chapter 4 The Geography of
Language
LOCATING THE SPOKEN WORD
Cell phone service provider advertisement in Mexico. Feisbuquear is a Spanglish verb
meaning “to Facebook.”
Why make up a word that doesn’t exist in Spanish or
English, but instead is located between the two
languages?
Think about this question and photo as you read. We
will revisit them in Seeing Geography on page 147.
Learning Objectives
4.1 Identify the geographical patterns of languages.
4.2 Understand how languages and dialects have come to
exist, move, and change.
4.3 Evaluate the relationship between technology and
language.
4.4 Explain the relationships between language and the
physical environment.
4.5 Characterize the ways languages are visibly part of the
cultural landscape.
Language is one of the primary features that distinguish humans
from other animals. Many animals, including dolphins, whales, and
birds, do indeed communicate with one another through patterned
systems of sounds, movements, or scents and other chemicals.
Some nonhuman primates have been taught to use sign language to
communicate with humans. The complexity of human language, its
ability to convey nuanced emotions and ideas, and its importance for
our existence as social beings sets it apart from the communication
systems used by other animals.
In many ways, language is the essence of human culture. It
provides the single most common variable by which different cultural
groups are identified and by which groups assert their unique
identity. Language not only facilitates the cultural diffusion of
innovations; it also helps to shape the way we think about, perceive,
and name our environment. Language, a mutually agreed-upon
system of symbolic communication, is the main vehicle by which
learned belief systems, customs, and skills pass from one generation
to the next.
Region
4.1 Identify the geographical patterns of languages.
While there are relatively few linguistic families, the spatial variation
of speech is remarkably complicated, in part because of the intricate
regional patterns (Figure 4.1). Because language is such a central
component of culture, understanding the spatiality of language, and
how and why its patterns change over time, provides a valuable
window into human geography. The logical place to begin is with the
regional theme.
Description
The major linguistic families are defined as follows by the following categories.
Under Indo-European family are Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Iranic, Indic, and
other Indo-European. Under Sino-Tibetan family are Chinese and Tibeto-Burman.
Under Afro-Asiatic family are Semitic and Hamitic. Under other language families
are Altaic, Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Uralic, Austro-Asiatic, Japanese and
Korean, and other families. The following are listed under other families by letter. I,
Inuktitut. A, Amerindian with several language families. C, Caucasic. N dash S,
Nilo-Saharan. K, Khoisan. P s, Paleosiberian. D, Dravidian. P, Papuan. A b,
Aborigine. R, Romance. Various portions on both North and South America are
shaded and shown to depict various linguistic families present in those areas.
Greenland and the northern coast of Alaska and Canada are shown to have an
Inuktitut background. Slightly south of that, the northern portions of most Canadian
provinces are shown to have an Amerindian background. The mid portion of North
America, including southern Canada and most of the United States, has a
Germanic background. The majority of Central America and South America, as
well as the southwestern United States, have a Romance background with two
small pockets alone having an Amerindian background. There are pockets of
Amerindian backgrounds in central Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, central Brazil,
and along the northwestern through western border of Brazil. A small pocket along
the northern border of South America has a Germanic background.
FIGURE 4.1 The major linguistic formal culture regions of the world. Although
there are thousands of languages and dialects in the world, they can be grouped into a
few linguistic families. The Indo-European language family represents about half of the
world’s population. It spread throughout the world, in part, through Europe’s empirebuilding efforts.
Description
The countries and their respective linguistic families are as follows. Major portion
of Australia and New Zealand: Germanic. Central portion of Australia: Aborigine.
Papua New Guinea: Aborigine. Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Micronesia, and
Madagascar: Austronesian. Portions of Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam:
Austro-Asiatic. Japan and Korea: Japanese and Korean. Portion of Laos and
southern China: Tibeto-Burman. Portions of Northern China, Nepal, India, Taiwan,
and Hong Kong: Chinese. Northern, central, and western part of India, as well as
central and southern portions of Sri Lanka: Indic. South India & top portion of Sri
Lanka: Dravidian. Northern Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Northern China,
Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and northern Iran: Altaic. Russia, Northern
Kazakhstan, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia and
Northern Russia and Finland: Uralic. Sweden, Germany, Norway, Netherlands,
Belgium, Luxemburg, United Kingdom: Germanic. France, Spain, Portugal, and
Switzerland: Romance. Lithuania, Kaliningrad, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia,
and portion of Azerbaijan: Other Indo-European. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and
West Pakistan: Iranic. Small pocket in Pakistan is Caucasic. Saudi Arabia, Yemen,
Oman, portions of Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, West Sahara,
Mauritania, West Mali, Sudan, top portion of South sudan, Ethiopia: Semitic.
Kenya, Somalia, East Ethiopia, Eritrea, pockets of Algeria and Tunisia, Niger,
Nigeria, portions of Cameroon: Hamitic. Portions of Chad, Central African
Republic, South Sudan, the northern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda,
Burundi: Nilo-Saharan. Portions of Namibia and Botswana: Khoisan. Mid through
southern Africa: Niger-Congo.
Language Classifications
Separate languages are those that cannot be mutually understood.
In other words, a monolingual speaker of one language cannot
comprehend the speaker of another (Figure 4.2, page 120).
Dialects, by contrast, are variant forms of a language where mutual
comprehension is possible. A speaker of English, for example, can
generally understand that language’s various dialects, regardless of
whether the speaker comes from Australia, Scotland, or Mississippi.
Nevertheless, a dialect is distinctive enough to label its speaker as
hailing from one place or another, or even from a particular city.
About 7000 languages and many more dialects are spoken today.
FIGURE 4.2 How to sound like a dog in 14 languages. Although a dog obviously
sounds the same in any part of the world, the speakers of various human languages
render that sound very differently.
Description
The various languages in which each dog barks are as follows. Woof, English.
Gav, Russian. Ouaf, French. Guau, Spanish. Waf, Dutch. Wan, Japanese. Voff,
Icelandic. Ham, Romanian. Bau, Italian. Hav, Turkish. Vaagh, Persian. Wong,
Cantonese. Guk, Indonesian, and Meong, Korean.
When different linguistic groups come into contact, a pidgin
language, characterized by a very small vocabulary derived from the
languages of the groups in contact, often results. Pidgins primarily
serve the purposes of trade and commerce: they facilitate exchange
at a basic level but do not have complex vocabularies or
grammatical structures. An example is Tok Pisin, which means, “talk
business.” Tok Pisin is a largely English-derived pidgin spoken in
Papua New Guinea, where it has become the official national
language in a country where many native Papuan tongues are
spoken. Although New Guinea pidgin is not readily intelligible to a
speaker of Standard English, certain common words such as gut bai
(“good-bye”), tenkyu (“thank you”), and haumas (“how much”) reflect
the influence of English. When pidgin languages acquire fuller
vocabularies and become native languages of their speakers, they
are called creole languages. Obviously, deciding precisely when a
pidgin becomes a creole language has at least as much to do with a
group’s political and social recognition as it does with what are, in
practice, fuzzy boundaries between language forms (see also Doing
Geography: Active Learning, on page 146).
Another response to the need for speakers of different languages
to communicate with one another is the elevation of one existing
language to the status of a lingua franca. A lingua franca is a
language of communication and commerce spoken across a wide
area where it is not a mother tongue. The Swahili language enjoys
lingua franca status in much of East Africa, where inhabitants speak
a number of other regional languages and dialects. English is fast
becoming a global lingua franca. Finally, regions that have
linguistically mixed populations may be characterized by
bilingualism, which is the ability to speak two languages with
fluency. For example, along the U.S.–Mexico border, so many
residents speak both English and Spanish (with varying degrees of
fluency) that bilingualism in practice—even if not in policy—means
there is no need for a lingua franca.
Language Families
One way in which geolinguists simplify the mapping of languages is
by grouping them into language families: tongues that are related
and share a common ancestry. Words are simply arbitrary sounds
associated with certain meanings. Thus, when words in different
languages are alike in both sound and meaning, they may well be
related. Over time, languages interact with one another, borrowing
words, imposing themselves through conquest, or organically
diverging from a common ground. Languages and their interrelations
can thus be graphically depicted as a tree with various branches
(Figure 4.3).
FIGURE 4.3 Linguistic family tree. Shown here is a detailed image of one branch of
the linguistic family tree.
(Source: Adapted from Ford.)
Description
The linguistic families and the forthcoming languages follow. Indo-European has
four main branches: Thraco-Illytian, Celtic-Italiao-Tocharian, Aryanco-GrecoArmenic, and Balto-Slavo-Germanic. Thraco-Illyrian leads to a single language,
Albanian. It also leads to another family: Anatolian, which sub-branches into:
Hittite, Palaic, Lydian, Luwian, and Lycian. Celtic-Italo-Tocharin branches into Italic
and Proto-Celtic. Italic sub-branches into both Octo-Umbrian and Latin. Latin
branches into the Romance languages, which are: Italian, Portuguese, French,
Spanish, Catalian, and Romanian. Proto-Celtic leads to Cornish, Brittanic, Gaelic,
and Manx. Brittanic branches into Breton and Welsh. Gaelic branches into Scottish
and Irish. These four languages are named as Celtic. Balto-Slavo-Germanic leads
to Proto-Germanic and Balto-Slavic. Germanic branches into Western-Germanic
and Northern-Germanic. Western Germanic branches into Flemish, Dutch,
German, Frisian, and English. Northern-Germanic branches into Swedish and
Danish, marked as Scandinavian. Northern-Germanic also branches into
Norwegian, which leads to Icelandic. All Germanic outshoots are named together
as Germanic. Balto-Slavic leads to Baltic and Slavic. Slavic branches into three
languages: Southern Slavic, Eastern Slavic, and Western Slavic. Southern Slavic
leads to: Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, and Slovenian. Eastern Slavic leads to
Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian. Western Slavic leads to Polish, Slovak, and
Czech. All Slavic outshoots are termed as Slavic. Baltic branches into Old
Prussian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, collectively marked as Baltic. Aryano-GrecoArmenic leads to Armeno-Aryan, which sub-divides into Armenian, Greek, and
Indo-Irani. Greek branches into Arcadian, Aeolic, Ionic, and Doric. These are
collectively marked as Greek. Indo-Irani leads to Old Iranian, Hindi, and Sanskrit.
