Chapter 6 review

1. How does language influence culture? National identities Creating a standard language (spoken by the many) Creating an official language (used by governments) Political conflict Cultural heritages torn Example: Belgium (Flanders and Wallonia- Flemish and French) Dialects Traits of a culture Variants along regional or ethnic lines in vocab, pronunciation, pace… Isogloss Geographic boundaries where linguistic features occur

2. Why and how are languages distributed? Pidgin language Informal mixing of two or more Creole language Pidgin that has become the first language of a group Formation of language Sound shifts, divergence, convergence, backward reconstruction Theories of distribution Still do not know exactly where languages began, but probably around where more people lived and migrated to and from.

Language families Indo-European Sino-Tibetan Afro-Asiatic 50% of people worldwide Language group (subfamily) Germanic, romance, Slavic, iranic English, Spanish, Russian, hindi Sino-Tibetan 20% of people- mainly east asia Mandarin chinese Afro-Asiatic North Africa and middle east Arabic, swahili

3. How do languages diffuse? Human Interaction Trade- communication Migration Business & trade- 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