Transcript The Mosaic of Languages

The Mosaic of Languages
Cultural Geography
Why geographers study language
• Provides the single most common variable by which cultural groups are
identified
• Provides the main means by which learned customs and skills pass from
one generation to the next
• Reflects all aspects of culture – the physical area occupied by the society
• Facilitates cultural diffusion of innovations
• Because languages vary spatially, they reinforce the sense of region and
place
• Study of language is called linguistic geography and geolinguistics by
geographers
Language and Identity
• Establishes a cultural identity
• Builds group identity and a sense
of unity
• Also nationalism
• Can divide people as well
• Canada – both English and French
are official languages
Language Diffusion
• May follow trade routes
• Swahili developed as a trade language between Arabic traders and Bantuspeaking tribes on Africa’s east coast
• May diffuse through migration
• Colonists from Europe brought the English, Spanish, French and Dutch
languages to North and South America, Africa, Australia, and parts of Asia
• Blended languages can help aid communication among groups
speaking several languages
• Louisiana – French, African, and North American peoples blended to create
Louisiana Creole
Language Families
• Over 6,000 languages
• Language — tongues that cannot be mutually understood
• Characterized by placing them with similar languages
• Evolved from earlier languages
• Dialect
• A speaker of English can understand the various dialect of the language
• A dialect is distinctive enough in vocabulary and pronunciation to label its
speaker
• Reflects changes in speech patterns related to class, region, or other cultural
changes.
• Southern drawl, Boston Accent, street slang
Language Families
The Indo-European language family
• Largest most wide-spread family
• Spoken on all continents
• Dominant in Europe, Russia, North and South
America, Australia, and parts of
southwestern Asia and India
• Subfamilies—Romance, Slavic, Germanic,
Indic, Celtic, and Iranic
• Subfamilies are divided into individual
languages
• Seven Indo-European tongues are among the
top 10 languages spoken in the world
• By comparing vocabularies in various
languages one can see the kinship
Language Families
The Afro-Asiatic family
• Has two major divisions—Semitic and Hamitic
• Semitic covers the area from Tigris-Euphrates
valley westward through most of the north half of
Africa to the Atlantic coast
• Domain is large but consists of mostly sparsely
populated deserts
• Arabic is the most widespread Semitic language
• Arabic has the most number of native speakers—
about 186 million
• Hebrew was a “dead” language used only in
religious ceremonies
• Today Hebrew is the official language of Israel
• Smaller number of people speak Hamitic
languages
• Originated in Asia but today only spoken in Africa
• Expansion of Arabic decreased the area and
number of speakers
Other major language families
• Japanese/Korean language
family
• Another major Asian family with
nearly 200 million speakers
• Austro-Asiatic language family
• Found in Southeast Asia, Vietnam,
Cambodia, Thailand, and spoken
by some tribal people of Malaya
and parts of India
English dialects in the United States
• Dialects reveal a vivid geography
• American English is hardly uniform from region to region
• At least three major dialects, corresponding to major culture regions,
developed in the eastern United States by the time of the American
Revolution
• Northern
• Midland
• Southern
English dialects in the United States
• The three subcultures expanded westward and their dialects spread
and fragmented
• Retained much of their basic character even beyond the Mississippi River
• Have distinctive vocabularies and pronunciations
• Drawing dialect boundaries is often tricky
• Today, many regional words are becoming old-fashioned, but new
words display regional variations
• The following words are all used to describe a controlled-access
divided highway
• Freeway — a California word
• Turnpike and parkway — mainly northeastern and Midwestern words
• Thruway, expressway, and interstate
English dialects in the United States
• Many African-Americans speak
their own form of English —
Black English
• Once dismissed as inferior
substandard English
• Developed on early slave
plantations
• Today, spoken by about 80 percent
of African-Americans
• Many features separate it from
standard speech, for example:
• Lack of pronoun differentiation
between genders
• Use of undifferentiated pronouns
English dialects in the United States
• American dialects suggest we
are not becoming a more
national culture by
overwhelming regional cultures
• Linguistic divergence is still under
way
• Dialects continue to mutate on a
regional level
• Local variations in grammar and
pronunciation proliferate
• The homogenizing influence of
radio, television, and other mass
media is being defied
London, England
• While English is spoken in many
pats of the world, all English
words are not mutually
intelligible.
• This London tube (subway) sign
say that anyone performing
there (eg singing or playing for
money) is subject to a fine of
subsection.
• Are tubs, subway, and busking
dialect words?
The environment and vocabulary
• Vocabularies develop for features of the environment that involve
livelihood
• Detailed vocabularies are necessary to communicate sophisticated
information relevant to the adaptive strategy
The environment and vocabulary
• English
•
•
•
•
Developed in wet coastal plains
Very poor in words describing mountainous terrain
Abounds with words describing flowing streams
Rural American South—river, creek, branch, fork, prong, run, bayou, and
slough
Understanding Dialects
• Bill Cosby understanding Southern
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1NsC98xVN0&feature=player_embedde
d
• Mental Floss – Regional Slang
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w6uQIXC1aI