Language

• Most people in the United States know only English.

  • Fewer than one-half of American high school students have studied a foreign language.

  • In contrast, nearly two-thirds of graduates from Dutch high school have learned at least three foreign languages.

• Even in other English-speaking countries, foreign languages are studied more frequently than in the United States.

  • For example, two-thirds of 10-year-olds in the United Kingdom are learning a foreign language in school.

• 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, estimates that the world has 6,909 languages.

    • Only 11 of these languages, including English, or spoken by at least 100 million people.

  • Approximately 153 languages are spoken by at least three million people, including the 11 largest ones.

    • The remaining 6,756 languages are spoken by fewer than 3 million people.

  • The distribution of some of these languages is easy for geographers to document, whereas others—especially in Africa and Asia—are difficult, if not impossible.

• The two introductory case study examples—French-speaking residents of Canada and Spanish-speaking residents of the United States—illustrate the “where” and “why” questions that concern geographers who study languages.

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

• Many languages also have a literary tradition, or a system of written communication.

  • However, hundreds of spoken languages lack a literary tradition.

  • The lack of written records makes it difficult to document the distribution of many languages.

• Many countries designate at least one language as their official language, which is the one used by the government for laws, reports, and public objects, such as road signs, money, and stamps.

  • A country with more than one official language may require all public documents to be in all languages.

  • Logically, an official language would be understood by most if not all of the countries’ citizens, but some countries that were once British colonies designated English as an official language, even though few of their citizens can speak it.

• Language is part of culture, which, as shown in Chapter 1, has two main meanings—people’s values and their tangible artifacts.

• 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.

• On the one hand, English has achieved unprecedented globalization because people around the world are learning to participate in a global economy and culture.

• On the other hand, people are trying to preserve local diversity and language because language is one of the basic elements of cultural identity and a major factor in a region’s uniqueness.

  • Language is a source of pride to a people, a symbol of cultural unity.

  • As a culture develops, language is both a cause of that development and a consequence.

• The global distribution of languages results from a combination of two geography processes—interaction and isolation.

  • People in two locations speak the same language because of migration from one of the locations to another.

  • If the two groups have few connections with each other after the migration, the language spoken by each will begin to differ.

  • After a long period without contact, the two groups will speak languages that are so different they are classified as separate languages.

• The interplay between interaction in isolation helps to explain regions of individual languages and entire language families.

  • The difference is that individual languages emerged in the recent past as a result of historically documented events, whereas language families emerged several thousand years ago before recorded history.

KEY ISSUE 1 - Where Are English-Language Speakers Distributed?

• The location of English-language speakers serves as a case study for understanding the process by which any language is distributed around the world.

• A language originated at a particular place and diffuses to other locations through the migration of its speakers.

Origin and Diffusion of English

• English is the first language of 328 million people and spoken fluently by another 1/2 to 1 billion people.

• English is an official language in 57 countries, more than any other language, and is the predominant language in two more (Australia and the United States).

  • Two billion people—one-third of the world—live in a country where English is an official language, even if they cannot speak it.

English Colonies

• The contemporary distribution of English speakers around the world exists because the people of England migrated with their language when they established colonies during the past four centuries.

  • English is an official language in most of the former British colonies.

• English first diffused west from England to North America in the 17th century.

  • The first English colonies were built in North America, beginning with Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and Plymouth Massachusetts, in 1620.

  • After England defeated France in a battle to dominate the North American colonies during the eighteenth century, the position of English as the principal language of North America was assured, even after the United States and Canada became independent countries.

• Similarly, the British took control of Ireland in the 17th century, South Asia in the mid-eighteenth century, the South Pacific in the late 18th century and early 19th century, and southern Africa in the late 19th century.

  • In each case, English became an official language, even if only the colonial rulers and a handful of elite local residents could speak it.

• More recently, the United States has been responsible for diffusing English to several places, most notably the Philippines, which Spain ceded to the United States in 1899, a year after losing the Spanish-American War.

  • After gaining full independence in 1946, the Philippines retained English as one of its official languages along with Filipino.

Origin of English in England

• The global distribution of English may be a function primarily of migration from England since the seventeenth century, but that does not explain how English came to be the principal language of the British Isles in the first place, or why English is classified as a Germanic language.

• The British Isles have been inhabited for thousands of years, but we know nothing of the early language is until tribes called the Celts arrived around 2000 BC, speaking languages we call Celtic.

  • Then, around 450 AD, tribes from mainland Europe invaded, pushing the Celts into remote northern and western parts of Britain, including Cornwall in the highlands of Scotland and Wales.

GERMAN INVASION.

• Being rating tribes were the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons.

