Part Three
THE GLOBAL
LINGUISTIC MOSAIC
A
Language is one of the cornerstones of national identity,
cultural unity, and community cohesion. Old languages
with historic roots, and languages spoken by threatened
minorities, are nurtured and fostered by their speakers. But
language also can be a weapon in cultural conflict and in
political strife. In the United States, the growth of the
Spanish-speaking population has led to demands for the use
of Spanish in public affairs; this movement, in turn, has
spawned national countermovements called “English Only”
and “English First.” In Quebec, a campaign for political
t Issue
independence from Canada was accompanied by the
official demotion of English in favor of Quebec’s distinctive
version of French. Language is a powerful component of
local nationalisms in many areas. The issue now is: Why do
regimes in multilingual countries seek to promote a
single national language? What are the consequences of
such initiatives?
English, global lingua franca? Dubai, Arabian Peninsula
Part Outline
8 A Geography of Language
9 The Diffusion of Languages
10 Modern Language Mosaics
Chapter
8
A Geography
of Language
From the field notes
10°W
5°W
0°
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
North
Sea
15°W
55°N
UNITED
KINGDOM
Irish Sea
IRELAND
5°E
NETHERLANDS
Kilkenny
BELG.
50°N
FRANCE
“Efforts to maintain and nurture indigenous and precolonial languages
continue to multiply and can often be seen in the cultural landscape. Here
in Ireland, official signs give the names of towns and other geographic
features in Gaelic as well as English. I started to take notes, and soon I
had a list not only of Gaelic equivalents of English place names, but also of
geographic features such as, on this sign on the outskirts of Kilkenney,
‘city center’.”
111
KEY POINTS
◆ Language is at the heart of culture, and
no culture exists without it. When a people’s language is threatened, the response
often is passionate and protective.
◆ States often try to promote a standard
language backed by national institutions
and official state examinations. Such initiatives play a key role in distinguishing what
we think of as a language from what we
think of as a dialect.
◆ Languages are constantly in flux. Standard languages can slow the rate of linguistic change, but in the modern world
where innovations diffuse rapidly, change
is inevitable.
P
◆ More people speak languages belonging
to the Indo-European language family than
languages in any other family. Indo-European languages are also more widely distributed than any others.
◆ Chinese is spoken by more people than
any other language, but English has become
the principal language of cross-cultural
communication, economics, and science.
◆ The present distribution of languages, as
revealed on maps, is useful in understanding prior cultural diffusions and present
cultural patterns.
eople tend to feel passionately about their language, especially when they sense that it is threatened. Language is at the heart of culture, and culture is the glue of society; without language, culture
could not be transmitted from one generation to the
next.
Such passion is not the exclusive preserve of small
groups whose languages are threatened by extinction (of
which there are many). It is also exhibited by cultures
whose languages are spoken by the tens, even hundreds,
of millions. Many French citizens, for example, are
fiercely, even aggressively protective of their language. A
former French president, Georges Pompidou, once
stated that “It is through our language that we exist in the
world other than as just another country.”
More than 25 years ago these words were given the
force of law: in 1975 the French government banned the
use of foreign words in advertisements, television and
radio broadcasts, and official documents unless no
French equivalent could be found. In 1992, France
amended its constitution to make French the official language of the Republic. In 1994 still another law was
passed to stop the use of foreign (mainly English) words
in France, with a hefty fine imposed for violators. The
French, said the government, would have to get used to
saying something other than le meeting, le corner, le
drugstore, and le hamburger.
112
Such legislation is unlikely to stop the “pollution”
of French. In our modern, interconnected world, where
innovations diffuse rapidly, words will be borrowed
and languages will change. But French is in no danger of
disappearing. Many communities that perceive a real
threat to their culture’s survival will protect it even
more forcefully.
Preliterate societies (peoples who speak their
language but do not write it) are at a disadvantage. Although they can transmit their culture from one generation to the next, they do not have a written literature
that can serve as a foundation for cultural preservation.
Like endangered species, there are languages that are
on the verge of extinction, and others that are threatened. The language mosaic of the world is constantly
changing.
Linguists estimate that between 5000 and 6000 languages are in use in the world today, some spoken by
many millions of people, others by a few hundred. As we
will note in Chapter 9, there are many unanswered questions about the origins and diffusion of all these languages; clearly, however, the same migrations that led to
spatial isolation among early human communities also led
to linguistic differences. Modern research is reconstructing the paths of linguistic diversification and throwing new light on ancient migrations. ◆
CHAPTER 8 A Geography of Language
◆ DEFINING LANGUAGE
The term languagehas been defined in numerous ways.
Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “a systematic means of
communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, gestures, marks, or especially articulate
vocal sounds.” Communication of sound (vocalization)
is the crucial part of this definition. Such communication
is symbolic; that is, in each language the meanings of
sounds and combination of sounds must be learned.
The definition is correct in stating that other means of
communication also constitute “language.” Nonhuman primates such as chimpanzees can also communicate through
signs, such as combinations of gestures and sounds that
alert the group to the presence of a predator or the availability of food. Elephants and dolphins, too, use sounds to
communicate. But only humans have developed complex
vocal communication systems that change over time and
space. How these systems first emerged remains an unanswered question. We do know that the vocal systems of
nonhuman primates are so basic and static that they are
unlikely to have been forerunners of human language.