Old-Iranian leads to Baluchi, Pashto, and Persoan or Farsi. Sanskrit leads to
Marathi, Gujarati, Urdu, Sinhalese, Panjabi, and Bengali, which are collectively
marked as Indic.
Indo-European Language Family
The largest and most widespread language family is the IndoEuropean, which is spoken on all the continents and is dominant in
Europe, Russia, North and South America, Australia, and parts of
southwestern Asia and India (see Figure 4.4, page 122). Romance,
Slavic, Germanic, Indic, Celtic, and Iranic are all Indo-European
subfamilies. These subfamilies, in turn, are divided into individual
languages. For example, English is a Germanic Indo-European
language. Six Indo-European tongues, including English, are among
the 10 most spoken languages in the world as classified by the
number of native speakers (Table 4.1, page 122).
TABLE 4.1 The 10 Leading Languages in Numbers of
Native Speakers*
Language
Family
Speakers
(in
millions)
Main Areas Where Spoken
Chinese
SinoTibetan
1284
China, Taiwan, Singapore
Spanish
IndoEuropean
437
Spain, Latin America, southwestern United
States
English
IndoEuropean
372
British Isles, United States, Caribbean,
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,
Philippines, former British colonies in tropical
Asia and Africa
Arabic
AfroAsiatic
295
Middle East, North Africa
Bengali
IndoEuropean
292
Bangladesh, eastern India
Hindi
IndoEuropean
260
Northern India, Pakistan
Portuguese
IndoEuropean
219
Portugal, Brazil, southern Africa
Russian
IndoEuropean
154
Russia, Kazakhstan, parts of Ukraine and other
former Soviet republics
Japanese
Japanese
and
Korean
128
Japan
Lahnda
IndoEuropean
84.3
Pakistan
*“Native speakers” means mother tongue.
Source: Ethnologue, 2017, http://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size.
Comparing the vocabularies of various Indo-European tongues
reveals their kinship. For example, the English word mother is similar
to the Polish matka, the Greek meter, the Spanish madre, the Farsi
madar in Iran, and the Sinhalese mava in Sri Lanka. Such similarities
demonstrate that these languages have a common ancestral tongue.
Sino-Tibetan Language Family
Sino-Tibetan is another of the major language families of the world
and is second only to Indo-European in numbers of native speakers.
The Sino-Tibetan region extends throughout most of China and
Southeast Asia (see Figure 4.3). The two language branches that
make up this group, Sino- and Tibeto-Burman, are believed to have
had a common origin some 6000 years ago in the Himalayan
Plateau; speakers of the two language groups subsequently moved
along the great Asian rivers that originate in this area. “Sino” refers
to China and in this context indicates the various languages spoken
by more than 1.4 billion people in China. Han Chinese (Mandarin) is
spoken in a variety of dialects and serves as the official language of
China. The nearly 400 languages and dialects that make up the
Burmese and Tibetan branch of this language family border the
Chinese language region on the south and west. Other East Asian
languages, such as Vietnamese, have been heavily influenced by
contact with the Chinese and their languages, although it is not clear
that they are linguistically related to Chinese at all.
Afro-Asiatic Language Family
The third major language family is the Afro-Asiatic. It consists of two
major divisions: Semitic and Hamitic. The Semitic languages cover
the area from the Arabian Peninsula and the Tigris-Euphrates river
valley of Iraq westward through Syria and North Africa to the Atlantic
Ocean. Despite the considerable size of this region, there are fewer
speakers of the Semitic languages than you might expect because
most of the areas that Semites inhabit are sparsely populated
deserts. Arabic is by far the most widespread Semitic language and
has the greatest number of native speakers, about 295 million.
Although many different dialects of Arabic are spoken, there is only
one written form.
Hebrew, which is closely related to Arabic, is another Semitic
tongue spoken by 9 million people worldwide (but of those, only 7
million speak it fluently). For many centuries, Hebrew was a “dead”
language, used only in religious ceremonies by millions of Jews
throughout the world. With the creation of the state of Israel in 1948,
a common language was needed to unite the immigrant Jews, who
spoke the languages of their many different countries of origin.
Hebrew was revived as the official national language of what
otherwise would have been a polyglot, or multi-language, state
(Figure 4.4). Amharic, a third major Semitic tongue, is spoken today
by 22 million people in the mountains of East Africa.
FIGURE 4.4 Sign in Arab quarter of Nazareth. Many of Israel’s cities are home to
diverse populations. This sign at a child-care center reflects Israel’s polyglot
population, with its English, Arabic, and Hebrew wording.
Smaller numbers of people who speak Hamitic languages share
North and East Africa with the speakers of Semitic languages. Like
the Semitic languages, these tongues originated in Asia but today
are spoken almost exclusively in Africa by the Berbers of Morocco
and Algeria, the Tuaregs of the Sahara, and the Cushites of East
Africa.
Other Major Language Families
Most of the rest of the world’s population speak languages belonging
to one of six remaining major families. The Niger-Congo language
family, which is spoken by about 400 million people, dominates
Africa south of the Sahara Desert. The greater part of the NigerCongo culture region belongs to the Bantu subgroup. Both NigerCongo and its Bantu constituent are fragmented into a great many
different languages and dialects, including Swahili. The Bantu and
their many related languages spread from what is now southeastern
Nigeria about 4000 years ago, first west and then south in response
to climate change and new agricultural techniques.
Flanking the Slavic Indo-Europeans on the north and south in
Asia are the speakers of the Altaic language family, including Turkic,
Mongolic, and several other subgroups. The Altaic homeland lies
largely in the inhospitable deserts, tundra, and coniferous forests of
northern and central Asia. Also occupying tundra and grassland
areas adjacent to the Slavs is the Uralic family. Finnish and
Hungarian are the two most widely spoken Uralic tongues, and both
enjoy the status of official languages in their respective countries.
As depicted in Figure 4.5, one of the most remarkable language
families in terms of distribution is the Austronesian. Representatives
of this group probably originated from modern-day Taiwan. Today,
speakers of the Austronesian languages live mainly on tropical
islands stretching from Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa,
through Indonesia and the Pacific islands, to Hawaii and Easter
Island. This longitudinal span is more than half the distance around
the world. The north–south, or latitudinal, range of this language
area is bounded by Hawaii and Taiwan in the north and New Zealand
in the south. The largest single language in this family is Javanese,
with 75.5 million native speakers, but the most geographically
widespread is Polynesian.
FIGURE 4.5 Map of the Pacific language family tree. This map shows the settlement
of the Pacific by Austronesian language family speakers. By studying the relationships
between these languages, the settlement history of the region is revealed.
(Source: Adapted from
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090122141146.htm.)
Description
The legend lists the sources of Austronesian settlements as follows: south east
Asia, Taiwan, Philippines, Island south east Asia, New Guinea, Oceania, and
Polynesia. Sources on the map are designated by dots. Settlements are
concentrated on the map as follows. South east Asia has two dots, one each in the
middle of China and one near Hong Kong. Five dots are clustered around Taiwan
showing that origin. Philippines is clustered with dots showing that origin. Borneo,
Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia is clustered with dots showing Island south east
Asian origin. Indonesia also has dots showing origin from New Guinea. The sea to
the east of Indonesia shows Oceania origin. Micronesia, north to Indonesia and Fiji
and Polynesia to the east show dots showing Polynesia origin. A dot far north east
of New Zealand and closer to South America designates Rapanui or Easter Island
and shows Polynesian origin. Flow lines are seen from Taiwan through Philippines
to Madagascar. The line branches starting from the Philippines and moving south
west, where it branches west to Madagascar and east through New Guinea to
From Fiji, one line moves north towards Micronesia, and another line further
moves east to Polynesia, where it branches three directions. One branches
towards the northern Pacific Ocean, one branches south west towards New
Zealand, and the last branches south east towards Rapanui.
Japanese and Korean, with about 205 million speakers combined,
probably form another Asian language family. The two perhaps have
some link to the Altaic family, but even their kinship to each other
remains controversial and unproven.
In Southeast Asia, the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais, and
some tribal peoples of Malaysia and parts of India speak languages
that constitute the Austro-Asiatic family. They occupy an area into
which Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European, and Austronesian languages
have all encroached.
Mobility
4.2 Understand how languages and dialects have come to exist,
move, and change.
Different types of cultural diffusion have helped shape the linguistic
map. Relocation diffusion has been extremely important because
languages spread when groups, in whole or in part, migrate from one
area to another. Some individual tongues or entire language families
are no longer spoken in the regions where they originated, and in
certain other cases the linguistic hearth is peripheral to the present
distribution (compare Figures 4.3 and 4.7). Today, languages
continue to evolve and change based on the shifting locations of
peoples and on their needs as well as on outside forces.
Indo-European Diffusion
How did Indo-European languages arise and spread to become the
largest language family on Earth? One theory suggests that the
earliest speakers of the Indo-European languages lived in southern
and southeastern Turkey, a region known as Anatolia, about 9000
years ago. According to the Anatolian hypothesis, the initial
diffusion of these Indo-European speakers was facilitated by the
innovation of plant domestication. As sedentary farming was adopted
throughout Europe, a gradual and peaceful expansion diffusion of
Indo-European languages occurred. As these people dispersed and
lost contact with one another, different Indo-European groups
gradually developed variant forms of the language, causing
fragmentation of the language family.
