AP Human Geography: Language Study Guide

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44 Terms

1
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What is a language?

A system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds that a group of people understands to have the same meaning.

2
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What is literary tradition?

A literary tradition is a system of written communication.

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What is an official language?

The language used by the government for laws, reports, and public objects, such as road signs, money, and stamps.

4
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How many estimated languages are there in the world?

About 6,909. 11 are spoken by 100mil+, 85 are spoken by 10mil+, 300 are spoken by 1-10mil, and the remaining 6,5225 are spoken by fewer than 1 million people each.

5
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How are the world's languages organized?

Families, branches, and groups.

6
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What is a language family?

A collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history.

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What is a language branch?

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 archeological evidence can confirm that the branches derived from the same family.

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What is a language group?

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.

9
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What are the 4 largest language families?

Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Afro-Asiatic.

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What is the most widely used language family?

Indo-European

11
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Where are Sino-Tibetan languages?

In china and several smaller countries in Southeast Asia.

12
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What are logograms?

Symbols that represent words, or meaningful parts of words, rater that sounds (as in English).

13
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Where are Austronesian languages?

Mainly in Indonesia.

14
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Where are Afro-Asiatic languages?

Southwest Asia and North Africa, includes the many speakers of Arabic.

15
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Where are the Niger-Congo languages?

In sub-Saharan Africa.

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What and where are is the distribution of the Indo-European Germanic Branches?

Germanic branch- divided into east and west, and west is further divided into High and low Germanic.

17
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What branch of the Indo-European languages has the most speakers?

The Indo-Iranian branch which includes more than 100 individual languages in the east (Indic) and the west (Iranian).

18
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How many languages are spoken in India?

438 languages, and the official languages is Hindi.

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What are the major Iran group languages?

Persian (aka Farsi), Pashto, & Kurdish: all written in the Arabic alphabet.

20
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What language started the Romance branch?

The Latin language spoken by the Romans 2,000 years ago.

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What are the 5 largest Romance languages?

Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italia, and Romanian.

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How did English originate?

3 tribes from Germany and Denmark, the Angles, Jutes, and Saxtons, moved into the British Isles and named them Angles (spelled Engles) land which shortened into England. They originally spoke German, but it began to evolve into English do to the invasions fo the Vikings from Norway and the Normans from France, which brought new words to the language.

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What was Vulgar Latin?

The Latin that the people in the provinces of Rome spoke.

24
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How did romance languages evolve?

The provinces all spoke Latin, but following the collapse fo the Roman Empire, they became isolated from each other and eventually their languages began to evolve into the different Romance languages.

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What was the hypothesized ancestor of the Indo-European language family?

Proto-Indo European.

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What are the 2 hypothesizes for the first speakers of Proto-Indo-European?

The nomadic warrior hypothesis and the sedentary farmer hypothesis.

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What is the nomadic warrior hypothesis?

The first Proto-Indo-European speakers were the Kurgan people who lived between present day Russia and Kazakhstan. They were nomadic herders and migrated/spread their language in search of grasslands for their animals. They then used their domesticated horses as weapons and conquered much of Europe and South Asia.

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What is the sedentary farmer hypothesis?

The first Proto-Indo-European speakers were farmers who lived in present day turkey and migrated with their agricultural practices.

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What is a dialect?

A regional variation of a language distinguished by distinctive vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation.

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What is an isogloss?

A boundary that separated different regions where there are different language usages.

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What are the 4 major distinct regions in the U.S.A. and what do they call soft drinks?

Northern, Western, Midlands, and Southeastern. Northeast and Southwest (coast) say soda, Midwest and Northwest say pop, and the south says coke.

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How have Spanish and Portuguese achieved worldwide importance?

Because of their colonial activities- colonized much of Latin and South America.

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What is a creole, or a creolized language?

A language that results form the mixing of the colonizer's language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated (Ex. French Creole in Haiti).

34
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Describe the diversity in Belgium.

The north (Flemings) speak Flemish and the south (Walloons) speak French. There is controversy because the north wants to split from the south (which would make it a very wealthy country and the south a very poor country).

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Describe the diversity in Switzerland.

There are many different languages divided into 4 major regions and they get along peacefully (the only issue is if you move to different areas).

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Describe the diversity in Nigeria.

Africa's most populous country, has 527 distinct languages and the different groups often battle/don't get along which makes the country very unproductive.

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Describe the idea of an isolated language and give 2 examples of isolated languages.

Basque and Icelandic- Isolated languages are languages unrelated to any other and therefore not attached to any language family due their isolation.

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What is an extinct language?

A language that is no longer in use.

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What areas are trying to preserve languages?

Australia, New Zealand, and France.

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Why does English have a global dominance?

An estimated 328 million people speak language as their first language and another ½-1 billion people speak it fluently; not to mention the 57 countries with English as their official language. English has such a global dominance because English speaking countries have long been global economic and political powers, and many new innovations/large countries use English. Also came from the mass amount of areas colonized by Great Britain.

41
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What is a lingua franca?

A language of international communication.

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What is a pidgin language?

A simplified version of a lingua franca in order to communicate with speakers of that language.

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What are English with African Americans, Spanish, French and German called?

Ebonics, Franglais, Spanglish, and Denglish.

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What is a standard language?

The form of a language used for official government business, education, and mass communications.