This means that human languages, even those spoken in preliterate societies, are fundamentally different
from those of nonhuman primates. The Khoisan-speaking peoples of southwestern Africa may not have a word
for helicopter, but they have the symbols that they can
use to describe this piece of unfamiliar technology. The
potential vocabulary of any language is infinite, whether
it is spoken by large-scale industrialized societies or by
nonindustrial peoples like the San or the Yanomami of
the Amazonian rainforest.
Languages are not static but change continuously. A
vital culture requires a flexible language. If you read a
few pages from one of Shakespeare’s plays, you will realize how much English has changed over several centuries. Today we can see changes in American English;
the computer revolution, for example, has greatly expanded the vocabulary of commonly used words. In this
chapter we examine fundamental geographic aspects of
the world’s language mosaic—their distribution and
spread. This will prepare us for an introduction to the
fascinating study of language origins and diffusion, the
subject of Chapter 9. In Chapter 10 we will look at some
topics of special interest, including the language of place
names.
Standard Language
Technologically advanced societies are likely to have a
standard language, whose quality is a matter of cultural identity and national concern. The standard language may be sustained by official state examinations for
teachers, civil servants, and others. The phrase “the
King’s English” is a popular reference to the fact that the
English spoken by well-educated people in London and
its environs is regarded as British Received Pronunciation (BRP) English—that is, the standard.
113
Who decides what the standard language will be?
Not surprisingly, the answer has to do with influence
and power. In France, the French spoken in and around
Paris was made the official, standard language during
the sixteenth century. In China, standard Chinese is the
Northern Mandarin Chinese heard in and around the
capital, Beijing. Although this is China’s official standard
language, the linguistic term “Chinese” actually incorporates many variants. This distinction between the standard language and other versions of it is not unique to
China; it is found in all but the smallest societies. The
Italian of Sicily is very different from that spoken north of
Venice, and both tongues differ from the standard Italian
of Latium, the region around Rome.
Dialects
As we will see, the distinction between a language and a
dialect is not always clear, but dialects can generally be
thought of as regional variants of a standard language.
Differences in vocabulary, syntax (the way words are put
together to form phrases), pronunciation, cadence (the
rhythm of speech), and even the pace of speech all mark
a speaker’s dialect. Even if the written form of a statement
adheres to the standard language, an accent can reveal the
regional home of a person who reads the statement aloud.
The words “horse” and “oil” are written the same way in
New England and in the South, but to the Southerner, the
New Englander may be saying “hahse,” while to the New
Englander the Southerner seems to be saying “all.”
More often, however, dialects are marked by actual
differences in vocabulary. A single word or group of
words can reveal the source area of the dialect used. Linguistic geographers map the areal extent of particular
words, marking their limits as isoglosses (Fig. 8-1). An
Figure 8-1 Isoglosses. Isoglosses move over time. In this
hypothetical case, the use of “herd” has receded in favor of
“flock,” but some outliers of “herd” remain.
“flock”
Isoglos
s 1952
2
Is o g lo s s 1 9 9
“herd”
Town
Village
Part Three The Global Linguistic Mosaic
114
isogloss is a geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs, but such a boundary is
rarely a simple line. Usually there are outlying areas of
usage, as in Figure 8-1. This may signify either that use of
the dialect has expanded or that it has contracted, leaving the outliers as dwindling remnants. A series of largescale maps over time will tell the story of that dialect’s
advance or retreat.
what processes created this distribution, and how the
present pattern is changing.
Before we view maps of language distribution, however, let us briefly consider the problem of language
classification. This obviously relates to the definition of
language: What is a language and what is a dialect? That
issue is a complex one. Some scholars have classified
Quebecois French as a language, whereas others insist
that it is a dialect of European French. In regions of
Africa where Bantu languages are spoken, many of those
languages are closely related and share major portions of
their vocabulary.
What is clear is that the distinction between a language and a dialect is not based on an objective measure
of mutual intelligibility; if it were, Chinese would not be
◆ CLASSIFICATION AND
DISTRIBUTION OF LANGUAGES
In the context of cultural geography, we are interested in
how languages are distributed throughout the world,
Figure 8-2 Language Families of the World. Generalized map of the world distribution of
language families. Source: Based on a map prepared by Hammond, Inc., for the first edition, 1977.
