1. Chapter 5
Language

2. French Road Signs, Québec

3. Chapter 5: Key Issue 1

4. Origin, Diffusion, & Dialects of English
Origin and diffusion of English
English colonies
Origin of English in England
Dialects of English
Dialects in England
Differences between British & American English
Dialects in the United States

5. Language Overview
Geographer’s Perspective on Language (Language as Foundation of Culture)
Linguistic Diversity
Roots of Language
Key Terms
Language Divisions
Spatial Distribution of Key Languages

6. Language Defined
Organized system of spoken words by which people communicate with one another with mutual comprehension (Getis, 1985).
Languages subtly gradate one to another. Dialects and other regional differences may eventually lead to incomprehensibility - a new language.
Migration and Isolation explain how a single language can later become two or more.

7. Geographer’s Perspective on Language
Language is an essential element of culture, possibly the most important medium by which culture is transmitted.
Languages even structure the perceptions of their speakers. Attitudes, understandings, and responses are partly determined by the words available.
Languages are a hallmark of cultural diversity with distinctive regional distributions.

9. Video for Lord’s Prayer
The actor was reading The Lords Prayer in Old English from the 11th century.
In standardised West Saxon literary dialect of Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon).

10. Languages and Language Families

11. English Speaking Countries
Fig. 5-1: English is an official language in 50 countries, including some in which it is not the most widely spoken language. It is also used and understood in many others.

12. Invasions of England 5th - 11th centuries
Fig. 5-2: The groups that brought what became English to England included Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Vikings. The Normans later brought French vocabulary to English.

13. Evolution of English

14. Old & Middle English Dialects
Fig. 5-3: The main dialect regions of Old English before the Norman invasion persisted to some extent in the Middle English dialects through the 1400s.

15. Scene from “My Fair Lady”

16. Scene from “My Fair Lady”

17. Dialects in the USA

18. Dialects in the Eastern U.S.
two-thirds of original English settlers were Puritans from East Anglia and southeast England
originally Quakers from Northern England came to the Middle Colonies, and then people from other European countries
half of the early settlers came from southeast England
Fig. 5-4: Hans Kurath divided the eastern U.S. into three dialect regions, whose distribution is similar to that of house types (Fig. 4-9).

19. Key Terms
DIALECT - a regional variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary.
Social Dialects - can denote social class and standing.
Vernacular Dialects - the common, slang, speech of a region.
Sounds Familiar - English Dialects Website
Common American Slang
Term Is he fair dinkum? Why I declare! Down by the crick bludger mosquito hawk nappies
Meaning Is he real or genuine? That’s remarkable! Down by the stream (creek) freeloader; welfare dragon fly diapers
Location Australia Deep South (U.S.) Middle Atlantic States Australia South (U.S.) Britain; Brit. Colonies

20. Chapter 5: Key Issue 2

21. The Indo-European Language Family
Branches of Indo-European
Germanic branch
Indo-Iranian branch
Balto-Slavic branch
Romance branch
Origin and diffusion of Indo-European
Kurgan and Anatolian theories

22. Indo-European Language Family
Fig. 5-5: The main branches of the Indo-European language family include Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian.

23. Germanic Branch of Indo-European
Fig. 5-6: The Germanic branch today is divided into North and West Germanic groups. English is in the West Germanic group.

24. South Asian Languages & Language Families
Fig. 5-7: Indo-European is the largest of four main language families in South Asia. The country of India has 18 official languages.

25. Romance Branch of Indo-European
Fig. 5-8: The Romance branch includes three of the world’s 12 most widely spoken languages (Spanish, French, and Portuguese), as well as a number of smaller languages and dialects.

26. Signs in Barcelona, Spain
Signs in Barcelona are written both in Catalán (top) and Spanish (bottom).

27. Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Haitian Creole and French are both official languages in Haiti, although English is also used.

28. Key Terms
CREOLE - a language that results from the mixing of a colonizer’s language with an indigenous language. Often they are pidgins.
Can you guess which colonizing language is the base for each of the following creole examples?
New Orleans’ French Quarter
a. mo pe aste sa banan b. de bin alde luk dat big tri c. a waka go a wosu d. olmaan i kas-im chek e. li pote sa bay mo f. ja fruher wir bleiben g. dis smol swain i bin go fo maket
I am buying the banana they always looked for a big tree he walked home the old man is cashing a check he brought that for me Yes at first we remained this little pig went to market

29. Key Terms
CREOLE - a language that results from the mixing of a colonizer’s language with an indigenous language. Often they are pidgins.
Can you guess which colonizing language is the base for each of the following creole examples?
New Orleans’ French Quarter
a. mo pe aste sa banan b. de bin alde luk dat big tri c. a waka go a wosu d. olmaan i kas-im chek e. li pote sa bay mo f. ja fruher wir bleiben g. dis smol swain i bin go fo maket
French based Seychelles Creole English based Roper River Creole English based Saran English based Cape York Creole French based Guyanais German based Papua New Guinea Pidgin German English based Cameroon Pidgin

30. Kurgan Theory of Indo-European Origin
Fig. 5-9: In the Kurgan theory, Proto-Indo-European diffused from the Kurgan hearth north of the Caspian Sea, beginning about 7000 years ago.

