Human Geog Mid#2

What is the principle feature of language?

Spoken

How many languages are currently spoken?

7000

What is an Institutional language?

A language used in education, work, mass media, and government

What is a Stable language?

A language used for face-to-face communications with all generations

What is an endangered language?

A threatened or dying language because it is not being passed to younger generations

Language Family

A collection of languages that existed long before recorded history

Language Branch

A collection of languages within a family related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago

Language Group

A collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past

What language family is most spoken worldwide?

Indo-European

What two language families are spoken by 2/3rds of the worlds population?

Indo-European & Sino-Tibetan

How many writing systems are present around the world?

3856

How many language families have at least 50 million speakers?

12

What is the “taxonomy” of the English language?

Indo-European / Germanic Branch / West Germanic Group

What languages fall under the Uralic group?

Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian

What is Quentin Atkinson’s theory of language origin?

Believed it spread from West Africa as there is a greater diversity of sounds getting further from W. Africa

What is Marija Gibutas’ theory on language origin?

Kurgan peoples domesticated horses, cattle, and lived in the grasslands. Their ease of migration lead to the spread of language throughout the land they searched for grassland

What is Colin Renfrew’s theory of language origin?

The first speakers lived 2000 years before the Kurgans, in the eastern part of present-day Turkey. Language triumphed due to people becoming more numerous from an Agricultural society vs. Hunting

Lingua franca

A language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.

Pidgin language

A simplified, “broken” adoption of a Lingua franca

Dialect

A regional variation of a language

Isgloss

The tracking and mapping of a words’s usage boundaries

Creole

A language which forms over time from mixing a colonizer’s language with the indigenous language

Mutual intelligibility

The ability for two unique speakers to understand each other without special effort

Is Catalan a dialect, or a language?

It was a Spanish dialect, but is now classified as a distinct Romance language

What country has the most languages?

Papa New Guinea

What two countries are home to nearly 20% of all the world’s languages?

Papa New Guinea, Indonesia

How many languages are considered Endangered?

3100

50% of endangered languages are located in just _____ countries

8

Ethnicity

identity with a group of people who share the cultural traditions of a particular homeland or hearth

Race

is identity with a group of people who are perceived to share a physiological trait

Nationality

identity with a group of people who share legal attachment to a particular country.

Racism

the belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

What pattern of slave trade was developed in the 18th century?

A Triangular pattern

Sharecropper

Someone who works fields rented from a landowner and pays the rent by turning over to the landowner a share of the crops.

Redlining

The process of financial institutions preventing people from lending money to purchase or improve property within a delineated boundary

Ethnic enclave

A place with a high concentration of an ethnic group that is distinct from those in the surrounding area

Ethnoburb

A suburban area with a cluster of a particular ethnic group.

“Separate but Equal”

The idea of giving Whites and Blacks equal treatment, but spatially segregated

Jim Crow Laws

A comprehensive set of separate but equal treatment laws in the southern states

What Supreme Court decision found that separation of Blacks & Whites was unconstitutional?

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954

Apartheid

Legal separation of races

When was apartheid abolished?

1990-1991

When did #BlackLivesMatter first appear online?

2013

Nationalism

Loyalty and support for a nationality

Centripetal force

Attitude that unifies people and enhances support for a state

Centrifugal force

Attitude that divides people and reduces support for a state

Who are the Kurds?

Sunni Muslims who live within several countries, principally in Turkey and Iran

Ethnophobia

Fear of people of a particular ethnicity

Xenophobia

which is fear of people who are from other countries.

Ethnic Cleansing

purposeful policy designed by one ethnicity or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas

Genocide

mass killing of a group of people in an attempt to eliminate the entire group from existence

What ethnic group is claimed by the Myanmar government to be living there illegally?

Rohingya

What has been a primary agent for ethnic violence within contemporary Africa?

European imposed boundaries in the 19th century with little regard to ethnic distributions created a host of 20th century nations with a large collection of dissimilar ethnicities.

What triggered the conflict in Sudan?

southern ethnicities attempting to resist northerners’ attempts to impose a legal system based on Muslim religious practice

Which ethnicity did the Belgians use to rule Rwanda indirectly?

Tutsi’s

When Rwanda gained independence in 1962, which group gained power and undertook ethnic cleansing?

Hutu’s

What event triggered the 1994 Rwanda genocide?

The shooting down of a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi

What state was created to unite the Balkan peoples after WWI?

Yugoslavia

Why did Serbia ethnically cleanse the Albanians?

Because they were the dominant ethnic group of Kosovo, a state that Serbia holds a historical claim to.

Why did the Serbs and Croats of Bosnia & Herzegovina want to unite with Serbia and Croatia?

They did not want to live in an independent multi-ethnic state with a Muslim plurality

What is a state?

an area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government that has control over its internal and foreign affairs

How many UN member states are there?

193, in 2011

What is sovereignty?

independence from control of its internal affairs by other states.

Unitary government

most power is placed in the hands of central government officials

Federal government

strong power is allocated to units of local government

Devolution

process of transferring or delegating power to a lower level, especially by a national government to local or regional administration

What did most states look like in Ancient times?

City States

Nation

large group of people who are united by common cultural characteristics, such as language and ethnicity, or by shared history

Nation-state

is a state whose territory corresponds to that occupied by a particular nation.

Self-determination

The concept that nations have the right to govern themselves

What are the stages of nation-state development?

City states → Empires → Feudal states → Nation states

Which nation-states are known as the “Baltic Sisters”?

Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania

Multinational state

a state that contains more than one nation

Irredentism

Historical claim over a territory

Colony

A territory that is legally tied to a sovereign state rather than being completely independent

Colonialism

An effort by one country to establish settlements in a territory and impose its political, economic, and cultural principles on that territory.

What three reasons are the basis of colonialism?

Promote Christianity, extract resources, and enhance world power through control of territory and dominance over people

Frontier

A zone where no state exercises complete political control

Boundary

an invisible line that marks the extent of a state’s territory

Physical Boundary

coincide with significant features of the natural landscape

Cultural boundaries

Follow the distribution of cultural characteristics

Geometric boundaries

based on human constructs, such as straight lines.

Territorial waters

12 Nautical miles

Contiguous zone

12-24 nautical miles

Exclusive Economic Zone

24-200 nautical miles

Superimposed boundary

Drawn on an area by a conquering or colonizing power that ignores existing cultural patterns.

Subsequent boundary

Established after the settlement in an area and is changed to accommodate developments such as war

Relic boundary

one that no longer functions but can still be detected on the cultural landscape

Consequent boundary

drawn in order to separate groups based on ethnic, linguistic, religious, or economic differences.

What three nations claim conflicting sovereignty over five uninhabited islands in the East China Sea, going insofar as to establish air defence zones?

China, Taiwan, and Japan

What region is there a boundary dispute between India and Pakistan?

Kashmir

What is a landlocked state?

A state lacking a direct outlet to a sea because it is completely surrounded by other countries.

What is an advantage for a compact state?

Efficiency; distance to any boundary from the centre is not highly variable

Perforated state

A state completely surrounding another

Prorupted state

An otherwise compact state with a large projecting extension

Elongated state

A long and narrow shaped state

A fragmented state

A state with discontinuous pieces of territory

Gerrymandering

Redrawing of legislative boundaries to benefit the party in power

What form of Gerrymandering is this?

Cracking, where like-minded voters are spread across several districts to reduce their power

What form of gerrymandering is this?

Packing, where like-minded voters are clustered in a few districts to reduce their impact on other elections