21
LANGUAGE FAMILIES
OF THE WORLD
60°
INDO-EUROPEAN
21
21
1A
A Germanic B Romance C Slavic
D Baltic E Celtic F Albanian
G Greek H Armenian J Indo-Iranian
40°
1A
40°
E N G L I S H
AT L A N T I C
15
1A
KHOISAN
1A
20°
1B
Tropic of Cancer
15
15
S
9
SINO-TIBETAN
10
JAPANESE AND KOREAN
P
A
I
15
Equator
VE
C
15
A
H
U
20°
20°
15
AMERICAN INDIAN
S
P
PAPUAN AND AUSTRALIAN
15
I
Tropic of Capricorn
14
A
T
20°
1B
R
MALAY-POLYNESIAN
N
13
1B
E
AUSTRO-ASIATIC
P
12
15
1B
U
DRAVIDIAN
B
1B
Q
S
OCEAN
11
1B
1A
K
0°
1A
H 1B
S
ARA
PA C I F I C
15
15
N
20°
I
ALTAIC
20°
1B
1A
R
8
1B
1B
15
CA
URALIC
15
WA
7
OCEAN
1A
E
6
1B
FRENCH
S
SUDANIC
15
E
5
1A
15
A L G O N Q U I N
U
SAHARAN
1A
G
4
A P
A S
C A
15
N
U
NIGER-CONGO
1A
21
21
1A
H
O
3
T
N
AFRO-ASIATIC
A
MAYA
2
21
20
1A
1
21
21
H
OTHERS:
16 BASQUE
17 CAUCASIAN
18 ANDAMANESE
19 VIETNAMESE
20 PALEO-ASIATIC
21 ESKIMO-ALEUT
UNPOPULATED AREAS
0
0
1000
2000
1000
3000 Kilometers
2000 Miles
1B
40°
40°
15
40°
40°
1A
1B
SOUTHERN OCEAN
60°
160°
140°
120°
60°
60°
80°
1A
60°
40°
60°
CHAPTER 8 A Geography of Language
considered one language, whereas Norwegian and Danish might be. Instead, we must recognize that what we
consider a language is a function of society’s view of
what constitutes a cultural community—a matter that in
turn is influenced by historical developments in the political arena. The ability of the Chinese political elite to
build and sustain a state encompassing speakers of different, albeit closely related, Sino-Tibetan tongues helps
explain why we think of Chinese as one language. By
contrast, the disintegration of the Danish and Swedish
empires is partly responsible for our tendency to recognize several distinct languages in Scandinavia. As such, it
is not too much of an exaggeration to say that a language
is a dialect with an army behind it.
Given the complexities of distinguishing languages
from dialects, the actual number of languages in use remains a matter of considerable debate. The most conser-
1C
21
H
1F
11
U
UG
11
A
LI
LA
O
PA C I F I C
1J
M
10
9
VIE
H
AI
20°
TAGALOG
MA
SIN HALESE
OCEAN
12
KHMER
18
11
Tropic of Cancer
9
13
BISAYAN
19
INDIAN
13
A
S
LI
NGA
BE
Y
LA
GAL
E
10
12
D I
C
2
40°
A
10
I N
TAN
10
AN
ESE
AM
TN
A R
A B I C
G
E
R
I N
1J
5
H
P
E
H
9
BE
1C
JA
KO
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E
ND
TI
BI
7
1C
T
A ZA
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YR
S
A
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PU
BALUCHI
I
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ING
5
GBAYA
IBO
CH
INE
KHALKA-MONGOL
ES
PUSHTU
2
YORUBA
1C
C
N
60°
1C
UIGUR
MARATHI
3
20
7
ESE
BURM
2
GIZ
B
ND
5
HAUSA
T
A
4
1J
IA
R
KI
11
B EJ
MA
MOSSI
A
RS
A
C
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E
R
T
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A
I
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A
8
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BE
K
TUR K M
ENIA
N
TURKISH
HEBREW
A
R
17
1G
2
A
K A Z A K H
8
1B
I
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1C
8
1G
S
NCH
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EN
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-MA
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N
NI S
SPA
7 1B
1C
8
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FR1B
R
CHUKCH
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1C
Y A K U T
1C
TATAR
8
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T
CH
UKRAINIAN
7
1C
TUN
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8
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LIA
ITA
OCEAN
1D
1E
16
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SAMO
KH 7
AN
vative calculation, which would recognize the maximum
number of dialects, puts the number at about 3000. Most
linguistic geographers today would recognize between
5000 and 6000 languages, including more than 600 in
India and over 1000 in Africa alone.
In classifying languages we use terms that are also
employed in biology, and for the same reasons: some
languages are related and others are not. Languages that
are grouped in language families are thought to have a
shared, but fairly distant, origin; in a language subfamily, their commonality is more definite. Subfamilies are
divided into language groups, which consist of sets of
individual languages.
