity and national concern
2. May be sustained by official state examination of teachers, officials, etc.
3. People with regional influence and power decide what the standard language will be
4. Example of China
C. Dialects
1. Variants of the standard language
2. Regional accents can reveal the home of a person
3. An isogloss is a transition zone surrounding a particular linguistic feature

III. Classification and distribution

A. Classification
1. The issue of what is a language, and what is a dialect
2. Actual number of languages used on Earth is still a debate
3. Most linguistic geographers today recognize between 5000 and 6000 languages
4. Most linguistic geographers recognize more than 600 discrete languages in India, and more
than 1,000 in Africa
5. Language families are thought to have a shared, but fairly distant origin
6. In language subfamilies their commonality is more definite
7. Subfamilies are divided into language groups that consist of sets of individual languages
B. Distribution
1. Figure 8-2 shows the distribution of the 20 principal Indo-European language families
2. Greater detail of the subfamilies is shown in Figure 8-3
3. Spatially, the Indo-European language is the world's most widely dispersed
4. Indo-European languages are spoken by about half the world's population
IV. The major world languages
A. Introduction
1. Chinese spoken by more people than any other language (Table 8-1)
2. English ranks second; it is also a second language of hundreds of millions
3. Sub-Saharan African languages are not major languages because of fragmentation
4. Language family of Madagascar
a) Long ago settled by seafarers from islands of Southeast Asia
b) Predominant languages belong to the Malay-Polynesian family
c) Difference between place names on Madagascar and Africa reveals a piece of
historical geography
B. Languages of Europe (Figure 8-3)
1. Indo-European language prevails
2. Linguistic and political maps show high correlation between languages spoken and political
organization of space
3. Romance languages dominate in five countries
4. Eastern boundaries of Germany coincide almost exactly with the transition from Germanic to
Slavic tongues
5. Believed Ural-Altaic languages spread into Europe between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago
C. Languages of India (Figure 8-4)
1. Four language families
2. Only the Indo-European and Dravidian families have significant numbers of speakers
3. Indians speak about 15 major languages; all but four are Indo-European
4. Dravidian languages are clustered, and there is no certainty about their origin
5. Close relationship between regional languages and political divisions
6. Hindi is the principal Indo-European language with about 300 million speakers
7. The Indian language mosaic is not as intensely fragmented as the African
D. Languages of Africa
1. Most are unwritten
2. Grouped into four families (Figure 8-5)
3. The largest is the Niger-Congo family
4. The oldest are the Khoisan languages
5. If people of a large region speak languages that are somewhat different but still closely
related, it is reasonable to conclude they migrated into that region relatively recently
6. Languages with a common root but very different from each other indicate long-term
modification
7. Example of Bantu languages
E. Chinese: One language or many? (Figure 8-6)
1. One of the world's oldest
2. Spoken by the greatest contiguous population cluster on Earth
3. Divided by dialects that are mutually unintelligible
a) Mandarin dominates with about 700 million speakers
b) Wu Chinese has more than 100 million speakers
c) Yue (Cantonese) has about 70 million speakers
4. Some scholars argue that Chinese is not one but several languages
5. Several efforts have been made to create a truly national language
THE DIFFUSION OF LANGUAGES
II. Tracing linguistic diversification
A. Diffusion of languages
1. Long been charted through the analysis of sound shifts
2. Backward reconstruction of languages is called deep reconstruction
3. Find some vocabulary of an extinct language and try to go backward
4. More than 200 years ago, William Jones discovered ancient Sanskrit bore a striking
resemblance to ancient Greek and Latin
5. Jacob Grimm pointed out related languages have similar, but not identical consonants
6. From Jones and Grimm came the linguistic hypothesis that postulated the existence of an
ancestral (Proto) Indo-European language
7. This concept had major implications that created major research tasks
a) The vocabulary of the postulated source language must be reconstructed
b) The hearth or source of this language from which it spread must be located
c) The routes of diffusion should be traced
d) The ways of life of those who spoke and spread this language should be established

