In Chapter 1 we discussed that culture has two main meanings: people’s values and their tangible artifacts. Chapter 4 looked at the material objects of culture. This chapter and the next two discuss three traits that shape cultural values: language, religion, and ethnicity.

Key Issue 1: Where Are Languages Distributed?

Language is a system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds, or movements that a group of people understands to have the same meaning. Language is an important element of culture that people value. Beginning an analysis of the geographic elements of cultural values with language is useful because it is the medium through which other cultural values, such as religion and ethnicity, are communicated.

Languages & Geography Most people in the United States only know how to speak English. Only 20 percent of students take foreign language courses in the United States, whereas in Europe, 92 percent of students learn English in addition to their native languages. The sharing of a common language is a centripetal force, a force that tends to unify people. At times the use of different languages serves as a centrifugal force, a force that tends to pull people apart.

Language & Migration The contemporary distribution of languages across Earth can be attributed to the past migrations of peoples. For example, the native language of Madagascar is part of the same language family as the languages spoken in Indonesia and the Philippines. The shared language family provides evidence of migration between these two places. Forces of isolation and interaction help to explain the distribution of languages. Geographers analyze the similarities among languages to explain the diffusion and interaction of people around the world.

Organizing Languages Earth’s cultural diversity is readily apparent through the collection of languages spread across its continents. According to Ethnologue, one of the most authoritative sources of languages (see: ethnologue.com), there are an estimated 7,099 languages, including 90 spoken by at least 10 million people, 307 spoken by between 1 and 10 million people, and 6,702 spoken by fewer than 1 million people. The distribution of some languages is easy for geographers to determine, while others (especially in Africa and Asia) can be difficult (or perhaps even impossible) to document. Ethnologue categorizes languages into five classes: institutional, developing, vigorous, threatened, and dying.

An institutional language is a language used in education, work, mass media, and government. Ethnologue identifies 576 institutional languages, including English.

A developing language is spoken daily by people of all ages in a population. Ethnologue identifies 1,601 developing languages.

A vigorous language is spoken daily by people of all ages in a population, but lacks a literary tradition. Ethnologue identifies 2,455 vigorous languages.

A threatened language is used for face-to-face communication but its number of users is declining. Ethnologue identifies 1,547 threatened languages.

A dying language is still used by older people but is not being passed down to children. Ethnologue identifies 920 dying languages.

Some languages are only spoken. A language with a literary tradition is written as well as spoken. All institutional languages have a literary tradition. Even though a developing language may have a literary tradition, it is one that is not widely distributed. Some languages with literary traditions may use more than one alphabet.

Languages are organized into families, branches, and groups. A language family is a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history. Indo-European is the language family with the most speakers. English is one of the languages of the Indo-European language family.

A language branch exists within a family, comprising a collection of languages that are related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago. Archaeological evidence is often used to link language branches to the same family. English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.

A language group is a collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and exhibit many similarities in grammar and vocabulary. English is in the West Germanic group within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.

Distribution of Languages Figure 5-4 includes the language families with at least 7 million native users and labels individual languages with at least 50 million users. Ethnologue identifies 141 language families.

The origin of language families predates recorded history, so exact origins and diffusion patterns of language families is unknown. Based on the complexity and diversity of languages present in Africa today Quentin Atkinson, a New Zealander biologist, posits that all languages originated in Africa. He further claims that languages outside of Africa show less linguistic diversity because they have had a shorter time period in which to evolve.

Language Families Over 90 percent of the world’s people speak a language belonging to one of seven language families. Two-thirds use a language that is in either the Indo-European or Sino-Tibetan language families. The remaining 9 use a language belonging to one of the other 134 smaller language families. Other than Indo-European, Quechuan is the most widely used language family in the Western Hemisphere.

Language Family Trees, provides a visual representation of the divisions within language families. Individual languages are displayed as leaves with larger leaves indicating a greater number of users. Language families are represented as the trunks of the trees. Some trunks are divided to illustrate branches within the language family. The width of these trunks and branches also represents the relative number of users of the language. Some major branches such as Germanic are further divided into language groups. Superfamilies are shown below the ground level because their existence is still speculative and controversial.

Distribution of Indo-European Languages Indo-European is the most extensively used language family and is the major language group used in Europe, South Asia, and North and Latin America. Of its eight branches, four are widely used (Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Romance, and Balto-Slavic), while the other four branches are used by relatively fewer people (Albanian, Armenian, Celtic, and Greek).

Indo-Iranian Branch The Indo-Iranian branch is the Indo-European language family with the most speakers. The Indo-Iranian branch is further divided into the Iranian and Indo-Aryan groups. The Iranian group (Western) includes Persian (also called Farsi) in Iran, Pashto in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, and Kurdish. The Indo-Aryan group (Eastern) includes Hindi, the most widely used language in this group, Bengali, the second most widely used language in this group, and Urdu, Pakistan’s official language.

Germanic Branch English is part of the West Germanic group of the Germanic branch of the Indo- European language family. Other West Germanic group languages include Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, Afrikaans, and German. The other important Germanic group is North Germanic. The North Germanic group includes four languages spoken in Scandinavia—Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.