  • All three were Germanic tribes—the Jutes from northern Denmark, the angles from Southern Denmark, and the Saxons from Northwestern Germany.

  • The three tribes who brought the beginnings of English to the British Isles shared a language similar to that of other people in the region from which they came.

  • Today, English people and others who trace their cultural heritage back to England are often called Anglo-Saxons, after the two larger tribes.

  • Modern English has evolved primarily from the language spoken by the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons.

  • The name England comes from Angles’ land.

• At some time in history, all Germanic people spoke a kind of language, but that time predates written records.

  • The common origin of English with other Germanic languages can be reconstructed by analyzing language differences that emerged after Germanic groups migrated to separate territories and live in isolation from each other, allowing their languages to continue evolving independently.

• Other people subsequently invaded England and added their language to basic English.

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

  • Although defeated in their effort to conquer the islands, many Vikings remained in the country to enrich the language with new words.

NORMAN INVASION.

• English is a good bit different from German today primarily because England was conquered by the Normans in 1066.

• The Normans, who came from present-day Normandy in France, spoke French, which they established as England's official language for the next 300 years.

  • The leaders of England, including the royal family, nobles, judges, and clergy, therefore spoke French.

  • However, the majority of the people, who had little education, did not know French, so they continue to speak English with each other.

• England lost control of Normandy in 1204, during the reign of King John, and entered a long period of conflict with France.

  • As a result, fewer people in England wish to speak French, and English again became the country's unchallenged dominant language.

  • Recognizing that nearly everyone in England was speaking English, Parliament enacted the Statute of Pleading in 1362 to change the official language of court business from French to English.

    • However, Parliament continued to conduct business in French until 1489.

• During the three hundred years that French was the official language of England, the Germanic language used by the common people and the French used by the leaders mingled to form a new language.

  • Modern English shows its simpler, straightforward words, such as sky, horse, man, and woman, to its Germanic roots, and fancy, more elegant words, such as celestial, equestrian, masculine, and feminine, to its French Invaders.

Dialects of English

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

  • Generally, speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of another dialect.

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

• The distribution of dialects is documented through the study of particular words.

• Every word that is not used nationally has some geographic extent within the country and therefore has boundaries.

  • Such a word-usage boundary, known as in isogloss, can be constructed for each word.

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

• When speakers of a language migrate to other locations, various dialects of that language may develop.

  • This was the case with the migration of English speakers to North America several hundred years ago.

  • Because of its large number of speakers and widespread distribution, English has an especially large number of dialects.

  • North Americans are well aware that they speak English differently from the British, not to mention people living in India, Pakistan, Australia, and other English-speaking countries.

    • Further, English varies by region within individual countries.

    • In both the United States and England, northerners sound different from southerners.

• In a language with multiple dialects, one dialect may be recognized as the standard language, which is a dialect that is well established and widely recognized as the most acceptable for government, business, education, and mass communication.

  • One particular dialect of English, the one associated with upper-class Britons living in the London area, is recognized in much of the English-speaking world as a standard form of British speech.

  • This speech, known as British Received Pronunciation (BRP), is well-known because it is commonly used by politicians, broadcasters, and actors.

Dialects in England

• “If you use proper English, you're regarded as a freak; why can't the English learn to speak?” asked Professor Henry Higgins in the Broadway musical My Fair Lady.

  • He was referring to the Cockney-speaking Eliza Doolittle, who pronounced rain like “rine” and dropped the /h/ sound from the beginning of words like happy.

  • Eliza Doolittle’s speech illustrates that English, like other languages, has a wide variety of dialects that use different pronunciations, spellings, and meanings for particular words.

• As already discussed, English originated with 3 invading groups from northern Europe who settled in different parts of Britain—the Angles in the north, the Jutes in the southeast, and the Saxons in the south and west.

  • The language each spoke was the basis of distinct regional dialects of Old English—Kentish in the southeast, West Saxon in the southwest, Merican in the center of the island, and Northumbrian in the north.

• French replaced English as the language of the government and aristocracy following the Norman invasion of 1066.

  • After several hundred years of living in isolation in rural settlements under the control of a French-speaking government, five major regional dialects had emerged—Northern, East Midland, West Midland, South Western, and Southeastern or Kentish.

• From a collection of local dialects, one often emerges as the standard language for writing and speech.

  • In the case of England, it was a dialect used by upper-class residents in the capital city of London and the two important university cities of Cambridge and Oxford.

  • The diffusion of the upper-class London and University dialects was encouraged by the introduction of the printing press to England in 1476.

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

    • These frequently arbitrary rules were then taught in schools throughout the country.

• Despite the current dominance of BRP, strong regional differences persist in English dialects spoken in the United Kingdom, especially in rural areas.