III. The language tree (Figure 8-2)

A. Divergence
1. Differentiation in language over time and space
2. Languages branched into dialects
4. Dialects became isolated and then became discrete languages
5. Language tree model remains central to language research (Figure 9-1)
B. Convergence
1. Human mobility complicates language study
2. Languages also spread by relocation diffusion
3. Long-isolated languages making contact– language convergence
4. Can make research unreliable
C. Replacement
1. Defined–replacement or modification of language by stronger invaders of a less advanced
people
2. Goes on today
3. No reason to believe it has not happened ever since humans began to use language
4. Hungarian is completely surrounded by Indo- European languages
5. What Proto-language gave rise to the Basque language is unknown

IV. Theories of language diffusion

A. Roots
1. Proto-language had words for certain landforms and other features of the landscape
2. More specifically some contained words for certain types of vegetation–trees, grass, etc.
3. Such information helps indicate the environment in which a language may have developed
B. Conquest theory
1 Some believed the Proto-Indo-European language originated somewhere north of the Black
Sea in the vast steppes of Ukraine and Russia
2. The language then spread west judging by the sound shifts
3. More than 5000 years ago, these people used horses, developed the wheel, and traded
widely
C. Agriculture theory
1. Some felt the spread of agriculture, not conquest, diffused the Proto-Indo-European
language through Europe
a) Postulated the source area as the hilly and mountainous terrain Anatolia in Turkey
 b) Proto-Indo-European language has few word for plains but many for high and low
mountains, valleys, mountain streams, rapids, lakes, and other high-relief landforms
c) Language also has words for trees, and animals that never lived on the plains
d) The realm's leading hearth of agricultural innovation lay in nearby Mesopotamia
2. Support for the theory
a) Research proved the existence of distance decay in the geographic pattern
(1) Certain genes become steadily less common as one moves north and west
(2) Farming in Anatolia led to overpopulation, which led to outmigration
(3) Farming peoples of Anatolia migrated in a slow moving wave into Europe
b) Nonfarming societies held out, and their languages remained unchanged
c) Some geographers prefer the Soviet dispersal hypothesis (Figure 22-2)
3. Drawbacks of the theory
a) Anatolian region is not ideal for farming
b) Some believe the proto language(s) was first carried eastward into Southwest Asia,
then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and on into the Balkans (Figure 9-2)
c) May be some truth in both hypotheses
d) An eastward diffusion must have occurred because of relationships between Sanskrit
and ancient Latin and Greek

V. Superfamily
A. Nostratic
1. Language development and divergence have been occurring for 90,000 or more
years(Figure 9-4)
2. Renfrew proposed three agricultural hearths gave rise to language families (Figure 9-5)
3. Russian scholars have long been in the forefront of research on ancient languages
a) Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky
(1) Studied independently of each other
(2) Came to similar conclusions
(3) Established the core of a pre-Proto-European language named Nostratic
4. Nostratic vocabulary revealed much about the people speaking it
a) No names for domestic plants
b) People were hunters and gatherers, not farmers
5. May date back 14,000 years
6. Believed to be the ancestral language for many other languages
7. Nostratic links widely separated languages
8. Some scholars have suggested that Nostratic is a direct successor of a Proto-World
Language that goes back to the dawn of human history