Figure 8-2 shows the distribution of 20 major language families. On this map, only the Indo-European
language family is broken down into subfamilies (greater
detail for Europe is shown in Figure 8-3). Spatially, the
AK
RY
KO
ENGLISH
1E
AT L A N T I C
B
SWAH
ILI
BALUBA
A
A
TT
HO
6
EN
TO
OCEAN
M
ON
UA
14
N
13
13
13
GA
SH
20°
20°
LA
13
20°
20°
14
Tropic of Capricorn
T
1A
1A
AFRIKAANS
E N G L I S H
13
ENGLISH
H
20°
A
U
13
JAVAN
ESE
0°
14
SY
B
BEM
Equator
A
T
MBUNDU
Y
13
PAP
3
MA
AT L A N T I C
OCEAN
KU
A
N
DA
13
MONGO
40°
40°
40°
1A
E
SOUTHERN
60°
0°
20°
Antarctic Circle
40°
N
OCEAN
60°
60°
60°
100°
120°
140°
I
S
40°
7
1A
1A
7
N
I A
R U S S
1A
1A
60°
NO
RW
E
SWE
DIS
H
21
G
LAPP
SH
FINNI
Arctic Circle
I AN
KO M
21
115
160°
60°
G
L
1A
Part Three The Global Linguistic Mosaic
116
20°
30°
20°
10°
40°
LANGUAGES OF EUROPE
200
200
100
0
Saami
300 Miles
Circle
re
22
Estonian
u
Lithuanian
Danish
English
Welsh
4
4
22 Latvian
SWEDISH
ris
22
ian
22
Belarusian
Polish
Dutch
22
37
German
Czech
Al
sat
14
Ukrainian
37
ian
Slovak
22
S
Romanian
Hungarian
2
16
42
37
ne
love
2
37
37
I
Provençal
11
t
Serbo-Croatian
a
37
e
ues
Macedonian
n
Albanian
Por
tug
40°
37
a
11
S ea
Bulgarian
37
i
Catalan
Spanish
Black
37
l
40°
42
26
Basque
10
22
22
37
37
French
11
50°
21
Breton
Galician
22
1
English
R
Scots
Ga
North Sea
4
6
4
F
Irish
Ga
English
c 4
eli
4
50°
elic
60°
6
Swed
is
h
N orw
eg
ia
n
Faeroese
20°
lian
nnish
an S ea
60°
ATL
ANT
IC
OC
EAN
Samoyedic
Saami
Fi
Norw
e gi
600 Kilometers
Ka
Arctic
Icelandic
400
s s
i a n
0
Catalan
Tu r k i s h
G re e k
10°
37
Mediterran
Major Indo-European Branches
Other Indo-European Branches
Germanic group
WESTERN GERMANIC
1 Dutch
2 German
3 Frisian
4 English
Celtic group
NORTHERN GERMANIC
5 Danish
6 Swedish
7 Norwegian
8 Icelandic
9 Faeroses
BRITTANIC
GAULISH
29 Breton
30 Welsh
31 Irish Gaelic
32 Scots Gaelic
Baltic group
33 Lativian
Romance group
10 Portuguese
11 Spanish
12 Catalan
13 Provençal
ean Sea
14 French
15 Italian
16 Rhaeto-Romance
17 Romanian
34 Lithuanian
Hellenic
35 Greek
Thracian/Illyrian group
Slavic group
WEST SLAVONIC
EAST SLAVONIC
SOUTH SLAVONIC
18 Polish
19 Slovak
20 Czech
21 Sorbian
22 Russian
23 Ukrainian
24 Belarusian
25 Slovene
26 Serbo-Croatian
27 Macedonian
28 Bulgarian
36 Albanian
Thracian/Illyrian group
37 Romani
Uralic Language Family
Finno-Ugric group
38 Ginnish
39 Karelian
40 Saami
41 Estonian
42 Hungarian
Areas with significant
concentrations of other
languages (usually
adjacent national languages).
Samoyedic group
44 Samoyedic
Boundary between languages.
Altaic Language Family
Turkic group
45 Turkish
Other Languages
Basque
Boundary between
Indo-European and
non-Indo-European
languages.
46 Basque
Figure 8-3 Languages of Europe. Generalized map of language-use regions in Europe.
Source: Based on a map in A. B. Murphy, “European languages,” T. Unwin, ed., A European Geography. London: Longman, 1998, p. 38.
CHAPTER 8 A Geography of Language
Indo-European languages are the most widely dispersed
language family. As Figure 8-2 indicates, the IndoEuropean language family dominates not only in Europe
but also in significant parts of Asia (including Russia and
India), North and South America, Australia, and portions
of Southern Africa. Indo-European languages are
spoken by about half the world’s peoples, and English is
the most widely used Indo-European language.
Geolinguists theorize that a lost language (or set of
languages) they call Proto-Indo-European existed somewhere in the vicinity of the Black Sea or east-central Europe (see the discussion in the next chapter) and that the
present languages of the Indo-European family evolved
from it. As Indo-European speakers dispersed, vocabularies grew and linguistic differentiation took place. Latin
arose during this early period and was disseminated over
much of Europe during the rise of the Roman Empire.
Later, Latin died out and was supplanted by Italian,
French, and the other Romance languages.
As Figure 8-2 indicates, the Indo-European language
family includes not only the major languages of Europe
and the former Soviet Union but also those of northern
India and Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran.
This reflects the probable route of ancient migration
from the west to South Asia. More modern migrations
carried Indo-European languages (principally English,
Spanish, Portuguese, and French) to the Americas, Australia, and Africa.
◆ THE MAJOR WORLD
LANGUAGES
Although more of the world’s peoples speak Indo-European languages than languages in any other family, Chinese is the single most important language in terms of
number of speakers (Table 8-1), with English ranking second. The numbers in Table 8-1 should be viewed as approximations. English, for example, is not only spoken by
280 million North Americans, 60 million Britons and Irish,
more than 20 million Australians and New Zealanders,
and millions more in countries with smaller populations; it
is also used as a second language by hundreds of millions
of people in India, Africa, and elsewhere. French is the
first language of 77 million people (some sources report
as many as 100 million), but it is also widely used as a second language. Note also that some of the numbers in
Table 8-1 are based on population data that are not reliable. The regional languages of India (Indo-European as
well as Dravidian) are among the most used, but exact
data on the number of speakers are not available.