The Anatolian hypothesis has been criticized by scholars who
note that specific words used for animals (particularly horses), but
not agriculture, appear to link Indo-European languages to a
common origin. The Kurgan hypothesis, which is more widely
accepted than the Anatolian hypothesis, places the rise of IndoEuropean languages in the central Asian steppes only 6000 years
ago (Figure 4.6). It asserts that the spread of Indo-European
languages was both swifter and less peaceful than is maintained by
those who subscribe to the Anatolian hypothesis. The domestication
of horses by militaristic Kurgans allowed them to overtake the more
peaceful agricultural societies and to rapidly spread their languages
through imposition. No one theory has been definitively proven.
FIGURE 4.6 The spread of Indo-European language. This map depicts the so-called
Kurgan hypothesis, named after the burial mounds (kurgan) characteristic of the
warrior pastoralists who inhabited the area north of the Black and Caspian seas.
Around 6000 B.C.E., they began to spread outward, conquering and imposing their
language across Europe, central Asia, India, the Balkans, and Anatolia (modern-day
Turkey).
Description
The Kurgan homeland, circa 4000 B C E, is at the center portion of Europe and
Asia north east to the Black Sea, and north east to the Caspian Sea. Migrations
stemmed from this region north towards the North Sea, west into Europe, south
across the Black Sea to Asia Minor, south west to the Mediterranean Sea, south
east to the regions north of the Arabian Sea, and east into Asia. The homeland
expanded east and west and was settled up to circa 2500 B C E. By 1000 B C E
the region had spread up to Eastern Asia, Europe, Asia Minor, region beneath
Caspian Sea, Aral Sea and to the east of Aral Sea.
What is more certain is that in later millennia, the diffusion of
certain Indo-European languages—in particular, Latin, English, and
Russian—occurred in conjunction with the territorial spread of great
political empires. In such cases of imperial conquest, relocation and
expansion diffusion were not mutually exclusive. Relocation diffusion
occurred as a small number of conquering elites came to rule an
area. The language of the conqueror, implanted by relocation
diffusion, often gained wider acceptance through expansion
diffusion. Typically, the conqueror’s language spread hierarchically—
adopted first by the more important and influential persons and by
city dwellers. The diffusion of Latin with Roman conquests, and
Spanish with the conquest of Latin America, occurred in this manner.
Migration and the Survival of
Language
As we have seen above, conquest can lead to the imposition of a
new language and the abandonment or suppression of native
tongues. However, these threatened languages may reappear and
thrive in new places, as their speakers migrate for reasons of
economic or cultural survival.
New York City is thought to be home to as many as 800
languages, making it the most linguistically dense place in the world.
There are more speakers of Vlashki in Queens than in the Croatian
mountain villages where the language originated, and roughly the
same number of Garifuna speakers in the Bronx and Brooklyn as in
Honduras and Belize. According to journalist Sam Roberts, these are
but two of “a remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have
taken root in New York.”
How did New York City become home to such linguistic riches?
These languages relocated there through the migration of their
native speakers. While populations in the language source region
may fall victim to ethnic conflict, disease, starvation, compulsory
schooling, or merely assimilation into dominant language groups,
thereby losing their ability to speak their native language, migrant
speakers from these places may have a better chance at keeping
the tongue alive and well in their new homes.
Many of these relocated languages find themselves under new
pressure from the dominant English language in the United States
(see Subject to Debate). For this reason, members of the nonprofit
Endangered Language Alliance canvass city neighborhoods in
search of immigrant speakers of vulnerable languages. The
speakers are videotaped, and the Alliance encourages the teaching
and use of these languages. The reality, however, is that many of
these languages will vanish from New York City’s linguistic
landscape when the children of these immigrants cease to speak
them regularly or when parents stop teaching them to their children.
SUBJECT TO DEBATE
Imposing English
English-only laws are nothing new in the United States. Its history as a nation of
immigrants has led to a population that, at any one point in time, has spoken a variety
of languages besides English. In its early days as a colony, one could hear German,
Dutch, French, and a multitude of Native American languages spoken alongside
English. This prompted both Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to propose enforcing
English as the sole acceptable language, and Theodore Roosevelt once said, “The
one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin or preventing all possibility of
its continuing as a nation at all would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling
nationalities. We have but one flag. We must also learn one language, and that
language is English.”
Citing concerns that providing official documents and services in multiple
languages would simply be too expensive, contemporary advocates of English-only
legislation claim that mandating one language is one way to reduce the cost of
government. Some proponents also believe that English-only laws encourage
immigrants to assimilate by learning the official language of the United States.
Opponents accuse the laws of being discriminatory and suggest that supporters of
English-only legislation are threatened by cultural diversity. Linguistic unity, they say,
does not lead to political or cultural unity. Furthermore, providing official documents
and services only in English in effect denies these services and information to those
who do not understand English. Debates such as these bring up questions of the
legal, social, and political status of minority groups and their languages, debates that
exist in many countries besides the United States.
Today, most of those who wish to legislate English as the official language of the
country target Spanish-speaking immigrants as the object of their concern. Anxieties
about being culturally “overwhelmed” by Spanish speakers who refuse to learn English
culminate in claims that Latino immigrants are dividing the nation in two: one Englishspeaking and culturally “American,” and the other Spanish-speaking and unwilling to
assimilate into the mainstream.
Historically, most immigrants to the United States eventually abandon their native
tongues. As late as 1910, one out of every four Americans could speak some
language other than English with the skill of a native; today that number is significantly
lower. This was a result of the mass immigrations from Germany, Poland, Italy, Russia,
China, and many other foreign lands. Much of this linguistic diversity has given way to
English, partly because these other languages lacked legal status, partly because of
the monolingual educational system in the United States, and partly because of social
pressures.
Continuing the Debate
As this discussion illustrates, many cultures do not want to assimilate into Englishspeaking society, choosing instead to actively assert pride in their language. Keeping
this in mind, consider these questions:
Do you think the wave of immigrants today, with their pride in language, is
different from earlier waves? How so?
Will monoglot English speakers become a dwindling minority as more and more
people become bilingual through either choice or necessity?
States that have some form of official English-only laws. Dates show the
years English-only laws were enacted. In the 1980s, the influx of immigrants to
the United States from Asia and Latin America prompted many of these laws.
Typically, English-only laws require that state documents be published in English
only. Some states’ laws, however, also prohibit the state from doing business in a
language other than English or providing services such as multilingual emergency
medical hotlines.
Description
States and the year when English was declared the official language are as
follows. Idaho, 2007. Montana, 1995. North Dakota, 1987. South Dakota,
1995. Nebraska, 1920. Kansas, 2007. Oklahoma, 2010. Arizona, 2006.
California, 1986. Alaska, 1998. Hawaii, 1978. Iowa, 2002. Missouri, 1998.
Arkansas, 1987. Illinois, 1969. Indiana, 1984. Kentucky, 1984. Tennessee,
1984. Mississippi, 1987. Alabama, 1990. Georgia, 1996. Florida, 1988. South
Carolina, 1987. North Carolina, 1987. Virginia, 1996. New Hampshire, 1995.
Massachusetts, 1975. States that do not have English as official law are
Washington, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland,
Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and Maine.
Religion and Linguistic Mobility
Cultural interaction creates situations in which language is linked to a
particular religious faith or denomination, a linkage that greatly
heightens cultural identity. Perhaps Arabic provides the best
example of this cultural link. It spread from a core area on the
Arabian Peninsula with the expansion of Islam. Had it not been for
the evangelical success of the Muslims, Arabic would not have
diffused so widely. The other Semitic languages also correspond to
particular religious groups. Most Hebrew-speaking people are of the
Jewish faith, and the Amharic speakers in Ethiopia tend to be Coptic,
or Eastern, Christians. Indeed, we can attribute the preservation and
recent revival of Hebrew to its active promotion by Jewish
nationalists who believe that teaching and promoting Hebrew to
diasporic Jews facilitate unity.
Many languages persist because of their use in religious
ceremonies and texts. Latin survived mainly as the ceremonial
language of the Roman Catholic Church and Vatican City. In nonArabic Muslim lands, such as Iran, where people consider
themselves Persians and speak Farsi, Arabic is still used in religious
ceremonies. Great religious books can also shape languages by
providing them with a standard form. Martin Luther’s translation of
the Bible in 1522 led to the standardization of the German language,
and the Qur’an is the model for written Arabic. Because they act as
common points of frequent cultural reference and interaction, great
religious books can also aid in the survival of languages that would
otherwise become extinct. The early appearance of a hymnal and
the Bible in the Welsh language aided the survival of that Celtic
tongue, and Christian missionaries in diverse countries have
translated the Bible into local languages, helping to preserve them.
In Fiji, the appearance of the Bible in one of the 15 local dialects
elevated that dialect to the dominant native language of the islands.
Language’s Shifting
Boundaries
Dialects, as well as the language families discussed previously,
reveal a vivid geography. Their boundaries—what separates them
from other dialects and languages—shift over time, both spatially
and in terms of what elements they contain or discard.
Geolinguists map dialects by using isoglosses, which indicate
the spatial borders of individual words or pronunciations. For
example, the dialect boundaries between Latin American Spanish
speakers using tú and those using vos are clearly defined in some
areas, as shown in Figure 4.7. The choice of tú or vos for the
second-person singular carries with it a cultural indication. Vos
represents a usage closer to the original Spanish but is considered
by many in the Spanish-speaking world to be rather archaic and, in
fact, has died out in Spain itself. In other regions, particularly
throughout the countries of the Southern Cone, vos has long been
used by the media; often, it is considered to reflect the “standard”
dialect and usage for the area in which it is used. Because certain
words or dialects can fall out of fashion or simply become
overwhelmed by an influx of new speakers, isogloss boundaries are
rarely clear or stable over time. Indeed, in Central America, the
media are increasingly using vos—long used in conversation in the
region—thus elevating vos to a more official status covering a larger
territory. Because of this, geolinguists often disagree about how
many dialects are present in an area or exactly where isogloss
borders should be drawn. The language map of any place is
constantly shifting.