Balto-Slavic Branch Slavic was once a single language, but differences developed when a group of Slavs migrated from Asia to Eastern Europe. The Slavs were isolated from each other and the languages changed over time. The Balto-Slavic branch is further divided into East, West, and South Slavic groups and a Baltic group. East Slavic languages include Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. Russian is the most pervasive as the Soviet government forced all of its residents to learn Russian. The West Slavic group includes Polish, Czech, and Slovak. The South Slavic language group is centered in the former Yugoslavia. The language spoken there was once known as Serbo-Croatian and used two alphabets. Serbian is written in Cyrillic and Croatian in Latin letters. Since independence each country has rebranded the language with the country name, e.g., Croatian in Croatia, Serbian in Serbia, and Bosnian in Bosnia, etc.

Romance Branch. The four most widely used Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian. Romanian is separated from other Romance languages by Slavic-speaking countries.

Distribution of Other Language Families There are eleven other language families with at least 50 million speakers distributed throughout Asia and Africa.

East Asia Language Families Most people in Asia use a language within the Sino-Tibetan family. Japanese and Korean are the two most commonly used language families in Asia, excluding those in China.

Sino-Tibetan Sino-Tibetan is the second-most widely used language family in the world. Mandarin (known by the Chinese as Putonghua, or “common speech”) is the world’s single most-spoken language. Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan and is one of the U.N.’s official languages. Seven other Sino-Tibetan languages, each have over 20 million speakers.

Japanese Written in part with Chinese characters, Japanese also uses two systems of phonetic symbols, used either in place of Chinese characters or alongside them. While the original form of writing Japanese was influenced by the Chinese writing system, the two languages are structurally distinct.

Korean The Korean written system, known as hankul, is distinct from Japanese and Sino-Tibetan languages in that each letter represents a sound, as in Western languages. Most of the Korean vocabulary originated from Chinese words.

Southeast Asia Language Families The three largest language families present in Southeast Asia are Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, and Tai-Kadai.

Austronesian Approximately 5 percent of the world’s population speaks languages of the Austronesian family, with most speakers concentrated in Indonesia. As Indonesia is composed of several thousand different islands, many distinct languages and dialects can be found across the country—according to Ethnologue, 706 living languages are spoken in Indonesia. The most spoken first language in Indonesia is Javanese, spoken by 84 percent of the population who live on the heavily populated island of Java.

Austro-Asiatic The Austro-Asiatic language family is used by approximately 2 percent of the world’s population, with Vietnamese being the most widely used language in the family. Written Vietnamese features a Latin alphabet, a legacy of the work of Roman Catholic missionaries in the seventeenth century.

Tai-Kadai The Tai-Kadai family was once categorized as a branch of Sino-Tibetan. The primary languages of this family are spoken in Thailand and adjacent areas of China. Some scholars believe that populations speaking Tai-Kadai languages may have migrated from the Philippines.

Other Asian Language The Dravidian and Turkic language families are also two widely used languages in Asia.

Dravidian Dravidian is the second most widely used language in South Asia and the main language family used in India. Telugu and Tamil are the two most commonly used Dravidian languages. The origin of Dravidian is unknown except for the fact that it was present in South Asia prior to the arrival of speakers of Indo-European.

Turkic The Turkic languages, formerly called Altaic, are theorized to have emerged from the steppe areas bordering the Qilian Shan and Altai mountains between Tibet and China. Turkish is the most commonly used language in this group. After the Soviets gained control of Central Asia in the mid-twentieth century, the Turkic languages of the region were suppressed. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, languages from the Turkic family were recognized as the official languages in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Once categorized as Turkic, the Uralic languages originated from a common language spoken by people in the Ural Mountains region of Russia some 7,000 years ago are now considered distinct.

African Language Families Language scholars dispute the categorization of African languages into families. Some scholars do not even agree on the exact number of languages used in Africa. Ethnologue identifies 2,146 languages in Africa, with only 699 having a literary tradition. Africa is home to the world’s third- and fourth-largest language families: Afro-Asiatic in North Africa and Niger-Congo in sub-Saharan Africa.

Afro-Asiatic Arabic is the primary language in the Afro-Asiatic family, with 206 million speakers. Two dozen countries in Southwest Asia & North Africa have adopted Arabic as their official language. In addition to Arabic, most people use a second language that is distinct from official Arabic. Ethnologue identifies 34 individual Arabic languages. Many of the 1.9 billion Muslims across the world speak some Arabic, as Islam’s holiest book, the Quran (Koran) was written in the seventh century in the language. Hebrew is also a member of the Afro-Asiatic language family, being the original language of Judaism’s Bible (Tanakh) and Christianity’s Old Testament.

Niger-Congo More than 95 percent of sub-Saharan Africans use a language belonging to the Niger-Congo family. Yoruba, Igbo, and Swahili are the three most widely spoken Niger-Congo languages. Nigeria is home to the Yoruba and Igbo languages, and Swahili serves as the official language of Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. Swahili developed through interactions between African groups and Arab traders, so its vocabulary has a pronounced Arabic influence. Swahili is one of the few African languages with an extensive literary tradition.

Nilo-Saharan Across north-central Africa 53 million people speak languages of the Nilo-Saharan family. Divisions within this group illustrate the problem of classifying African languages. Even though there are relatively few people speaking these languages, this language family is divided into six branches, along with many groups and subgroups.

5.1

Lingua franca A language that groups of people who don't speak the same language use to communicate often for trade or business

Logogram A symbol that represents a word rather than a sound.

Vulgar Latin A form of Latin used in daily conversation by ancient Romans, as opposed to the standard dialect, which was used for official documents.