Table 8-1 does not list any languages spoken south
of the Sahara as major world languages. One reason can
be seen in Figure 8-2: the African language map is highly
fragmented. Subsaharan Africa still has a relatively small
population (647 million people in 2002), but more than
117
Table 8-1 The Major World Language Families
Language Family
Indo-European
Sino-Tibetan
Japanese-Korean
Dravidian
Altaic
Afro-Asiatic
Malay-Polynesian
Major
Language
Number of
Speakers
(Millions)
English
Hindi
Spanish
Bengali
Portuguese
Russian
German
French
Italian
Urdu
Chinese
Burmese
Thai
Japanese
Korean
Telugu
Tamil
Turkish
Arabic
Indonesia
445
366
340
207
176
167
100
77
62
60
1211
32
23
125
78
69
66
61
211
154
1000 languages are spoken there. These languages are
grouped into four families (3, 4, 5, and 6 in Figure 8-2).
In terms of number of speakers, Hausa is estimated to be
the most important Subsaharan African language, with
perhaps as many as 50 million speakers. Hundreds of
African languages have fewer than 1 million speakers.
Figure 8-2 also shows other language families that are
spoken by dwindling, often marginally located or isolated
groups. Austro-Asiatic languages (11), spoken in interior
locales of eastern India and in Cambodia (Khmer) and
Laos, are thought to be survivors of ancient languages spoken before modern invasions and cultural diffusion took
place. Some scholars place Vietnamese in this family, but
others do not. The Papuan and indigenous Australian languages (13), though numerous and quite diverse, are spoken by fewer than 10 million people. The languages of Native Americans (14) remain strong only in areas of Middle
America, the high Andes, and northern Canada. Languages
of the Eskimo-Aleut family (20) survive on the Arctic margins of Greenland, North America, and eastern Asia.
If we look carefully at the map of world languages,
some interesting questions arise. Consider, for example,
the island of Madagascar off the East African coast. The
primary languages spoken on Madagascar belong not to
an African language family but to the Malay-Polynesian
family, the languages of Indonesia and its neighbors.
How did this happen on an island so close to Africa? Actually, the map reveals a piece of ancient history that is
118
F
Part Three The Global Linguistic Mosaic
rom the field notes
“Approaching the orthodox Jewish neighborhood
for Meah Shearim in Jerusalem, I was drawn to a large sign
specifying guidelines for how one should dress when entering the neighborhood. The call for covered arms and skirts
below the knee was interesting, but so was the language in
which the call was made. Jerusalem is a cosmopolitan city,
with people from all corners of the earth. But when the local
community seeks to communicate with those from the outside, they resort to one (and only one) language: English.”
not well understood. Long ago, seafarers from the islands of Southeast Asia crossed the Indian Ocean. They
may have reached the East African coast first and then
sailed on to Madagascar, where they settled. Africans
had not yet sailed across the strait, so there was no threat
to the Indonesian-Malayan settlements. The settlements
grew and prospered, and large states evolved. Later,
Africans began to come to Madagascar, but by that time
the cultural landscape had been established. If you compare the names of Madagascar’s places to those across
the water in Africa, you can see evidence of a fascinating
piece of geographic history.
The Languages of Europe
The language map of Europe (Fig. 8-3) shows that the
Indo-European language family prevails in this region,
with pockets of the Uralic family occurring in Hungary
(the Ugric subfamily) and in Finland and adjacent areas
(the Finnic subfamily), and a major Altaic language—
Turkish—dominating Turkey west of the Sea of Marmara. Indo-European tongues were brought into Europe
by Celtic peoples who spread across the continent during the first millennium B.C.. Celtic speech still survives at
the western edges of Europe, but in most places Celtic
tongues fell victim to subsequent migrations and empire
building. These historical developments led to the creation of a European linguistic pattern characterized by
three major subgroups: Romance, Germanic, and Slavic.
The Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian,
Romanian, and Portuguese) lie in areas once dominated
by the Roman Empire where the dominant form of
speech was not subsequently overwhelmed by immigrants. The Germanic languages (English, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) reflect the expansion of
peoples out of northern Europe to the west and south.
Some Germanic peoples spread into areas dominated by
Rome, and at the northern and northeastern edges of the
Roman Empire their tongues gained ascendancy. Other
Germanic peoples spread into areas that had never been
a part of an ancient empire (e.g., present-day Sweden,
Norway, Denmark, and the northern part of the Netherlands). The Germanic character of English bears the imprint of a further migration—that of the Normans into
England in 1066, bringing a Romance tongue to the
British Isles. The essential Germanic character of English
remained, but many new words were added that are Romance in origin. The Slavic languages (Russian, Polish,
Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and
Bulgarian) came as Slavic people migrated from a base in
present-day Ukraine close to 2000 years ago. Slavic
tongues came to dominate much of eastern Europe over
the succeeding centuries. They too overwhelmed Latinbased tongues along much of the eastern part of the old
Roman Empire—with the notable exception of an area
on the western shores of the Black Sea, where a Latinbased tongue either survived the Slavic invasion or was
reintroduced by migrants. That tongue is the ancestor of
the modern-day Romance language: Romanian.