FIGURE 4.7 Dialect boundaries in Latin America. Spanish speakers in the Americas
use either vos or tú as the second-person singular verb form. They represent dialects
of Spanish: both are correct, linguistically speaking, but the vos form is older. Some
regions use vos and tú interchangeably.
(Source: Adapted from Pountain, 2005.)
Description
The Legend lists the Spanish dialect boundaries as tú, vos, tú or vos, and not
applicable. Countries where tú is shown are: Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Dominican
Republic, Panama, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Ecuador,
Peru, and Bolivia. Countries where vos is shown: Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, El
Salvador, Paraguay, and Argentina. Countries where tú or vos is shown:
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, portions of Bolivia,
Paraguay, and Uruguay, and Chile. Areas where this is not applicable are: Brazil
and the United States.
The dialects of American English provide another good example.
At least three major dialects, corresponding to major culture regions,
had developed in the eastern United States by the time of the
American Revolution: the Northern, Midland, and Southern dialects
(Figure 4.8). As the three subcultures expanded westward, their
dialects spread and fragmented. Nevertheless, they retained much
of their basic character, even beyond the Mississippi River. These
culture regions have unusually stable boundaries. Even today, the “rless” pronunciation of words such as car (“cah”) and storm (“stohm”),
characteristic of the East Coast Midland regions, is readily
discernible in the speech of its inhabitants.
FIGURE 4.8 Major dialects of North American English, with a few selected
subdialects. These dialects had developed by the time of the American Revolution
and have remained remarkably stable over time. Some cities, identified on this map,
have their own particular dialects.
Description
The legend lists the five dialect regions as Northern, Midland, Southern, Western,
and Urban. The dialects are distributed across the United States as follows. The
western dialect region makes up most of the western half of the United States,
including the southwestern, pacific south west, and parts of the upper Midwestern
regions, as well as San Francisco, which has an urban dialect region. The
northern dialect region includes the north eastern states, most of which are along
the Canadian border and includes the upper Midwestern, inland north, and New
England regions as well as cities such as New York and Boston, both of which
have urban dialect regions. The midland dialect region falls south of the northern
dialect region, and north of the southern dialect region. It includes the southern
Appalachian and Ozark regions of the United states and stretches from the east
coast at southern Illinois, through the center of the United States around
Oklahoma. Pittsburgh of this region has an urban dialect region. The southern
dialect region of the United States includes mostly southern states bordering the
Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. This includes the inland south, Gullah,
Cajun, and gulf southern regions, as well as cities such as Charleston and Miami,
both of which are urban dialect regions.
Although we are sometimes led to believe that Americans are
becoming more alike, as a national culture overwhelms regional
ones, the current status of American English dialects suggests
otherwise. Linguistic divergence is still under way, and dialects
continue to mutate on a regional level, just as they always have.
Local variations in grammar and pronunciation proliferate,
confounding the proponents of standardized speech and defying the
homogenizing influence of the Internet, television, and other mass
media.
Shifting language boundaries involve content as well as spatial
reach, and this, too, changes over time. Today, for example, some of
the unique vocabulary of American English dialects is becoming oldfashioned. For instance, the term icebox, which was literally a
wooden box with a compartment for ice that was used to cool food,
was used widely throughout the United States before people had
refrigerators. Although the modern electric refrigerator is ubiquitous
in the United States today, some people, particularly those of older
generations and in the South, still use the term icebox. Most
speakers of American English, by contrast, no longer pause to say
the entire word refrigerator, shortening it instead to fridge.
As illustrated by the birth of the new word fridge, slang terms are
quite common in most languages, and American English is no
exception. Slang refers to words and phrases that are not part of a
standard, recognized vocabulary for a given language but are
nonetheless used and understood by some or most of its speakers.
Often, subcultures—for example, youth, drug dealers, and clubbers
—have their own slang that is used within that community but is not
readily understood by nonmembers. Slang words tend to be used for
a period of time and then discarded as newer terms replace them.
For example, fresh, the bomb, and phat were used to refer to
desirable, attractive, or fashionable things in the 1990s. Although
many people today still recognize these words, a new generation of
young people is much more likely to use a new set of words. Their
children, in turn, will more than likely use yet another set of words.
Slang illustrates another way in which American English changes
over time.
Some African Americans speak a distinctive form of English.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) shares characteristics
with the older Southern dialect and also displays considerable
African influence in pitch, rhythm, and tone. Some linguists
understand AAVE as a creole language that grew out of a pidgin that
developed on the early slave plantations and is today spoken by
some African Americans. Indeed, AAVE shares many characteristics
with other English creole languages worldwide. Today, it is
considered a dialect, or variation, of Standard American English. It is
also considered an ethnolect, a dialect spoken by an ethnic group,
in this case, African Americans. The popularity of AAVE’s distinctive
vocabulary and syntax among some white Americans, however, calls
into question its ethnic exclusivity and serves to point out the
instability of any language boundaries, including ethnic ones.
The grammar of AAVE is virtually uniform across the country,
which has been attributed to the segregation of African American
speakers or their relatively recent migration from the South (see
Chapter 5, page 155). Some distinguishing characteristics of AAVE’s
speech patterns include the use of double negatives (“She don’t like
nothing”), omission of forms of the verb to be (“He my friend”), and
non-conjugation of verbs (“She give him her paper yesterday”).
There is some controversy over the place of AAVE in the U.S.
educational system. Does AAVE constitute a distinctive language,
rather than simply a dialect of English? Should it be taught—with its
attendant grammar, structure, and literature—to American
schoolchildren? Are those who speak AAVE and Standard English
technically bilingual? This has led some linguists to refer to AAVE as
African American Language (AAL), indicating the status of a
separate language.
In the United States today, many descendants of Spanish
speakers have adapted their speech to include words and variants of
words in both Spanish and English, in a dialect known as “Spanglish”
(see Seeing Geography, page 147). Although acceptance of AAVE
and Spanglish as legitimate language forms is hardly without conflict
(see Subject to Debate, page 125), they illustrate the fluidity of
languages and how they are constantly evolving and changing as
the needs and experiences of their users change.
Globalization
4.3 Evaluate the relationship between technology and language.
More often than not, the diffusion of some languages has come at
the expense of many others. Ten thousand years ago, the human
race consisted of only 1 million people, speaking an estimated
15,000 languages. Today, a population 7000 times larger speaks
only 47 percent as many tongues. Only 1 percent of all languages
have as many as 500,000 speakers. It has been estimated that the
world loses a language on average every two weeks. Some experts
believe that all but 300 languages will be extinct or dying by the year
2100. Clearly, globalization has worked to favor some languages and
eliminate others. There are, for instance, no children today who are
learning any of California’s nearly 100 native languages (see The
Video Connection). Languages die out when their speakers do; often
the entire cultural world associated with a language vanishes as well.
Thus, globalization both presents the opportunity for more people to
communicate directly with one another and, at the same time,
threatens to extinguish the cultural diversity that goes hand in hand
with linguistic diversity.
The Video Connection
Who Speaks Wukchumni?
The Wukchumni are a Native American people resident in central California. Today,
fewer than 200 Wukchumni are alive. Marie Wilcox, born in 1932, is the only remaining
native speaker of the Wukchumni language. Together with family members, Marie has
composed a Wukchumni dictionary and recorded herself speaking the native
language. The predicament of the Wukchumni people and their language is mirrored
throughout the United States, where 130 Native American languages are on the
“endangered” list.
Thinking Geographically
1. As you watch this video, notice the poverty and isolation of the rural area where
Marie and her fellow Wukchumni tribe members live. Do you think these factors
have helped to preserve, or to endanger, the Wukchumni language?
2. Marie, her daughter Jennifer Malone, and her grandson Donovan Treglown have
all contributed to the compilation and recording of the Wukchumni dictionary
featured in this video. Their work has involved years of sacrifice. What factors
have motivated them to pursue and complete this project?
3. As Marie relates in this video, the deaths of individual Wukchumni speakers
have endangered the language to the point of extinction. Do you believe that,
when Marie passes away, the Wukchumni language will die out entirely? Why or
why not?
Technology, Language, and
Empire
Technological innovations affecting language range from the basic
practice of writing down spoken languages to the sophisticated
information superhighway provided by the Internet. Technological
innovations have in the past facilitated the spread and proliferation of
multiple languages, but more recently they have encouraged the
tendency of only a few languages—especially English, but also
Chinese and Spanish—to dominate all others (Figure 4.9). Particular
language groups achieve cultural dominance over neighboring
groups in a variety of ways, often with profound results for the
linguistic map of the world. Technological superiority is usually
involved (see the cartoon). Earlier, we saw how plant and animal
domestication—the technology of the “agricultural revolution”—aided
the early diffusion of the Indo-European language family.
FIGURE 4.9 Multilingual sign. This sign, located in a New York City polling station,
displays the world’s three dominant languages: English, Spanish, and Chinese.
Description
The first sign shows No Loitering and No Electioneering written in English,
Spanish, and Chinese. A second sign below with an arrow shows the words, Vote
Here, written in the same three languages. A third sign has the words, Interpreter
available, in English and Spanish.
An even more basic technology was the invention of writing,
which appears to have developed as early as 5300 years ago in
several hearth areas, including in Egypt, among the Sumerians in
what is today Iraq, and in China. Writing helped civilizations develop
and spread, giving written languages a major advantage over those
that remained spoken only. Written languages can be published and
distributed widely, and they carry with them the status of standard,
official, and legal communication.
Written language facilitates record keeping, helping governments
and bureaucracies to develop. Thus, the languages of conquerors
tend to spread with imperial expansion. The imperial expansion of
Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, and the
United States across the globe altered the linguistic practices of
millions of people. This empire building superimposed IndoEuropean tongues on the map of the tropics and subtropics. The
areas most affected were Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the
Austronesian island world. A parallel case from the ancient world is
China, also a formidable imperial power that spread its language to
those it conquered. During the Tang dynasty (618–907 C.E.),
Chinese control extended to Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria (in
contemporary northeastern China), and Korea. The 4000-year-old
written Chinese language proved essential for the cohesion and
maintenance of its far-flung empire. Although people throughout the
empire spoke different dialects or even different languages, a
common writing system lent a measure of mutual intelligibility at the
level of the written word. Today, however, the Chinese are concerned
about the “Romanization” of their language, as Chinese schools
prioritize learning English and youth are not familiar with as many
Chinese characters as their parents or grandparents.
