Chapter 5

Language

French Road Signs, Québec

Chapter 5: Key Issue 1

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

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

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.

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.

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).

Languages and Language Families

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.

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.

Evolution of English

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.

Scene from “My Fair Lady”

Scene from “My Fair Lady”

Dialects in the USA

Dialects in the Eastern U.S.

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).

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

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.

TermIs he fair dinkum? Why I declare!Down by the crickbludger mosquito hawknappies

MeaningIs he real or genuine? That’s remarkable!Down by the stream (creek)freeloader; welfare dragon flydiapers

LocationAustraliaDeep South (U.S.)Middle Atlantic StatesAustraliaSouth (U.S.)Britain; Brit. Colonies

Sounds Familiar - English Dialects Website

Common American Slang

Chapter 5: Key Issue 2

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

Indo-European Language Family

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

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.

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.

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.

Signs in Barcelona, Spain

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

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Haitian Creole and French are both official languages in Haiti, although English is also used.

Key Terms CREOLE - a language that results from the mixing of a colonizer’s language with an indigenous language. Often they are pidgins.

a. mo pe aste sa bananb. de bin alde luk dat big tric. a waka go a wosud. olmaan i kas-im cheke. li pote sa bay mof. ja fruher wir bleibeng. dis smol swain i bin go fo maket

I am buying the bananathey always looked for a big treehe walked homethe old man is cashing a checkhe brought that for meYes at first we remainedthis little pig went to market

Can you guess which colonizing language is the base for each of the following creole examples?

New Orleans’ French Quarter

French based Seychelles Creole English based Roper River Creole English based SaranEnglish based Cape York Creole French based GuyanaisGerman based Papua New Guinea Pidgin German English based Cameroon Pidgin

New Orleans’ French Quarter

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?a. mo pe aste sa bananb. de bin alde luk dat big tric. a waka go a wosud. olmaan i kas-im cheke. li pote sa bay mof. ja fruher wir bleibeng. dis smol swain i bin go fo maket

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.

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.

Chapter 5: Key Issue 3

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

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.

Major Language FamiliesPercentage 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.

Language Family Trees

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

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.

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.

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.

Chapter 5: Key Issue 4

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

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.

Endangered Languages

Why are they disappearing?

Globalization

Migration (Urbanization)

Economic Development

- Lingua FrancasMedia

Internet (Requires Arabic Character Set)

Lingua Franca - a language used for trade by two people who speak different native tongues.

Attempts to Fight Extinction

Hebrew – used to unite Jews from around the world when the state of Israel was formed in 1948. 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 1777. since the 1920s, people have been learning the language again.

Jerusalem Street

sign

A street in Jerusalem was re-named New York after Sept. 11, 2001. The street name is shown in Hebrew, Arabic, and English

Ireland Road Signs

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

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.

Bookstore in Brussels,

Belgium

The name of the bookstore is printed in both French (top) and Flemish (bottom).

Language Areas in Switzerland

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

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.

The New Lingua Franca

The Spread of English Globally

The Spread of English Globally

ImperialismColonialismGlobal Domination of USA after WWIIBusinessGlobalization of CultureEducation Internet

Internet Hosts

Fig. 5-1-1: A large proportion of the world’s internet users and hosts are in the developed countries of North America and western Europe.

Online Population, 1996 - 2005

Fig. 5-1.1: English is still the largest language on the internet, but there has been rapid growth in many others, especially Chinese.

E-Commerce Languages

2000 & 2004

Fig 5-1.2: English and English-speaking countries still dominate e-commerce, but other languages are growing rapidly.

Key TermsPIDGIN - 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.”

Give us da food we need fo today an every day.Hemmo our shame, an let us goFo all da kine bad stuff we do to you,Jalike us guys let da odda guys go awready,And we no stay huhu wit demFo 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 6 linguists to translate the New Testament into Hawaiian Pidgin, published 2001

French Signs in Québec City

Spanish Signs in New York City

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

Russian Sign

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