The Cultural Landscape Chapter 5: Language

Quebecois

________ are committed to preserving their distinctive French- language culture and to do so, they may secede from Canada.

Indo European

________ is divided into eight branches.

Belgium

________ has had more difficulty than Switzerland in reconciling the interests of the different language speakers.

Niger Congo

More than 95 % of the people in sub- Saharan Africa speak the languages of the ________ family.

France

Traditionally, language has been an especially important source of national pride and identity in ________,

17th century AD

Slavic was once a single language, but differences developed in the ________, and several groups of Slavs migrated from Asia to different areas of Eastern Europe and thereafter lived in isolation from one another.

1204

England lost control of Normandy in ________, during the reign of King John, and entered a long period of conflict with France.

regional variation

A dialect is a(n) ________ of a language distinguished by distinctive vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation.

Geographers

________ are especially interested in differences in dialects because they reflect distinctive features of the environment in which groups live.

Bosnian Muslims

________ have introduced Arabic words used in their religion, and Croats have replaced words regarded as having a Serbian origin with words considered to be purely Croatian.

northwestern Europe

English had diffused around the world from a small island in ________ because of the cultural dominance of England and the United States over other territories on Earths surface.

Jesus

At the time of ________, people in present- day Israel gradually spoke Aramaic, which in turn was replaced by Arabic.

Foreign terms

________ may be written with one of the sets of phonetic symbols.

Norway

Vikings from present- day ________ landed on the northeast coast of England in the 9th century.

Romansh

________ is one of four official languages of Switzerland, although it is spoken by only 40, 000 people.

Brussels

Although located in Flanders, ________ is officially bilingual and signs are in both French and Flemish.

Hebrew

________ is a rare case of an extinct language that has been revived.

Basque

________ was probably once spoken over a wider area but was abandoned where its speakers came in contact with Indo- Europeans.

Urdu

________ is written with the Arabic alphabet, a legacy of the fact that most of its speakers are Muslims and their holiest book (the Quran) is written in Arabic.

Moldovan

________ is the official language of Moldova is generally classified as a dialect of Romanian.

English

________ is diffusing into the Spanish language spoken by 34 million Hispanics in the United States, to create Spanglish, a combination of Spanish and ________.

Search Divergence

________ is normal, for interaction between the two groups was largely confined to the exchange of letters and other Printed Matter rather than direct speech.

Afro Asiatic

A language in the ________ family, including Arabic, is spoken by 6 percent, mostly in the Middle East.

Renfrew

________ argues that Indo- European diffuse into Europe and South Asia along with agricultural practices rather than by military conquest.

Switzerland

________ has four official languages- German (used by 65 percent of the population), French (18 percent), Italian (10 percent), and Romansh (1 percent)

Spanglish

________ has become especially widespread in popular cultures, such as song lyrics, television, and magazines aimed at young Hispanic women, but it has also been adopted by writers of serious literature.

Pyrenees Mountains

It is now the first language of 666, 000 people in the ________ of northern Spain and southwestern France.

Altaic

The ________ and Uralic language families were once not to be linked as one family, but recent studies going to geographically distinct origins.

Catalan

________ is also spoken by 6 million people in eastern Spain and is the official language of Spain's highly autonomous Catalonia province, centered in the city of Barcelona.

Isoglosses

________ are determined by collecting data directly from people, particularly natives of rural areas.

second century AD

At its height in the ________, the Roman Empire extended from the Atlantic Ocean on the west of the Black Sea on the east and encompassed all lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

Spain

________ grew to its approximate present boundaries into the fifth century, when the kingdom of Castile and Leon merged with the kingdom of Aragon.

branch languages

Other Sinitic ________ are spoken by tens of millions of people in China, mostly in the Southern and Eastern parts of the country- Wu, Yue (also known as Cantonese), Min, Jinyu, Xiang, Hakka, and Gan.

Grammar books

________ and dictionaries printed in the 18th century established rules for spelling and grammar that were based on the London dialect.

variety of Hindustani

Originally a(n) ________ spoken in the area of New Delhi, Hindi grew into a national language in the 19th century when the British encouraged its use in government.

Midlands

Southerners pronounce words like grass and path within and /ah /sound; Northerners and people in the ________ use a short /a,/as do most people in the United States.

Indigenous American Indians

________ "also enriched American English with names for objects such as canoe, moccasin, and squash.

Chinese ideograms

Written in part with ________, Japanese also uses two systems of phonetic symbols, like Western languages, used either in place of the ideograms or alongside them.

Southern Belgians

________ (known as Walloons) speak French, whereas northern Belgians (known as Flemings) speak a dialect of the Germanic language, Dutch, called Flemish.

survival of any language

The ________ depends on the political and military strength of its speakers.

American states

Spanish is the official language of 18 Latin ________, and Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, which has as many people as all the other South American countries combined and 18 times more than Portugal itself.

Soviet Union

With the dissolution of the ________ in the early 1990s, Altaic languages became official, and several newly- independent countries, including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Speakers of Brythonic

________ (also called Cymric or Britannic) fled westward during the Germanic invasions to Wales, southwestward to Cornwall, or southward across the English Channel to the Brittany peninsula of France.

Spanish

________ and Portuguese have achieved worldwide importance because of the colonial activities of the European speakers.

Irish Gaelic

________ and English are the Republic of Irelands two official languages.

creole

A(n) ________ or ________ language is defined as a language that results from the mixing of the colonizers language and the indigenous language of the people being dominated.

Spanishs

Rather than a threat to existing languages, Spanglish is generally regarded as an enriching of both English and Spanish by adopting the best elements of each- Englishs ability to invent new words and ________ ability to convey nuances of emotion.

Breton

________ differs from the other Celtic languages in that it has more French words.

Ataturk

________ believed that switching to Roman letters would help modernize the economy and culture of Turkey through increased communications with European countries.

Romance languages

________ spoken in some former colonies can also be classified as separate languages because they differ substantially from the original introduced by European colonizers.

If you look at their distribution, you can see a physical reason for their independent development

These language families are clustered either on islands or peninsulas

Language maps show a striking oddity

The people of Madagascar, the large island off the coast of Africa, speak Malagasy, which belongs to the Austronesian family, even though the island is 3,000 km (1,900 miles)distant from any other Austronesian-speaking country

AN UNCHANGING LANGUAGE

ICELANDIC

language

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

literary tradition

a system of written communication

official language

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

dialect

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

isogloss

a word-usage boundary

standard language

a dialect that is well established and widely recognized as the most acceptable for government, business, education, and mass communication

language family

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

language branch

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

language group

a collection of languages within a branch that shares a common origin in the relatively recent past and displays relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary

Vulgar Latin

the Latin that people in the provinces learned was not the standard literary form but a spoken form

creole or creolized language

defined as a language that results from the mixing of the colonizer’s language and the indigenous language of the people being dominated

ideograms

represent ideas or concepts, not specific pronunciations

extinct languages

once in use—even in the recent past—but no longer spoken or read in daily activities by anyone in the world

isolated language

a language unrelated to any other and therefore not attached to any language family

lingua franca

a language of international communication, such as English

pidgin language

a group that learns English or another lingua franca may learn a simplified form