Chapter 6 review

1. How does language influence culture? National identities Creating a standard language Mutual Intelligibilty Political conflict Cultural heritages torn Example: Belgium (Flanders and Wallonia- Flemish and French) Dialects Variants along regional or ethnic lines in vocab, pronunciation, pace… Isogloss Geographic boundaries where linguistic features occur Example: North, South

2. Why and how are languages distributed? Formation of language Sound shifts, divergence, convergence, backward reconstruction Language families Indo-European Language family is #1 Reflect who controlled the area, who lived there, what cultures and religions were present Theories of distribution Still do not know exactly where languages began, but probably around where more people lived and migrated to and from.

3. How do languages diffuse? Human Interaction Trade- communication Migration Lingua Franca- English Top 5: Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, English, Arabic Print Distribution Monolingual and multilingual states Promoting one language over another Colonialism Forcing languages on peoples

4. What are the top languages? 1. Mandarin Chinese 2. English 3. Hindi 4. Spanish 5. Russian 6. Arabic 7. Bengali 8. Portuguese 9. Malay-Indonesian 10. French