Even though imperial nations have, for the most part, given up
their colonial empires, the languages they transplanted overseas
survive. As a result, English still has a foothold in much of Africa,
South Asia, the Philippines, and the Pacific islands. French persists
in former French and Belgian colonies, especially in northern,
western, and central Africa; Madagascar; and Polynesia (Figure
4.10). In most of these areas, English and French are the languages
of the educated elite, often holding official legal status. They are also
used as a lingua franca of government, commerce, and higher
education, helping hold together states with multiple native
languages.
FIGURE 4.10 French, the colonial language of the empire, shares this sign on the
isle of Bora Bora in French Polynesia with the native variant of the Polynesian tongue.
Until recently, French rulers allowed no public display of the Polynesian language and
tried to make the natives adopt French.
Transportation technology also profoundly affects the geography
of languages. Ships, railroads, and highways all serve to spread the
languages of the culture groups that build them, sometimes spelling
doom for the speech of less technologically advanced peoples
whose lands are suddenly opened to outside contacts. The TransSiberian Railroad, built about a century ago, spread the Russian
language eastward to the Pacific Ocean. The Alaska Highway, which
runs through Canada, carried English into Native American refuges.
The construction of highways in Brazil’s remote Amazonian interior
threatens the native languages of that region.
Another example is the predominance of English on the Internet,
which can be understood as a contemporary information highway
(Figure 4.11). It is unclear what will happen when other languages
begin to challenge the dominance of English on the Internet, which is
bound to happen sooner or later, although exactly when English will
be surpassed by another language is anyone’s guess. For example,
from 2000 to 2017 there was a truly impressive 2263 percent growth
in the number of Chinese speakers on the Internet. If this trend
continues, and when—not if—the 47 percent of Chinese speakers
who do not now use the Internet begin to log on, we can expect
Chinese to surpass English as the most popular language on the
Internet. Speakers of other languages grew even more impressively
over this time period. For instance, Arabic-speaking Internet users
grew 6806 percent from 2000 to 2017, while speakers of Russian
grew 3273 percent over the same period.
FIGURE 4.11 The 10 most prevalent languages on the Internet, measured as a
percentage of total users. English is the second most widely spoken language on
Earth, after Mandarin Chinese. And English is the most widely spoken second
language in the world. Mandarin Chinese, however, is an increasingly popular second
language learned by individuals of non-Chinese ancestry.
(Source: Adapted from http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm.)
Description
The X axis measures millions of users from 0 through 1200 with increments of 100
and the Y axis shows Languages. The languages and their millions of users are
listed as follows. English, 1052.8. Chinese, 804.6. Spanish, 337.9. Arabic, 219.
Portuguese, 169.2. Indonesian/Malaysian, 168.8. French, 118.6. Japanese, 109.6.
Russian, 108. German, 84.7. All other languages, 950.3.
Technology can also be used to preserve and revive endangered
languages. Native American groups, for instance, are working with
software developers to create language apps for the iPhone and
iPad. They are also producing toys and video games that speak in
native languages. Facebook, texting, video chats, and YouTube also
help to connect speakers and promote the use of native speech,
especially among younger people. Most speakers of Native
American languages—around 90 percent—are middle-aged and
older, so capturing the interest of younger speakers is vitally
important to the survival of these languages. The U.S. government
provides federal funds in the form of competitive grants to support
language preservation efforts, and some tribes can utilize casino
earnings for this purpose. Regardless of the funding source, most
Native American groups are engaged in language preservation and
instruction. Besides social media, apps, and video games, language
immersion schools have been established (Figure 4.12), with mentor
relationships forming between elders and youth.
FIGURE 4.12 Learning Cherokee with technology. These two fifth-graders attend
the Cherokee Nation Immersion School in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. They are working
with their teacher to learn the Cherokee language with the assistance of an app.
Texting and Language
Modification
Though English may dominate the Internet (see Figure 4.11), much
of what comes across our computer and cell phone screens isn’t a
readily recognizable form of English. As with the diffusion of spoken
English to far-flung regions of the British Empire, the English
language that is spread via electronic correspondence is subject to
significant modification. E-mailing, instant messaging, and text
messaging Standard English on cell phones requires a lot of typing,
and text is notoriously deficient in conveying emotions when
compared to the spoken word. For these reasons, abbreviations and
symbols are used to shorten the number of keystrokes, to add
emotional punctuation to correspondence, and to make electronic
communication difficult to monitor by those who don’t understand the
language—particularly parents and teachers!
English is an alphabetic writing system, where letters represent
discrete sounds that must be strung together to form a word’s
complete sound. A second major writing system is syllabic, where
characters represent blocks of word sounds. This type of writing,
prevalent throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia, includes
Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and Thai. The third form of writing is
logographic, where characters represent entire words. Chinese is the
only major language in this category.
English-speaking texters quickly learn to take shortcuts around
the lengthiness inherent to alphabetic writing systems. The simplest
and most commonly used shortcut involves using acronyms instead
of whole words to convey common phrases. POS (parent over
shoulder), VBG (very big grin), LOL (laughing out loud), and GMTA
(great minds think alike) are some examples of this technique.
Another shortcut involves using characters that sound like words.
For example, the number “8” can substitute for the word or sound
“ate,” so “h8” is “hate,” and “i8” is “I ate.” In the first example, a
syllabic approach to writing is used because “8” condenses the
syllable “ate” into one character. The second example substitutes a
symbol for an entire word. Using “8” for the word “ate” is an example
of this technique, called rebus writing, where a symbol is used for
what it sounds like, as opposed to what it stands for. As your
instructor for this class will likely confirm, such abbreviations and
symbols have even worked their way into term papers at the college
level, much to the consternation or delight of language scholars (see
the cartoon above).
Texters sometimes use logographic writing, in which symbols
such as ☺ and ♥, which are called pictograms, or word pictures, are
used. Although the meaning of these symbols is understood by
speakers of many languages because of their ubiquity, non-English
languages also employ their own symbol combinations. In Korean,
for instance, ^^ is used instead of :) to convey a smiling face and -_is used instead of :( to depict a sad face. In Chinese, the number “5”
is pronounced in a way that resembles crying, so “555” is the
Chinese texter’s way of conveying sadness.
Texting shortcuts are making their way into spoken and written
English. For instance, LOL is now commonly used in speech. As
speakers of non-English languages become more heavily involved in
texting-based activities, their spoken and written languages also
doubtlessly will become modified.
Language Proliferation: One or
Many?
Could all the world’s languages have derived from one single mother
tongue? It may seem a large leap from the primordial tongue to a
consideration of globalization and languages, but, in fact, the two are
related. If we humans began with one language, why shouldn’t we
return to that condition? If one language can become 15,000
languages and the 7000 or so that remain will dwindle to 300
languages within a century, then is it possible to eventually end up
with just one again?
Are the forces of modernization working to produce, through
cultural diffusion, a single world language? And if so, what will that
language be—English? Worldwide, about 335 million people speak
English as their mother tongue and perhaps another 350 million
speak it well as a second, learned language. Adding other
reasonably competent speakers who can “get by” in English, the
world total reaches about 1.5 billion, more than for any other
language. What’s more, the Internet is one of the most potent agents
of diffusion, and its leading language is English.
English earlier diffused widely with the British Empire and U.S.
imperialism, and today it has become the de facto language of
globalization. Consider the case of India, where the English
language imposed by British rulers was retained (after
independence) as the country’s language of business, government,
and education. It provided some linguistic unity for India, which had
800 indigenous languages and dialects. This is why today many of
India’s 1.3 billion people speak English well enough to provide
customer support services over the telephone for clients in the
United States. Even so, many resent its use and wish India were rid
of this linguistic colonial legacy once and for all (see Figure 4.22 on
page 142). Although English is not likely to be driven out of India any
time soon, it is true that the spoken English of India has drifted away
from Standard British English. The same holds true for the English of
Singapore, which is now a separate language called Singlish. Many
other regional, English-based languages have developed—
languages that could not be readily understood in London or
Chicago.
But is the diffusion of English to the entire world population likely?
Will globalization and cultural diffusion produce one world language?
Probably not. More likely, the world will ultimately be divided largely
among 5 to 10 major languages.
Language and Cultural Survival
Because language is the primary way of expressing culture, if a
language dies out, there is a good chance that the culture of its
speakers will, too. Languages, like animal species, can be classified
as endangered or extinct. Endangered languages are those that are
not being taught to children by their parents and are not being used
actively in everyday matters. Some linguists believe that more than
half of the world’s roughly 7000 languages are endangered.
According to Ethnologue, an online language resource, 377
languages have become extinct since 1950, and another 906 are on
the “dying” list. Languages that have only a few elderly speakers still
living fall into this category (Figure 4.13). Language hotspots—
places with the most unique, misunderstood, or endangered tongues
—are located around the globe (Figure 4.14). Three of the world’s
most vulnerable regions are found in the United States. The
Americas and the Pacific regions together account for more than
three-quarters of the world’s current nearly extinct languages, thanks
to their many and varied indigenous language groups. UNESCO
estimates that, in the United States alone, 48 native languages are
“critically endangered,” as their youngest speakers are grandparents.
When speakers die, it is most likely that their language will die out
with them.
FIGURE 4.13 Degrees of language endangerment. Forty-three percent of the world’s
languages are endangered to some degree.
(Data from UNESCO Project: Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 2011.)
Description
The table shows the rationale for classification of languages. The pie chart has the
following percentage values. Safe, 57. Vulnerable, 10. Definitely endangered, 11.
