1. Chapter 4: Geographies of Language

2. How is language connected to culture?
Provides a basis for communication
It shapes identity
Reflects a relationship with place
Language is situational and flexible
It is dynamic, changes
Language vs. dialect
Mutual intelligibility

4. All languages are capable of expressing all kinds of thought
Different languages express thought in different ways
Social influences:
Fork, coffee in Japanese
Farpotchket in Yiddish

5. How many languages? How many speakers? Geographical extent?
About 6900 languages are spoken on Earth.
A lot of small languages, but just a few large ones.
Large languages a relatively new phenomenon.
9 largest languages (by speakers); all but three are
Indo-European.

6. Language families: common ancestor
How many languages within a family?
Niger-Congo family has almost 25% of
the world’s languages.
Percent of people speaking languages of
the different language families.
Dominance of Indo-European languages.
Nearly 50% of the world speaks one of
these.

7. Hearth—where a language began How do languages diffuse?
Importance of agriculture and trade
Austronesian languages, Niger-Congo languages

8. Where did Indo-European languages begin?
Kurgan Hypothesis
Anatolian Hypothesis
Romance Languages
Derivative of Vulgar Latin

9. Global diffusion of languages
Political forces
Economic forces
Religious forces

10. Spanish in Argentina, but Italian too!

11. Mauritania—signage in
French & Arabic

12. Linguistic Dominance Not by size necessarily Chinese vs. English
Language gap—stateless languages
Official languages
None in the U.S.
UN—recognizes 6 languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic & Chinese
EU—recognizes 23 languages—all EU docs must be printed in all of these languages!

13. Loanwords
Pidgin
Code switching
Creole
Lingua Franca

14. Hear “David Copperfield” in Jamaican Patois, Spanglish, Hawaiian Pidgin, and the vernacularsof Trinidad & Tobago

15. English, the world’s lingua franca?
Will English become a global, universal language?
Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

16. Disappearing Languages: Enduring Voices Project
Language Hotspots

18. FIGURE 5-23a

19. Brussels bookstore—signage in both French and Flemish (bottom)

22. FIGURE 5-22

26. Language Diversity in the U.S.—Dialect Regions
Hans Kurath, 1930s, Isoglosses
Using the words used for pancake he was able to map
isoglosses and identify
dialect regions.

27. Major dialect regions on the U.S.

28. What do you call a carbonated beverage?

30. Take the New York Times Dialect Quiz
Other dialects:
African American English –has its own grammatical rules; evolved through resistance; relocation diffusion.
Chicano English—Mexican Americans