A comparison of Europe’s linguistic and political
maps shows a high correlation between the languages
spoken and the political organization of space. The Romance languages, of Romanic-Latin origin, dominate in
five countries, including Romania. The eastern boundaries of Germany coincide almost exactly with the transition from Germanic to Slavic tongues. Even at the level of
individual languages, boundaries can be seen on the political map: between French and Spanish, between Norwegian and Swedish, and between Bulgarian and Greek.
CHAPTER 8 A Geography of Language
Although Figure 8-3 shows a significant correlation
between political and linguistic boundaries, there are
some important exceptions. The French linguistic region
extends into Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, but in France
itself it coexists with a Celtic tongue in the Bretagne (Brittany) Peninsula. The Celtic languages survive not only in
Brittany (Breton) but also in Wales (Welsh), western Ireland (Irish Gaelic), and Scotland (Scots Gaelic), where
they constitute remnants of an early period of European
history before modern languages displaced them toward
the realm’s westernmost fringes. The use of Romanian extends well into Moldavia, signifying a past loss of national
territory. Greek and Albanian are also Indo-European languages, and their regional distribution corresponds significantly (though not exactly) with national territories. Figure
8-3 underscores the complex cultural pattern of Eastern
Europe: there are German speakers in Hungary; Hungarian speakers in Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia; Romanian speakers in Greece and Moldavia; Turkish speakers in Bulgaria; and Albanian speakers in Serbia.
Although the overwhelming majority of Europeans
and Russians speak Indo-European languages, the Uralic
and Altaic language families are also represented in this
119
realm. Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian are major languages of the Uralic family, which, as Figure 8-2 shows,
extends across Eurasia to the Pacific coast. The Altaic
family to which Turkish belongs is equally widespread
and includes Turkish, Kazakh, Uigur, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek, among other languages. Not all students of linguistic geography view the Uralic and Altaic languages as
distinct language families, and indeed there are reasons
to group them together. It is believed that they both
spread into Europe between 7000 and 10,000 years ago
and later were overtaken in most places by the IndoEuropean languages. Their source area may have been a
longitudinal zone along the Ural Mountains from which
migrations occurred both westward into Europe and
eastward into Asia. Whatever their origins, Uralic languages survive as the national languages of Finland and
Hungary, and an Altaic language is the national language
of Turkey.
The Languages of India
The mosaic of languages in India (Fig. 8-4) includes
four language families, but only two of these—the
LANGUAGES OF INDIA
KASHMIRI
T
Srinagar
IB
E
N
TA
Indo-European Family
(Indo-Aryan Group)
Dravidian Family
PA
Sino-Tibetan Family
HA
Amritsar
I
RI
B
JA
PA
N
Austro-Asiatic Family
E
ES
M
I
H
B
MUNDA
DI
JA
RA
TI
R
MA
Mumbai
ORAON
Jabalpur
Indore
GON
Nagpur
I
ATH
Raipur
O
RI
GA
NA
Calcutta
YA
Cuttack
GONDI
Hyderabad
Kolhapur
G
Kakinada
DA
MA
Chenn
M
SE
SRI LANKA
ARE
Trivandrum
OB
ALA
TAMIL
NIC
L AY
Bangalore
IL
AM
Madurai
AN D A M A N E S
Nellore
E
L
TE
KANNA
Mangalore
U
U
Hubli
T
U
Imphal
B
Ahmadabad
IL I
G
B
N
H
Varanasi
A
KHASI
E
N
Patna
RI
IHA
GA
LI
ASS
Lucknow
Kanpur
SA
NT
HA
LI
D
I
RA
J
Andamanese
I
Delhi
AN
T H Jaipur
S
Agra
A
Jodhpur
Figure 8-4 Languages of India. Major
languages of the Indian subcontinent.
Source: From a map prepared by Hammond, Inc., for the first edition, 1977.
120
Part Three The Global Linguistic Mosaic
Indo-European family and the Dravidian family—have
significant numbers of speakers among India’s nearly 1
billion inhabitants. In the Karakoram Mountains of
Jammu and Kashmir (the far northwest) there are small
numbers of Tibetan speakers, and along the border
with Myanmar (Burma) in the east lies a cluster of
Naga (Burmese) speakers. Also in the east are small
groups of Austro-Asiatic speakers. Otherwise, the people of India speak about 15 major languages, all but 4
of them Indo-European, and more than 1600 lesser
languages, some of which are spoken by only a few
thousand persons.
As Figure 8-4 indicates, the four Dravidian languages are all spoken in a compact region in the south of
the Indian Peninsula. The map suggests that these languages and the cultures they represent were “pushed”
southward by the advancing Indo-European speakers.
The Dravidian languages are older, although their origins are unclear. Some scholars believe that Dravidian
emerged in India. Others suggest that Dravidian speakers arrived thousands of years ago from Central Asia and
that Dravidian is related to Ural-Altaic languages. Still
others link the Dravidians with the ancient Indus civilization that arose in what is today Pakistan. Indeed, there is
a cluster of about 350,000 speakers of a form of Dravidian in north-central Pakistan.
Today the largest Dravidian language, with about 69
million speakers, is Telugu, the language of the Indian
state of Andhra Pradesh. Tamil, with its rich literature, is
spoken by approximately 66 million persons in Tamil
Nadu. Kannada (also called Kanarese), the language of
Karnataka, has approximately 35 million speakers, about
the same number as Malayalam, which is spoken in the
State of Kerala.