Severely endangered, 9. Critically endangered, 10. Extinct since 1950, 4. The
table details each degree as follows. Safe: Language is spoken by all generations;
international transmission is uninterrupted. Vulnerable: Most children speak the
language, but it may be restricted to certain domains, such as at home. Definitely
endangered: Children no longer learn the language as mother tongue in the home.
Severely endangered: Language is spoken by grandparents and older
generations; while the parent generation may understand it, they do not speak it to
children or among themselves. Critically endangered: The youngest speakers are
grandparents and older, and they speak the language partially and infrequently.
Extinct since 1950: There are no speakers left.
FIGURE 4.14 Global “language hotspots.” The Enduring Voices Project and
National Geographic Society have teamed up to document endangered languages and
thereby attempt to prevent language extinction. One-quarter of the world’s languages
that are in trouble or dying may be found in the Americas. They represent a wealth of
Native American languages slowly becoming suffocated by English, Spanish, and
Portuguese.
(Source: Adapted from http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/enduring-voices/.)
Description
The legend lists threat levels as severe, high, medium, or low. Severe threat levels
are mapped in the following regions: Northwest Pacific Plateau, Central and South
America, Central Siberia, Eastern Siberia, and Northern Australia. High language
extinction threat levels are mapped in: Oklahoma Southwest and Southern South
America. Medium language extinction threat levels are mapped in: Northern South
America and Western South America. Low language extinction threat levels are
mapped in: Mesoamerica, Western Africa, Southern Africa, Eastern Africa,
Caucasus, Eastern India and Malaysia, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Philippines, and
Eastern Melanesia.
Languages can also be used to keep cultural traditions alive.
Keith Basso, an anthropologist who has written an intriguing book
titled Wisdom Sits in Places, discusses the landscape of distinctive
place-names used by the Western Apache of New Mexico. The
people Basso studied use place-names to invoke stories that help
the Western Apache remember their collective history. According to
Nick Thompson, one of Basso’s interviewees, “White men need
paper maps. . . . We have maps in our minds.” Thompson goes on to
assert that calling up the names of places can guard against
forgetting the correct way of living, or adopting the bad habits of
white men, once Western Apaches move to other areas. “The names
of all these places are good. They make you remember how to live
right, so you want to replace yourself again.” One of the places
Basso heard about is called Shades of Shit. Here is what he was
told:
It happened here at Shades of Shit.
They had much corn, those people who lived here, and their
relatives had only a little. They refused to share it. Their
relatives begged them but still they refused to share it.
Then their relatives got angry and forced them to stay at
home. They wouldn’t let them go anywhere, not even to
defecate. So they had to do it at home. Their shades [shelters]
filled up with it. There was more and more of it! It was very bad!
Those people got sick and nearly died.
Then their relatives said, “You have brought this on
yourselves. Now you live in shades of shit!” Finally, they agreed
to share their corn.
It happened at Shades of Shit. (p. 24)
Today, merely standing at this place or speaking its graphic name
reminds the Western Apache that stinginess is a vice that can
threaten the survival of the entire community.
Nature–Culture
4.4 Explain the relationships between language and the physical
environment.
Language interacts with the environment in three basic ways. First,
the specific physical habitats in which languages evolve help to form
their vocabularies. Second, physical habitats may shape the way a
language sounds. Third, the environment can guide the migrations of
linguistic groups or provide refuges for languages in retreat. From
the viewpoint of possibilism—the notion that the physical
environment shapes, but does not fully determine, cultural
phenomena—the theme of nature–culture illustrates how the
physical environment influences the vocabulary, tonal
characteristics, and distribution of language.
Habitat and Vocabulary
Humankind’s relationship to the land played a strong role in the
emergence of linguistic differences, even at the level of vocabulary.
For example, the Spanish language—which originated in Castile,
Spain, a dry and relatively barren land rimmed by hills and high
mountains—is especially rich in words describing rough terrain,
allowing speakers of this tongue to distinguish even subtle
differences in the shape and configuration of mountains. Similarly,
Scottish Gaelic possesses a rich vocabulary to describe
mountainous types of topography; this terrain-focused vocabulary is
a common attribute of all the Celtic languages spoken by hill
peoples. English, by contrast, which developed in the temperate wet
coastal plains of northern Europe, is relatively deficient in words
describing mountainous terrain However, English abounds with
words describing flowing streams and wetlands: typical physical
features found in northern Europe. This vocabulary transferred well
to the temperate East Coast of the United States. In the rural
American South alone, one finds river, creek, branch, fork, prong,
run, bayou, and slough. This vocabulary indicates that the area is a
well-watered land with a dense network of streams.
Clearly, then, language serves an adaptive strategy. Vocabularies
are highly developed for those features of the environment that
involve livelihood. Without such detailed vocabularies, it would be
difficult to communicate sophisticated information relevant to the
community’s livelihood, which in most places is closely bound to the
physical landscape.
Natural Environment and
Language Sounds
Recent research suggests that the sounds that birds use to
communicate vary with the natural characteristics of their habitat.
The combinations of conditions such as temperature, vegetation,
wind, and mountains create specific habitats that are more or less
conducive to transmitting different sound frequencies.
Bioacousticians—scientists who study sound and biology—find that
birds living in rain forests use fewer consonants in their song. The
theory is that this is because the dense rainforest vegetation reflects
sounds from trees and leaves; furthermore, warm air can scramble
consonant-heavy sounds. Birds in such areas use more vowels,
resulting in a more sonorous song than birds dwelling in open plains,
where consonant-heavy sounds transmit more faithfully.
Could the same be true for human languages? Ian Maddieson, a
linguist at the University of New Mexico, believes so. He
hypothesizes that the linguistic soundscapes of human languages
have adapted to the ecological conditions of the places they are
spoken. As depicted in Figure 4.15, consonant-heavy languages,
such as English, evolved in the cool open plains of northern Europe.
Languages that are more focused on vowels, such as Hawaiian,
were shaped by the dense vegetation of their natural habitat. In the
geography of the spoken word, nature and culture appear to be
intertwined in fascinating ways.
FIGURE 4.15 Did the language you speak evolve because of the environment?
Places with more open spaces tend to have languages with lots of consonants. The
sounds of such languages don’t carry well in places that are windy or have dense
forest cover. These places tend to have languages with more vowels.
(Source: Based on an analysis by Ian Maddieson and Christophe Coupé.)
Description
The legend shows four different densities in consonants per word, with the highest
density labeled as more, and the lowest density labeled as fewer. Regions with the
most consonants per word are: the western North American border, Europe,
southern Asia, central Africa, southern Africa, parts of Southern South America,
and a few other sparse regions. Most regions with the most consonants per word
have neighboring regions with slightly less consonants per word. The regions with
the least consonants per word are northern South America, western through
central Africa, parts of northern Asia, Australia, and the countries of the Pacific
Ocean. These same regions also have areas with slightly more consonants per
word scattered throughout.
Habitat Helps Channel
Language
Environmental barriers and natural routes have often guided
linguistic groups onto certain paths. The wide distribution of the
Austronesian language group, for instance, was profoundly affected
by prevailing winds and water currents in the Pacific and Indian
oceans (see Figure 4.6). The Himalayas and the barren Deccan
Plateau deflected migrating Indo-Europeans entering the Indian
subcontinent into the rich Ganga-Indus river plain. The northern and
southern dialect boundaries in the United States are loosely limited
by the Mississippi River.
Because such physical barriers as rivers and mountain ridges can
discourage groups from migrating from one area to another, they
often serve as linguistic borders as well. In parts of the Alps,
speakers of German and Italian live on opposite sides of a major
mountain ridge. Portions of the mountain rim along the northern
edge of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East form the border
between Semitic and Indo-European tongues. Linguistic borders that
follow such physical features generally tend to be stable, and they
often endure for thousands of years. By contrast, language borders
that cross plains and major routes of communication are often
unstable, and shift over time.
Habitat Provides Refuge
The environment also influences language insofar as inhospitable
areas provide protection and isolation. Such areas, referred to as
linguistic refuge areas, provide minority linguistic groups protection
from aggressive neighbors. Rugged hilly and mountainous areas,
excessively cold or dry climates, dense forests, remote islands, and
extensive marshes and swamps can all offer refuge to minority
language groups. For one thing, unpleasant environments rarely
attract conquerors. Also, mountains tend to isolate the inhabitants of
one valley from those in adjacent ones, discouraging contact that
might lead to linguistic diffusion.
Examples of these linguistic refuge areas are numerous. The
rugged Caucasus Mountains and nearby ranges in central Eurasia
provide protection for a large variety of peoples and their languages
(Figure 4.16). In the Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico, an
archaic form of Spanish survives, largely as a result of isolation that
ended only in the early 1900s. Similarly, the Alps, the Himalayas,
and the highlands of Mexico form fine-grained linguistic mosaics,
thanks to the mountains that provide both isolation and protection for
multitudinous languages. Bitterly cold tundra climates of the far north
have sheltered Uralic and Inuktitut speakers, and a desert has
shielded Khoisan speakers from Bantu invaders. In short, rugged,
hostile, or isolated environments protect linguistic groups that might
otherwise be overtaken by more dominant languages.
FIGURE 4.16 The environment provides a linguistic refuge in the Caucasus
Mountains. The rugged mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas—
including parts of Armenia, Russia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan—is peopled by a great
variety of linguistic groups, representing three major language families. Mountain areas
are often linguistic mosaics because the rough terrain provides refuge and isolation.