VI. Diffusion to the Pacific and the Americas

A. Pacific diffusion
1. New Zealand peopled about 1000 years ago
2. Australia peopled between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago
3. Diffusion originated from coastal China
4. Austronesian language arose in Asia
5. Malay-Polynesian–forerunner of a large number of languages
6. Speed of diffusion and simultaneous divergence of languages is remarkable considering the
water-fragmented nature of the Pacific realm
7. The whole eastern region of Polynesia was settled within several centuries (Figure 9-6)
8. Much remains to be learned about the reasons behind the complexity of the Pacific
language map
B. Diffusion in the Americas
1. The Americas are dominated by Indo-European languages
2.Pre-Columbian populations had not gone beyond 40 million at the highest speculation
3. As many as 200 indigenous language families have been identified
4. Appears first American languages diverged into the most intricately divided branch of
language tree– if one accepts the Bering land-bridge hypothesis
5. The Greenberg hypothesis
a) Proposed there are only three families of indigenous American languages
b) Each corresponds to a major wave of migration from Asia (Figure 9-7)
c) Amerind, the superfamily, is the most widely distributed
d) Na-Dene, spoken by indigenous people in northwest Canada and part of Alaska
e) Eskimo-Aleut is still concentrated along Arctic and near-Arctic shores
f) Many linguists disagreeing with Greenberg feel he did not follow proper procedures of
reconstruction
g) Hypothesis implies a period longer than the 12,000-to-13,000-year-ago immigration
into the Americas
h) Archaeological dating in Pennsylvania (16,000 B.P.), and Chile (apx. 33,000 B.P.)
i) May lend credibility to Greenberg's hypothesis, if proved beyond a doubt
j) May mean the first wave came across the Bering Strait more than 40,000 years ago
k) Dental data gathered by Christy Turner conclude that three waves of immigration too
place over a longer period that 12,000 years
6. The continuing controversy
a) Most linguists still doubt the three-wave notion
b) There still remain many gaps in our knowledge

VII. Influences on individual languages

A. Critical influences on diffusion of individual tongues
1. Speakers of nonwritten languages will not retain the same language very long if contact with
one another is lost
2. Three critical components have influenced the world's linguistic mosaic
a) Writing–texts are the primary means by which language can become stabilized
b) Technology–influences both production of written texts and interaction of distant
peoples
c) Political organization–key because it affects both what people have access to and
which areas are in close contact with one another
B. Printing press and rise of national states
1. Printing press
a) Invented in 1588, in Germany
b) Allowed for unprecedented production of texts
c) Luther Bible for German and King James Bible for English
2. Rise of national states
a) Had a strong interest in creating a more integrated state territory
b) Brought people together and exposed them to common linguistic influences
c) Established networks of communication and interaction
MODERN LANGUAGE MOSAICS
I. Introduction
A. Changing cultural composition in the United States
1. In little more than a decade from now Hispanics, not Afro-Americans, will be the largest
minority in the United States
2. Growing demand that Spanish become the country's second language
3. Regional concentrations of Hispanics in south, southwestern, and western states
4. Language issue has divided the Hispanic communities themselves
a) In 1990, a national Hispanic policy organization published a study result that well
over half of Hispanics are functionally illiterate in English
(1) Educational attainment was declining compared to the national average
(2) Some argued the data reflected the disadvantaged socioeconomic position of
Hispanics
b) Some point out many early European immigrants did not learn English very well
either

II. Language and culture

A. Debates going on in many countries
1. Issue is not preservation of the English language so much as its primacy in the national
culture
2. English has become the medium of international communication, especially in business
3. Example of Malaysia
B. Some countries have made English (or another foreign language) their official language
1. Provokes charges of neocolonialism
2. Emotional attachment to language is a practical issue