The close relationship between regional languages
and political divisions in southern India also prevails in
the north. Indeed, a comparison of Figure 8-4 with an
atlas map of India’s federal system underscores the important role of languages in the development of this spatial structure. Hindi, the principal Indo-European language with approximately 366 million speakers, extends
across several north-central Indian States. But east as
well as west of India’s Hindi-speaking core lie States
where other languages prevail: Orissa (Oriya), Bihar
(Bihari), West Bengal (Bengali), Punjab (Punjabi), Rajasthan (Rajasthani), Gujarat (Gujarati), and Maharashtra
(Marathi). In the northeast the linguistic map is especially complex, as is reflected in the existence of seven
comparatively small states.
In addition to more than a dozen major languages,
India has hundreds of lesser languages, both Indo-European and Dravidian, that cannot be shown on a map on
the scale of Figure 8-4. Nevertheless, for such a large
population the Indian language mosaic is not as intensely fragmented as Africa’s. Instead, like that of Eu-
rope, it is dominated by several major regional languages with more speakers than many national tongues.
The Languages of Africa
As noted earlier, more than 1000 languages are spoken
in Subsaharan Africa, and linguists have been working
to record many of these; most are unwritten. The resulting data offer significant insights into Africa’s cultural past.
The languages of Africa (Fig. 8-5) are grouped into
four families, the largest of which is the Niger-Congo
family, which extends from West Africa all the way to
the south. This family can be subdivided into five subfamilies. One of these, the Bantu subfamily, encompasses the languages spoken by most of the people near
the equator and south of it. The languages spoken in
West Africa are of the Atlantic, Voltaic, Guinea, and
Hausa subfamilies. The oldest languages of Subsaharan
Africa are the Khoisan languages, which include a
“click” sound. Among these is the language of the San,
spoken by only a few thousand people in southwestern
Africa. Perhaps the Khoisan languages were once the
main languages of much of Africa, but they have been
reduced to comparative insignificance by the Bantu invasion, just as the Celtic languages were in Europe.
How can languages help us reconstruct the cultural
development of Africa? Consider what has happened in
Europe, where the subfamily of Romance languages has
differentiated into French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. Even within these individual languages we
see evidence of differentiation—for example, between
forms of Italian spoken in different parts of Italy or between Northern and Southern French and Walloon (the
traditional form of French spoken in southern Belgium).
Such differentiation develops over time, and it is reasonable to assume that the more time that elapses, the
greater the individuality of each language will be. Therefore, if the peoples of a large region speak languages
that are somewhat different but still closely related, it is
reasonable to conclude that they have migrated into that
region relatively recently. On the other hand, languages
that clearly have common roots and yet are very different must have undergone modification over a lengthy
period.
Among the languages of the Niger-Congo family,
those of the Bantu subfamily are much more closely related than those of other subfamilies. We can therefore
deduce that the Bantu peoples and cultures of Central
and Southern Africa are of more recent origin than those
of West Africa. This is reflected in African names. The
word “Bantu” should actually be written BaNtu (people),
with the Ba being a prefix. Sometimes the prefix is retained in common usage, sometimes not. The Watusi, for
example, are now usually called Tutsi. The people of
CHAPTER 8 A Geography of Language
121
LANGUAGES OF AFRICA
2B
2B
2B
SPANISH
1B
B
A
C
I
2B
A
R
I
C
C
2A
JA
BE
I
HA
AM
NUER
G
SIDAMO
12
AH
SW
A
6
1A
RI
KA
1A
ON
TH
A
ON
GA
Y
12A
S
M
SH
N
M A
L A
G A
A
U
B
I
SA
AF
6
SUDANIC FAMILY
5A Central and Eastern Subfamily
5B Nilotic Subfamily
U
AI
M
BE
M A L AW
3E
OI
5
SAHARAN FAMILY
UY
AS
BALUBA
KH
NIGER-CONGO FAMILY
3A Atlantic Subfamily
3B Voltaic Subfamily
3C Guinea Subfamily
3D Hausa Subfamily
3E Bantu Subfamily
KI K
MA
KE
KO
A
3E
O
NG
3E
4
I
I
ND
TE
AFRO-ASIATIC FAMILY
2A Semitic Subfamily
2B Berber Subfamily
2C Cushitic Subfamily
MBUNDU
3
L
A
IL
GA
MONGO
BA
2
A
5B
DE
L
S
AZAN
G
5A
L
A
K
M
DIN
A
IV
GBAYA
O
INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY
1A Germanic Subfamily
1B Romance Subfamily
BANDA
K
T
LA
1
IB
3E
FAN
GO
KRU
YORUBA
O
A
3E
N
A K A 3C
A
3B
5A
5A
RIC
3D
HAUSA
MOSSI
FULANI
2C
2A
A
T
R
HAI
TEDA
4
2B
U
S
W O LO F
3A
G
ON
B
A
R
E
G
A
B
A
R
2A
ZULU
SOTHO
1A
A
XHOS
1A
ENGLISH
AN
S
KHOISAN FAMILY
MALAY-POLYNESIAN FAMILY
12A Indonesian Subfamily
southeastern Uganda are the BaGanda or Ganda. The
Zulu of South Africa are actually the AmaZulu. Stories
about Zimbabwe often mention the MaShona or Shona.
