Geography 3320
Fall Semester, 2006

Geography of Language

Language - basically oral communication amongst human beings
    Non-literate societies
    Primate call systems
    Concept of displacement
Linguistic change
Standard language
    Defined by power structure in technologically advanced societies
    Cultural and national identity
Dialect
    Regional variation of a standard language
    In many cases distinction between dialect and language blurred
        Spain - Catalan - given dialect status

Iberian Peninsula Dialects

    Dialect variations
        Geography - Are you a Yankee or Dixie?

Southern Appalachian dialect - scene from the movie Deliverance - Cahulawassee (Chatooga) River
north Georgia

Lingusitic Geography - England

        Social class - Ebonics - Black English
        In time dialect variations evolve into distinct languages

World Language Families

Indo-European - related languages which stretch from India to Europe
    Persian, Hindi - members of Indo-European language family

World Language Families

European languages - Indo-European

    Germanic - nw Europe
        German, Dutch, Frisian, English, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and
        Icelandic
    Romance - Southern Europe
        Romanian - eastern Europe, colony of ancient Roman Empire
        Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, Spanish
    Slavic - Eastern Europe
        Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, etc.
    Other Indo-European language families in Europe
        Celtic (Gaelic), Greek, Baltic
Non-Indo-European languages in Europe
    Basque - goes back to Paleolithic

Basque Linguistic Group

    Hungarian, Finnish
Indo-European outside of Europe
    Pashtun - Afghanistan
    Farsi - Iran
    Hindi - India

Linguistic Geography - India

Semitic - North Africa, SW Asia

North and Sub-Saharan Africa Linguistic Groups

    Arabic
    Hebrew
Sino-Tibetan
    Chinese
African language families
    Niger-Congo

Language and History

Glottochronology - measuring rates of linguistic change, mapping linguistic divergence
Lingua franca - trade language, business language - use to communicate when a number of languages
    are present, common language spoken by peoples with different native tongues
    Swahili - East Africa - develop from Bantu, Arabic, and Persian
        Somalia to Uganda to Kenya
Creole languages - languages come into contact, a pidgin language develops
    Caribbean - pidgin from English and African
    Eventually language becomes standardized - becomes a Creole language
        English creoles in the Caribbean, Gullah in Georgia and South Carolina

Images of Gullah Culture

        Creole French in Louisiana and Haiti

Multilingual States

Mexico - 15% of the population use Indian dialects.  See map, Huastecan dialect spoken 300 miles
    south of the U.S.-Mexico border

Linguistic Geography - Mesoamerica