III. Language and trade

A. The Esperanto experiment
1. An effort to create a world language during the early twentieth century
2. Europeans were becoming more multilingual
3. Few wanted to learn another language that did not have practical utility
B. Lingua franca
1. Created by traders before the Europeanization of the world
2. The term comes from the Mediterranean Sea and its trading ports
3. A mixture of Frankish, Italian, Greek, Spanish, and Arabic
4. A product of linguistic convergence
5. Swahili has become the lingua franca of East Africa
a) Developed from African Bantu languages, Arabic, and Persian
b) Has a complex vocabulary and structure
c) Even used in eastern Congo
6. In West Africa Hausa is a regional tongue
C. Creolization
1. Pidgin–a language modified and simplified through contact with other languages
a) Common in the Caribbean region
b) English and African languages combined to form a pidgin English
2. May sometimes become a mother tongue
a) The process is known as Creolization
b) Pidgin becomes a lingua franca
3. Important unifying forces in a linguistically divided world
4. Sometimes difficult to distinguish between a dialect and a pidgin or creole language
IV. Multilingualism
A. Only a few true monolingual states left in the modern world
1. Include Japan, Uruguay, Venezuela, Iceland, Portugal, Poland, and Lesotho
a) Even these countries have small numbers of people who speak other languages
b) Japan has more than a half-million Koreans
2. Multilingual states–countries in which more than one language is spoken
3. In some states linguistic fragmentation reflects strong cultural pluralism
a) Can be a divisive force
a) Especially true in former colonial countries
b) Also true in the Americas (Figure 10-2)
4. Multilingualism takes several forms
a) Can have regional expression
(1) Example of Switzerland (Figure 10-3)
(2) Indigenous American tongues are still spoken in the Andean mountains of Peru
b) Considerable interdigitation of the speakers of different languages has developed
(1) Example–spatial interlocking of languages in South Africa
(2) Example of Russia's wanting the Russian language to become the lingua franca
5. The failure of Cyprus to be multilingual
B. Canada
1. The modern state is a combination of a large French-speaking territory with an even larger
English-speaking area
2. French speaking Quebec was given guarantees in 1867
a) French civil code was sustained
b) French language was protected in parliament and in the courts
3. Is still a divided society with language at the heart of the division
4. Example–the problem of language in Quebec, Canada (Figure 10-5)
C. Belgium
1. Divided into Dutch-speaking region in the north and French-speaking region in the south
2. Capital of Belgium is officially bilingual, but the majority speak French
3. Language regions reflect Belgium straddles line separating Romance and Germanic
branches of Indo-European
4. Nineteenth century efforts to build an integrated state
5. By the 1920s, activists were calling for the country to be partitioned along linguistic lines
6. Partitioning helped forge a sense of Flemish identity
a) Fueled a countermovement among Belgium's French speakers–the Walloons
b) Conflicts between linguistic communities became an increasingly central feature
c) Conflict has been largely nonviolent
d) Has led to fall of several governments and dominated political agenda on occasion
7. Language regions tend to foster regionalism
D. Nigeria
1. A colonial creation of almost unimaginable linguistic diversity
2. Three major regional languages
3. More than 12 major local languages spoken by 1 to 5 million people
4. Another 230 lesser but established tongues
5. Decided to adopt English as its "official" language
a) Has precluded major cultural conflict based on language
b) Caused problems for children first entering school knowing only traditional languages
V. Official languages
A. Serve different purposes
1. Used in the hopes of enhancing internal communication and interaction among peoples
who speak diverse traditional languages
2. Many former African colonies have adopted the language of their former colonial powers
3. Creating an official language has caused problems for some countries
4. Some former colonies chose two official languages
5. When Hindi was given official status in India, riots and disorder broke out in non-Hindi areas
6. Examples of other countries and their official languages are discussed
7. The United States has never proclaimed an official language

VI. Toponomy
A. The systematic study of place names
1. Place names can reveal much about the contents of a culture area
a) National origins of the people
b) Language and dialect
c) Routes of diffusion
d) History
2. Examples
B. Two part names
1. Many place names consist of two parts
a) A specific or given part
b) Generic or classifying part
c) The two parts may be connected or separate
2. Generic names can sometimes be linked to each of three source areas of United
States' dialects and their westward diffusion
C. Classification of place names
1. Historian George Stewart classified place names into ten categories
a) Descriptive–Rocky Mountains
b) Associative–Mill Valley, California
c) Incident–Battle Creek, Michigan
d) Possessive–Johnson City, Texas
e) Commendatory–Paradise Valley, Arizona
f) Commemorative–San Francisco
g) Folk-etymology–Plains, Georgia, or Academia, Pennsylvania
h) Manufactured–Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
i) Mistake–names involving historic errors in identification or translation
j) So-called Shift names–relocated names, double names for the same feature
2. Each category contains cultural-geographic evidence
D. Changing place names
1. Place names can elicit strong passions
2. African countries changed their names after becoming independent of the colonial powers
3. What's in a Name?
4. Name changes occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union
a) Thousands of places were renamed–sometimes to their Czarist-era appellations
b) Reformers, nationalists, and unreformed communists argued bitterly over the changes
5. Today in South Africa, the still-new government is wrestling with pressures for and against
placename changes
6. Professional story teller in an African village is not just a picturesque figure; his tales contain history
and psyche of his people
7. Language can reveal much about the way people view reality
8. Language and religion are two cornerstones of culture