31. Anatolian Hearth Theory of Indo-European Origin
Fig. 5-10: In the Anatolian hearth theory, Indo-European originated in Turkey before the Kurgans and diffused through agricultural expansion.

32. Chapter 5: Key Issue 3

33. Distribution of Other Language Families
Classification of languages
Distribution of language families
Sino-Tibetan language family
Other East and Southeast Asian language families
Afro-Asiatic language family
Altaic and Uralic language families
African language families

34. Language Families of the World
Fig. 5-11: Distribution of the world’s main language families. Languages with more than 50 million speakers are named.

35. Major Language Families Percentage of World Population
Fig. 5-11a: The percentage of world population speaking each of the main language families. Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan together represent almost 75% of the world’s people.

36. Language Family Trees
Fig. 5-12: Family trees and estimated numbers of speakers for the main world language families.

37. Chinese Ideograms
Fig. 5-13: Chinese language ideograms mostly represent concepts rather than sounds. The two basic characters at the top can be built into more complex words.

38. Language Families of Africa
Fig. 5-14: The 1000 or more languages of Africa are divided among five main language families, including Austronesian languages in Madagascar.

39. Languages of Nigeria
Fig. 5-15: More than 200 languages are spoken in Nigeria, the largest country in Africa (by population). English, considered neutral, is the official language.

40. Chapter 5: Key Issue 4

41. Language Diversity & Uniformity
Preserving language diversity
Hebrew: reviving extinct languages
Celtic: preserving endangered languages
Multilingual states
Isolated languages
Global dominance of English
English as a lingua franca
Diffusion to other languages

42. Endangered Languages
As recently as 3,000 years ago, there were 10,000 to 15,000 languages in the world.
Now: about 6000 left.
Of those, 1/2 will be gone by the year 2100 and all but 500 of the rest will be endangered.
More than 90 percent of the languages in existence today will be extinct or threatened in little more than a century if current trends continue.

43. Endangered Languages Why are they disappearing? Globalization
Migration (Urbanization)
Economic Development
- Lingua Francas Media
Internet (Requires Arabic Character Set)
Lingua Franca - a language used for trade by two people who speak different native tongues.

44. Attempts to Fight Extinction
Hebrew – used to unite Jews from around the world when the state of Israel was formed in The Israelis had to invent thousands of new words because the language had stopped being used in everyday life in the 4th Century.
Celtic – in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland governments are funding attempts to preserve traditional language.
Cornish – England – people are trying to revive a language whose last speaker died in since the 1920s, people have been learning the language again.

45. Jerusalem Street sign
A street in Jerusalem was re-named New York after Sept. 11, The street name is shown in Hebrew, Arabic, and English

46. Ireland Road Signs
Road signs in Ireland are written in both English and Gaelic (Goidelic).

47. Language Divisions in Belgium
Fig. 5-16: There has been much tension in Belgium between Flemings, who live in the north and speak Flemish, a Dutch dialect, and Walloons, who live in the south and speak French.

48. Bookstore in Brussels, Belgium
The name of the bookstore is printed in both French (top) and Flemish (bottom).

49. Language Areas in Switzerland
Fig. 5-17: Switzerland remains peaceful with four official languages and a decentralized government structure.

50. French-English Boundary in Canada
Fig. 5-18: Although Canada is bilingual, French speakers are concentrated in the province of Quebec, where 80% of the population speaks French.

51. The New Lingua Franca

52. The Spread of English Globally

53. The Spread of English Globally
Imperialism
Colonialism
Global Domination of USA after WWII
Business
Globalization of Culture
Education
Internet

54. Internet Hosts
Fig : A large proportion of the world’s internet users and hosts are in the developed countries of North America and western Europe.

55. Online Population,
Fig : English is still the largest language on the internet, but there has been rapid growth in many others, especially Chinese.

56. E-Commerce Languages 2000 & 2004
Fig 5-1.2: English and English-speaking countries still dominate e-commerce, but other languages are growing rapidly.

57. Key Terms
PIDGIN - a form of speech that adopts simplified grammar and limited vocabulary from a lingua franca, used for communication between speakers of two different languages.
Examples include Hawaiian Pidgin and the creoles of West Africa that resulted from the slave trade.
“No eat da candy, Bruddah, it's pilau. Da thing wen fall on da ground.”

58. Give us da food we need fo today an every day
Give us da food we need fo today an every day. Hemmo our shame, an let us go Fo all da kine bad stuff we do to you, Jalike us guys let da odda guys go awready, And we no stay huhu wit dem Fo all da kine bad stuff dey do to us. No let us get chance fo do bad kine stuff, But take us outa dea, so da Bad Guy no can hurt us. Cuz you our King. You get da real power, An you stay awesome foeva. Dass it!”
Matthew 6:9-13 “The Lord’s Prayer”
Taken from Da Jesus Book, a twelve year effort by linguists to translate the New Testament into Hawaiian Pidgin, published 2001

59. French Signs in Québec City

60. Spanish Signs in New York City

61. Key Points Language is a fundamental element of cultural identity.
Languages diverge via migration and isolation.
Small languages are disappearing as a result of globalization.
Languages that share a common ancestor belong to the same family.
Language diversity is a source of political conflict in the world.
McDonald’s, Israel

62. Russian Sign
Russian is an Indo-European language written in the Cyrillic alphabet, originally brought to Russia by Greek missionaries