Remember Basutoland, now called Lesotho? It was originally named after the Sotho, and BaSotholand became
Basutoland. Ba, Ma, Wa, and Ama are not very far removed linguistically, and they reveal close associations
between languages and peoples spread across Africa
from Uganda to Kwazulu-Natal.
It is not just a matter of prefixes, of course. Bantu
languages reflect their close relationships in vocabulary
and in numerous other respects. Geolinguists have
traced the changes that occur over space in a single
word and have found that thousands of miles away a
word is often quite close to its original form. Consider
the familiar Swahili greeting, jambo, used in coastal East
Africa. In the eastern Transvaal of South Africa and
Swaziland, people will recognize jabo.
Figure 8-5 Languages of Africa. Regional classification of African languages.
Source: From a map prepared by Hammond, Inc., for the first edition 1977.
The situation in West Africa is quite different.
Some of the languages there are closely associated, but
the major languages of the West African subfamilies
are much more discrete. Of course, there are other
kinds of evidence supporting the conclusion that the
peoples of Bantu Africa have a shorter history in that
area than those of West Africa, but the primary evidence is linguistic.
Chinese: One Language or Many?
The map of China’s ethnolinguistic areas (Fig. 8-6) should
be compared to the map of world population distribution
(Fig. 4-1). That comparison will reveal that the great
majority of China’s people speak Mandarin, either Northern or Southern. Chinese is one of the world’s oldest
languages and is spoken by the greatest contiguous population cluster on the Earth.
Part Three The Global Linguistic Mosaic
122
80°
70°
KA
120°
130°
50°
R U S S I A
ZA
KH
S TA
N
MONGOLIA
UNINHABITED
KYR
GYZ
40°
S TA
N
TAJIK
ISTA
N
PAK
IS
110°
100°
90°
t
40°
Eas
S e a p a n)
Ja
H
NORT
ea of
A (S
KORE
UNINHABITED
UNINHABITED
H
SOUT
A
KORE
TAN
JAPA
N
w
Ye l l o
Sea
UNINHABITED
30°
30°
IND
IA
N
E
P
A
East
a
a Se
Chin
BHUTAN
L
CHINA: ETHNOLINGUISTIC AREAS
Xiang
B
SINO-TIBETAN
Northern
Mandarin
Southern
Mandarin
Tibetan
Wu
ANGLAD
Gan
Thai
Miao-Yao
Mongolian
Turkic
South Min
Hakka
0
Yue
0
Korean
Manchu
(Tungus)
200
400
200
TAIWAN
PAC I
AUSTRO-ASIATIC
Mon-Khmer
ALTAIC
North Min
ESH
VIETNAM
MYANMAR
(BURMA)
Hainan
Island
600 Kilometers
400 Miles
OCE
LAOS
INDO-EUROPEAN
Tajik
FIC
South
a
China Se
20°
AN
INES
PHILIPP
THAILAND
100°
110°
Longitude East of Greenwich
120°
Figure 8-6 Ethnolinguistic Areas of China. Major languages zones of China. Source:
From several sources including Academia Sinica, Republic of China Yearbook.
As the map shows, a number of Chinese dialects
prevail in large areas of the country, notably in the south.
Most of these dialects are mutually unintelligible, and
some scholars therefore argue that Chinese is not one
but several languages, among which Mandarin dominates with about 874 million speakers. Wu Chinese
ranks next with over 75 million, and Yue (Cantonese) is
third with about 71 million.
In mid-1997, when the government of China took
over control of Hong Kong from the British, Beijing’s
leaders all made their speeches in Northern Mandarin,
and the Cantonese familiar to the great majority of
Hong Kong’s population was never heard. Thus China’s
rulers used language to underscore the nature of the
new authority to which the local people would now be
subject.
During the twentieth century several efforts were
made to create a truly national language in China. The
latest of these efforts is the so-called pinyin system, a
phonetic-spelling system based on the pronunciation of
Chinese characters in Northern Mandarin, China’s standard language. But China’s population contains many
minorities, as Figure 8-6 reminds us, and as a result linguistic integration may never be achieved.
One of the most interesting and challenging dimensions of the geography of language is the reconstruction
of the routes of diffusion of peoples and their languages.
While linguists attempt to establish the family tree of
languages, geographers focus on the spatial implications of this effort: the routes of migration and linguistic
diffusion. We turn next to this complicated topic, about
which new information is constantly emerging.
CHAPTER 8 A Geography of Language
123
◆ KEY TERMS ◆
dialect
Indo-European languages
isogloss
language
language family
language group
language subfamily
linguistic diversification
preliterate society
standard language
◆ APPLYING GEOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE ◆
1. Why is the language spoken by more people in this
world than any other not the language of international trade and communication? What factors put another language in this position? Can you foresee a
twenty-first-century scenario that might alter the balance?
2. In 1997 several dozen “Francophone” countries convened in Hanoi, Vietnam, to discuss ways to promote
the use of French and to (in the words of the conference report) “reverse the deterioration” of the language. In the social, economic, and political geography
of the world today, why do French-speakers feel a
threat to their language?
3. In terms of the geographic pattern (not the origins) of
language, what do Subsaharan Africa and New
Guinea have in common?