Description
The legend lists several categories and subcategories of languages. Caucasic
languages are broken down as follows. Circassian languages: Abkhazi, Adygey,
Cherkessian, Kabardin. Georgian languages: Georgian. Veinakh languages:
Chechen and Ingushi. Dagestani languages: Agul, Avar, Dargin, Lak, Lezgin,
Rutul, Tabasaran, and Tsakhur. Indo-European languages are broken down as
follows. Armenian languages: Armenian. Greek languages: Greek. Iranic
languages: Kurdish, Ossetian, and Talysh. Slavic languages: Russian. Altaic
languages are broken down as follows. Turkic languages: Azeri, Balkar, Karachay,
Kumyk, Nogay, and Turkmenian. Mongol languages: Kalmykian. The map reads
as follows. Russia to the north speaks mostly the Russian language, with spots of
Kalmykian to the east and a small central region of Turkmenian. The northern
border of the mountain region runs horizontally between the two seas, south of
which several smaller regions of languages are spread out between larger regions
of Russian and uninhabited areas. These smaller regions of language include
Kabardin, Cherkessian, Karachay, Inguishi, Ossetian, Balkar, and Kumyk. Most
regions are divided by selected borders of political subvisions. Along the Caspian
Sea in one political subdivision are a cluster of languages including Kumyk, Azeri,
Avar, Dargin, Lak, Agul, Ossetian, Rutul, and Lezgin. Beyond the international
borders south to this region is Azerbaijan, which speaks either Azeri or is an
uninhabited region. West to this on the other side of international borders is
Armenia, which speaks mostly Aermenian, with portions of Azeri, Kurdish, and
uninhabited land. Northwest to Armenia and Azerbaijan is Georgia, which speaks
predominantly Georgian. Azeri and Armenian are spoken along their respective
southern borders, along with a pocket of Greek and Abkhazi along the north
western border within a different political subdivision.
Still, environmental isolation is no longer the vital linguistic force it
once was. Fewer and fewer places are so isolated that they remain
relatively untouched by outside influences. Today, inhospitable lands
may offer linguistic refuge, but it is no longer certain that they will in
the future. Even an island situated in the middle of the vast Pacific
Ocean does not offer reliable refuge in the age of the Internet, social
media, and global tourism. Similarly, marshes and forests provide
refuge only if they are not drained and cleared by those who wish to
use the land more intensively. The nearly 10,000 Gullah-speaking
descendants of African slaves have long nurtured their distinctive
African-influenced culture and language, in part because they reside
on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida.
Today, the development of these islands for tourism and housing for
wealthy nonlocals, as well as the out-migration of Gullah youth in
search of better economic opportunities, threatens the survival of the
Gullah culture and language. The reality of the world is no longer
isolation, but contact.
Cultural Landscape
4.5 Characterize the ways languages are visibly part of the
cultural landscape.
Road signs, billboards, graffiti, placards, and other publicly displayed
writings not only reveal the locally dominant language but also can
be a visual index to bilingualism, linguistic oppression of minorities,
and other facets of linguistic geography. Furthermore, differences in
writing systems render some linguistic landscapes illegible to those
not familiar with these forms of writing (Figure 4.17).
FIGURE 4.17 Linguistic landscapes. This image, from Los Angeles’s Koreatown, is
difficult for non-Korean speakers to read. The Korean characters used are not the Latin
alphabet with which most English speakers are familiar.
Linguistic Landscapes and
Their Messages
Linguistic landscapes send messages, both friendly and hostile.
Often these messages have a political content and deal with power,
domination, subjugation, or freedom. In Turkey, for example, until
recently Kurdish-speaking minorities were not allowed to broadcast
music or television programs in Kurdish, to publish books in Kurdish,
or even to give their children Kurdish names. People who spoke
Kurdish were arrested and imprisoned. In 2002 Turkey reformed its
legal restrictions to allow the Kurdish language to be used in daily life
but not in public education. In 2012 Kurdish language instruction
became an elective subject in Turkey’s public schools. The Canadian
province of Québec, similarly, has tried to eliminate Englishlanguage signs. French-speaking immigrants settled Québec, and its
official language is French, in contrast to Canada’s policy elsewhere
of bilingualism in English and French. As Figure 4.18 indicates,
there is a practice in Ireland to supplement English-language placename signs by adding the original Gaelic place-names. The
suppression of minority languages and attempts to reinstate them in
the landscape offer an indication of the social and political status of
minority populations more generally.
FIGURE 4.18 Road sign in Dublin, Ireland, shows the place-name in Irish Gaelic on
top and English underneath.
Other types of writing, such as graffiti, can denote ownership of
territory or send messages to others (Figure 4.19). Only those who
understand the specific symbols used will be able to decipher the full
meaning of the message. Misreading such writing can have
dangerous consequences for those who stray into unfriendly
territory. In this way, graffiti can be understood as a dialect that is
particular to a subculture and transmitted through symbols or a
highly stylized script.
FIGURE 4.19 Graffiti in a parking lot. This wall in a parking lot in Cork, Ireland, is
covered with graffiti. Gangs use stylized scripts often unintelligible to nonmembers to
mark their territory.
Toponyms
Language and culture also intersect in the names that people place
on the land, whether they are given to settlements, terrain features,
streams, or various other aspects of their surroundings (Figure
4.20). These place-names, or toponyms, often reflect the spatial
patterns of language, dialect, and ethnicity. Toponyms become part
of the cultural landscape when they appear on signs and placards.
Many place-names consist of two parts—the generic and the
specific. For example, in the American place-names Huntsville,
Harrisburg, Ohio River, Newfound Gap, and Cape Hatteras, the
specific segments are Hunts-, Harris-, Ohio, Newfound, and
Hatteras. The generic parts, called generic toponyms, which tell
what kind of place is being described, are -ville, -burg, River, Gap,
and Cape.
FIGURE 4.20 Naming place is closely related to claiming place. This map of
Antarctica shows the pie slice–shaped land claims of various nations. Notice how
place-names reflect the names of Antarctic explorers or European rulers. The gray
portions are unclaimed.
(Source: Adapted from Latrimer Clarke Corporation Pty. Ltd.)
Description
The map reads as follows. In southern Antarctica within the Ross Dependency,
New Zealand, is the Ross Ice Shelf north to the Ross Sea. The region west of this,
in south western Antarctica bordering the Amundsen Sea, is unclaimed. Several
claims are made in northwestern Antarctica. There is Chilean claim from Ellsworth
Land through the Ronne Ice Shelf, and Argentine claim from the Ronne Ice Shelf
through the Weddell Sea. Additionally, the region north to the Ronne Ice Shelf is
labeled as British Antarctic territory. Northern Antarctica between the Coats and
Queen Maud lands is of Norwegian Dependency. Most of eastern Antarctica is of
Australian Antarctic territory, including the American highland, Queen Mary land,
and the South Geomagnetic pole. A small portion in the center of this claimed
south eastern territory belongs to the French.
Generic toponyms are of greater potential value to the cultural
geographer than specific names because they appear again and
again throughout a culture region. There are literally thousands of
generic place-names, and every culture or subculture has its own
distinctive set of them. They are particularly valuable both in tracing
the spread of a culture and in reconstructing culture regions of the
past. Sometimes generic toponyms provide information on changes
people brought about long ago in their physical surroundings.
Generic Toponyms of the United
States
The three dialects of the eastern United States (see Figure 4.9)—
Northern, Midland, and Southern—illustrate the value of generic
toponyms in cultural geographical detective work. For example, New
Englanders, speakers of the Northern dialect, often used the terms
Center and Corner in the names of the towns or hamlets. Outlying
settlements frequently bear the prefix East, West, North, or South,
with the specific name of the township as the suffix. Thus, in
Randolph Township, Orange County, Vermont, we find settlements
named Randolph Center, South Randolph, East Randolph, and
North Randolph (Figure 4.21). Hewitts Corners is located a few
miles away.
FIGURE 4.21 This map depicts a portion of the state of Vermont, displaying the
generic toponyms that abound in New England.
Description
Data follows. To the north is Washington County with the towns of Alpine Village,
Roxbury, East Roxbury, and West Brookfield. South of Washington County is
Addison County, with East Granville, Granville, Lower Granville, and Hancock. To
the south west is Rutland County, with Michigan and Pittsfield. To the north east is
Orange County with Jackson Corner, Washington Heights, and West Corinth at the
top. West Braintree, Randolph, East Braintree, Peth are seen west. Brookfield,
East Brookfield, Brookfield Center, North Randolph, Randolph Center, East
Randolph, South Randolph, North Tunbridge, and Tunbridge are seen at the
center. Chelsea, Vershire Heights, South Washington, Vershire Center, Kennedy
Corners, Old City, Strafford, and South Strafford are seen central and to the east.
Windsor County below Orange County has the following places. At left is
Rochester, Robinson, Talvcile, Emerson, Jerusalem, New Boston, Tupper,
Lympus, Gaysville, Riverside, and Stockbridge. Central to the map is Bethel, East
Bethel, North Royalton, Royalton, and South Royalton. To the right is Sharon and
West Norwich. Highway 89 cuts across Orange County passing by Brookfield,
Brookfield Center, Randolph Center, enters Windsor County and passes by Bethel,
North Royalton, Royalton, South Royalton, Sharon, and West Norwich.
These generic usages and duplications are peculiar to New
England, and we can locate areas settled by New Englanders as
they migrated westward by looking for such place-names in other
parts of the country. A trail of “Centers” and name duplications
extending westward from New England through upstate New York
and Ontario and into the upper Midwest clearly indicates their path of
migration and settlement. Toponymic evidence of New England
exists in areas as far away as Walworth County, Wisconsin, where
Troy, Troy Center, East Troy, and Abels Corners are clustered; in
Dufferin County, Ontario, where one finds places such as Mono
Centre; and even in distant Alberta, near Edmonton, where the
toponym Michigan Centre doubly suggests a particular cultural
diffusion.
Similarly, we can identify Midland American areas by such terms
as Gap, Cove, Hollow, Knob (a low, rounded hill), and -burg, as in
Stone Gap, Cades Cove, Stillhouse Hollow, Bald Knob, and
Fredericksburg. We can recognize Southern speech by such names
as Bayou, Gully, and Store (for rural hamlets), as in Cypress Bayou,
Gum Gully, and Halls Store.
