To start the study of the geographic elements of cultural values with language in part because it is the means through which other cultural values, such as religion and ethnicity, are communicated. Language is a system of communication through speech, movement, sounds, or symbols that a group of people understands to have the same meaning.

Most people communicate through speech, though some people use symbols or movements, such as sign language. An estimated 1 million Americans and 466 million people worldwide with disabling hearing loss communicate through sign language.

How many languages do you know? Only 20 percent of U.S. students learn a foreign language in school, compared with 92 percent of European students.

Geographers observe that cultural elements such as language, religion, and ethnicity can be strong centripetal and centrifugal forces, two terms that are adapted from physical science. For geographers, a centripetal force is a force that tends to unify people, whereas a centrifugal force is a force that tends to pull people apart. Sharing a common language is a good example of a centripetal force. On the other hand, conflict between two groups of people living in the same place but using different languages would be an example of a centrifugal force.

Language & Migration

The study of language follows logically from migration because the contemporary distribution of languages around the world is largely a result of past migration of peoples. People in two locations use the same language because of migration from one of the locations to another. On the other hand, people in two locations use different languages because of lack of interaction among them.

For example, the people of Madagascar (the large island off the east coast of Africa) use a language belonging to the same family as the languages of most of Indonesia and the Philippines. The shared language family between Indonesia and Madagascar is strong evidence of migration a long time ago between these two places. Researchers have concluded that migrants sailed the 6,000 kilometers (4,000 miles) across the Indian Ocean from Indonesia to Madagascar approximately 2,000 years ago. From approximately 3,000 to 1,200 years ago, migration diffused the same language family east across the Pacific to Polynesia, eventually reaching Hawaii and New Zealand.

Ancient Migration of A Language Family

The current distribution of Austronesian languages is a function of migration of Austronesian people beginning around 2,000 years ago.

Pause & Reflect 5.1.1

Give an example of another language that has diffused far from where it originated, identifying its origin and how it reached its destination.

If two groups have few connections with each other after migrating, the languages used by the two groups will begin to diverge. After a long period without contact, the two groups will use languages that are so different that they are classified as separate languages. The interplay between interaction and isolation helps explain the distribution of individual languages and entire language families.

Throughout history, languages diffused through relocation diffusion, that is the movement of people from one location to another. But in the modern world, some diffusion of language is contagious. That is, people in one location adopt words as a result of electronic contact with others.

Language is like luggage: People carry it with them when they move from place to place. They incorporate new words into their own language when they reach new places, and they contribute words brought with them to the existing language at the new location. Geographers look at the similarities among languages to understand the diffusion and interaction of people around the world.

Organizing Languages

Earth’s heterogeneous collection of languages is one of its most obvious examples of cultural diversity. Ethnologue, one of the most authoritative sources of languages (online at ethnologue.com), estimates that the world has 7,099 languages, including 90 used by at least 10 million people, 307 used by between 1 and 10 million people, and 6,702 used by fewer than 1 million people. The distribution of some of these languages is easy for geographers to document, whereas with others—especially in Africa and Asia—it is difficult, if not impossible.

Ethnologue classifies languages as institutional, developing, vigorous, threatened, and dying:

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

• A developing language is in daily use by people of all ages, from children to elderly individuals. Ethnologue identifies 1,601 developing languages; an example is Sama, spoken by around 260,000 people dispersed across Southeast Asia.

• A vigorous language is in daily use by people of all ages, but it lacks a literary tradition. Ethnologue identifies 2,455 vigorous languages; an example is Tagin, a language spoken by around 38,000 people in India.

• A threatened language is used for face-to-face communication, but is losing users. Ethnologue identifies 1,547 threatened languages; an example is Bolinao, spoken by around 56,000 people in the Philippines (refer to Figure 5-51).

• A dying language is still used by older people, but is not being transmitted to children. Ethnologue identifies 920 dying languages. Some of the threatened and dying languages are being saved, as discussed later in this chapter.

An institutional language has a literary tradition, which means it is written as well as spoken. Thousands of spoken languages lack a literary tradition. The lack of written records is one reason it is difficult to document the total number of languages or their distribution. A developing language also has a literary tradition, though literature in the language may not be widely distributed.

The system of written communication includes a method of writing and rules of grammar. The world’s languages with literary traditions make use of more than one alphabet (Figures 5-2 and 5-3). For example, Hindi is spoken in many different ways, but there is only one official way to write Hindi, using a script called Devanagari. Adding to the complexity, Urdu is spoken very much like Hindi, but it is recognized as a distinct language. Urdu is written with the Arabic alphabet, a legacy of the fact that most of its users are Muslims, and their holiest book (the Quran) is written in Arabic.

Writing Systems of Europe and Southwest Asia

Three Writing Systems

Sign in Hebrew (bottom), Arabic (upper right), and English (Latin writing system).

The world’s languages can be 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. The language family with the most users is Indo-European, which includes English.

• A language branch is a collection of languages within a family related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago; differences are not as extensive or as old as between language families, and archaeological evidence can confirm that the branches derived from the same family. English is in 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 display many similarities in grammar and vocabulary. English is in the West Germanic group within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.