Toponyms and Cultures of the Past
Place-names often survive long after the culture that produced them
vanishes from an area, thereby preserving traces of the past.
Australia abounds in Aborigine toponyms, even in areas from which
the native peoples disappeared long ago. No toponyms are more
permanently established than those identifying physical geographical
features, such as rivers and mountains. Even the most absolute
conquest, exterminating an aboriginal people, usually does not
entirely destroy such names. The abundance of Native American
toponyms in the United States provides an example. The names of
more than half of the states are of Native American origin. India,
however, has recently decided to revert to traditional toponyms, after
many Indian place-names had been Anglicized under British colonial
rule (Figure 4.22).
FIGURE 4.22 India’s postcolonial toponym shift. More than 50 years after the
English colonizers “quit” India, their colonial place-names are being swept from the
map, too.
(Source: Adapted from Sappenfield, 2006.)
In Spain and Portugal, seven centuries of Moorish rule left behind
a great many Arabic place-names. An example is the prefix guadaon river names (as in Guadalquivir and Guadalupejo). The prefix is a
corruption of the Arabic wadi, meaning “river” or “stream.” Thus,
Guadalquivir, corrupted from Wadi-al-Kabir, means “the great river.”
The frequent occurrence of Arabic names in any particular region or
province of Spain reveals the remnants of Moorish cultural influence
in that area. Many such names were brought to the Americas
through Iberian conquest, so that Guadalajara, for example, appears
on the map as an important Mexican city.
The Political Economy of Toponyms
Without a doubt, you are familiar with places that bear the names of
wealthy and influential individuals, politicians, or corporate sponsors.
Sports stadiums, campus buildings, and museums are all specific
spaces that can be named. The owners of these spaces typically use
naming opportunities as a way to raise funds. For instance,
universities provide naming rights for donors contributing anywhere
from $5 million to over $300 million.
But what happens when a place that has been built using public
monies—say, a train station that was constructed using tax revenues
—is given a corporate name (Figure 4.23)? Geographers Reuben
Rose-Redwood and Derek Alderman examine this practice, using
the example of the building that was constructed to replace the
World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, which were destroyed in the
terrorist attacks of 9/11. The building was initially dubbed “The
Freedom Tower,” but once it acquired corporate tenants, the building
began to be referred to by its legal address, One World Trade
Center. According to Rose-Redwood and Alderman, this illustrates
“how the naming of places has become . . . one of the next ‘frontiers’
in the neoliberalization of urban spaces.”
FIGURE 4.23 Barclays Center Station. The New York City subway system is public.
Yet this stop—just outside the Barclays Center arena—is named after the arena’s
corporate sponsor, a bank.
What happens when the corporate sponsor of a place has a lessthan-acceptable reputation? Florida Atlantic University, for instance,
sold the naming rights for its sports stadium to GEO Group for $6
million in February 2013. GEO Group operates private prisons and
has been implicated in the inhumane treatment of inmates at its
facilities. Less than two months later, the agreement was cancelled.
In this instance, the negative place image generated by a corporate
sponsor wasn’t worth the price paid (Figure 4.24).
FIGURE 4.24 University of Louisville sports stadium. The home of the Cardinals
was named after a pizza chain and supported by other corporate sponsors noted on
the sign. Recently the university took Papa John’s name off the stadium in the wake of
a racial slur scandal.
Is no place safe from corporate ownership? Apparently not.
People are paid to allow companies to use their cars as mobile
billboards. What about the items of clothing and accessories that
prominently bear the names of their designers? Is what poet
Adrienne Rich called “the geography closest-in”—our bodies—a
place that is also open for corporate naming opportunities?
World Heritage Site: Alhambra, Generalife, and Albayzín
The Alhambra fortress-palace complex, the gardens and rural estates of the
Generalife, and the Albayzín residential quarter together form this World Heritage Site.
All three are located in the city of Granada, in southern Spain. The Alhambra and the
Albayzín are situated on hills above the modern lower city. Hills were important
defense sites in medieval European cities (see Chapter 10). And the irrigated gardens
of the Generalife were part of the rulers’ rural estates.
From the eleventh through fourteenth centuries, Muslim rulers, or emirs,
oversaw the construction of the Alhambra fortress and residences, the gardens
of the Generalife, and the Albayzín residential quarter. From the eighth through
fifteenth centuries, Spain was ruled by the Moors, Muslims of North African
descent.
These sites are exceptional examples of Moorish imperial architecture. Though
Spain became Christianized after the Moors were expelled in 1492, Spanish
monarchs greatly admired and sought to safeguard the architectural
achievements of the Moors in the Andalusian region of southern Spain. Through
careful restoration, the architecture of these sites remains true to its Spanish-
Moorish roots. The urban layout, colors, and materials look today much as they
did over 700 years ago.
The Albayzín residential quarter occupies a hill that, according to archaeological
evidence, has been continuously occupied since early Roman times (about 2500
years).
WALL WRITING IN THE ALHAMBRA
The original Alhambra fortress-palace was built by Samuel Ha-Nagid, an eleventhcentury Jewish grand vizier (a prime minister of sorts) to the Zirid sultans of Granada.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Nazrid emirs constructed an entire
complex of palaces and irrigated gardens at the site. The buildings are adorned with
what appear at first glance to be elaborate, intricate designs. In reality, the walls,
ceilings, and other architectural elements are covered with words. Over 10,000 Arabic
inscriptions adorn the interior of the Alhambra complex. “There is probably no other
place in the world where studying walls, columns and fountains is so similar to turning
the pages of a book,” according to Spanish researcher Juan Castilla.
Islamic architecture is typically adorned with decorative writing called calligraphy
and other geometric patterns, rather than representations of living beings.
According to some Muslims, figural representation was a form of idolatry (the
worship of a physical object as a god), while others saw the body as an
imperfect covering for the soul.
Because calligraphy was commonly regarded as the preeminent expression of
the visual arts, calligraphers typically had a higher status than other artists and
were housed in the Ministry of Writing.
Efforts to digitally archive and transcribe the wall writing reveal that fewer than
10 percent of the inscriptions are Qur’anic (religious) verses or poetry. The rest
offer praise to the Nasrid emirs or consist of other popular sayings, with “There
is no victor but Allah” being the most common inscription.
TOURISM
This site attracts a huge number of international tourists, most of whom arrive in the
summer months.
The number of tourists to the Alhambra is limited to a daily quota of 6600.
Unfortunately, the decorative surfaces of the site’s buildings are not well
protected, so they continue to be worn away by the touch of so many tourists.
The picturesque city of Granada is situated on a series of hills against the
backdrop of the Sierra Mountains. Tourists enjoy the mix of Mediterranean
cultures, cuisines, and traditions there.
This World Heritage Site was built by and for the Moorish rulers of
southern Spain, and exemplifies the pinnacle of Andalusian architecture, a
synthesis of classical Arabic and southern Spanish styles.
The interior structures of the Alhambra palace are covered with more than
10,000 intricate inscriptions in Arabic calligraphy.
The Alhambra and the Generalife were placed on the list of World Heritage
Sites in 1984, and in 1994 the site was expanded to include the Albayzín
quarter.
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/314
Conclusion
Human interactions, with one another and with the world around
us, are primarily language-based. We shape our surroundings
using language, and in turn, our surroundings shape the way
different languages sound, their vocabularies, and their spatial
expression.
Like human cultures, languages are fluid and adaptive to the
needs of their users. Languages are also susceptible to the
power dynamics at work in human societies more generally.
Conquest, dominance, and repression, but also creativity and
resilience, are at work in the rise and fall of languages and in
their ever-changing expressions. The trend toward the
dominance of a few “big” languages may afford opportunities to
communicate on a global scale, but it also may signal the demise
of much of the cultural richness across the Earth.
Chapter Summary
4.1 Identify the geographical patterns of languages.
Language families, dialects, vocabulary, pronunciation, and
toponyms display distinct spatial variations that can be
identified on maps of linguistic culture regions.
Pidgins, creoles, lingua franca, and bilingualism are all linguistic
strategies that allow speakers of different languages to interact
with each other; there is both creativity and power involved.
Languages are connected to other languages in a tree-like
fashion, with major branches—such as Indo-European or SinoTibetan—leafing into specific, related tongues.
4.2 Understand how languages and dialects have come to exist,
move, and change.
The rise and spread of Indo-European, the largest language
family on Earth, has been explained by the Anatolian
hypothesis and the Kurgan hypothesis.
Relocation and expansion diffusion, both hierarchical and
contagious, are apparent in the movement of language from
one place to another.
Political conquest and the spread of religions have been
important for the diffusion of languages.
Language is fluid and ever-changing along with the needs of
users.
4.3 Evaluate the relationship between technology and language.
The number of languages spoken on Earth is decreasing, while
a few—notably Chinese, English, and Spanish—are spoken by
an increasing number of people worldwide. Technological
forces, ranging from the invention of writing to transportation
innovations, help to spread languages across the globe.
The rise of the Internet and texting have dramatically reshaped
spoken and written language.
When endangered languages become extinct, so too do the
cultures of their speakers. Efforts to preserve and teach dying
languages draw on the same cultural innovations that in other
ways act to threaten the most vulnerable of tongues.
4.4 Explain the relationships between language and the physical
environment.
The natural habitat helps to shape linguistic elements, such as
vocabulary and dominant sounds.
Physical features, such as mountains and rivers, can channel
the spread of language or provide barriers to its diffusion.
Inhospitable physical environments can provide refuge and
protection for speakers of minority languages.
4.5 Identify the ways languages are visibly part of the cultural
landscape.
Dominance of one group over another is often expressed in
exclusion, or even extermination, from the linguistic cultural
landscape.
Toponyms provide clues to the history of places, political
struggles over land, and display particular regional patterns in
the United States.
Corporations purchase the right to name places, and in so
doing bring the controversy between public and private space
Purchase answer to see full
attachment