• They can be grouped into three main ones—Northern, Midland, and Southern.

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

• The Northerners and people in the Midlands pronounce butter and Sunday with the /oo/ sound of words like boot.

• The main dialects can be subdivided.

• For example, distinctive Southwestern and Southeastern accents occur within the southern dialect.

• Southwesternmes pronounce thatch and thing with the /th/ sound of then, rather than thin.

Fresh and eggs have an /ai/ sound.

• Southeasterners pronounce the /a/ in apple and cat like the short /e/ in bet.

• Local dialects can be further distinguished.

  • Some words have distinctive pronunciations and meanings in each country of the United Kingdom.

Differences Between British and American English

• The English language was brought to the North American continent by colonists from England who settled along the Atlantic coast beginning in the 17th century.

  • The early colonists naturally spoke the language used in England at the time and established 17th-century English as the dominant form of European speech in colonial America.

• Later immigrants from other countries found English already implanted here.

  • Although they made significant contributions to American English, they became accultured into a society that already spoke English.

  • Therefore, the earliest colonists were most responsible for the dominant language patterns that exist today in the English-speaking part of the Western Hemisphere.

• Why is the English language in the United States so different from that in England?

  • As is so often the case was languages, the answer is isolation.

  • Separated by the Atlantic Ocean, English in the United States and England evolved independently during the 18th and 19th centuries, with little influence on one another.

  • Few residents of one country could visit the other, in the means to transmit the human voice over long distances would not become available until the 20th century.

• US English differs from that of England in three significant ways:

• #1 Vocabulary. The vocabulary of different largely because settlers in America encountered many new objects and experiences.

  • The new continent contains physical features, such as large forests and mountains, that had to be giving you names.

  • New animals were encountered, including the moose, raccoon, and chipmunk, all of which were given names borrowed from Native Americans.

  • Indigenous American “Indians” also enriched American English with names for objects such as canoe, moccasin, and squash.

  • As new inventions appeared, they acquire different names on either side of the Atlantic.

    • For example, the elevator is called a lift in England, and the flashlight is known as a torch.

      • The British call the hood of a car the bonnet and the trunk the boot.

• #2 Spelling. American spelling diverged from the British standard because of a strong National feeling in the United States for an independent identity.

  • Noah Webster, the creator of the first comprehensive American dictionary and grammar books, was not just a documentary of usage, he had an agenda.

  • Webster was determined to develop a uniquely American dialect of English.

    • He either ignored or was unaware of recently created rules of grammar and spelling developed in England.

  • Webster argued that spelling and grammar reforms would help establish a national language, radius cultural dependence on England, and Inspire national pride.

• #3. From the time of their arrival in North America, colonists began to pronounce words differently from the British.

  • 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.

  • Such words as fast, path, and half are pronounced in England like the /ah/ in father rather than the /a/ and man.

    • The British also eliminate the r sound from pronunciation except before vowels.

      • Thus lord in British pronunciation sounds like laud.

  • Americans pronounce unaccented syllables with more clarity.

    • The word secretary and necessary have four syllables in American English but only three in British (secret’ry and neccess’ry).

  • Surprisingly, pronunciation has changed more in England than in the United States.

    • The letters a and r are pronounced in the United States closer to the way they were pronounced in Britain in the 17th century when the first colonists arrived.

    • A single dialect of southern English did not emerge as the British national standard until the late eighteenth century after the American colonies had declared independence and were politically as well as physically isolated from England.

  • Thus people in the United States did not speak “proper” English because when the colonists left England, “proper” English was not what it is today.

    • Furthermore, few colonists were drawn from the English upper classes.

Dialects in the United States

• Major differences in US dialects originated because of the differences and dialects among the original settlers.

  • The English dialect spoken by the first colonists, who arrived in the 17th century, determine the future speech patterns of their communities because later immigrants adopted the language used in their new homes when they arrived.

  • The language may have been modified somewhat by the new arrivals, but the distinctive elements brought over by the original settlers continued to dominate.

SETTLEMENT IN THE EAST.

• The original American settlement stretched along the Atlantic coast in 13 separate colonies.

• These settlements can be grouped into three areas:

• New England. These colonies were established and inhabited almost entirely by settlers from England.

Two-thirds of the New England colonists were Puritans from East Anglia in Southern England, and only a few came from the north of England.

• Southeastern. About half came from Southeast England, although they represented a diversity of social-class backgrounds, including deported prisoners, indentured servants, and political and religious refugees.

• Middle Atlantic. These immigrants were more diverse.

The early settlers of Pennsylvania were predominantly Quakers from the north of England.

Scots and Irish also went to Pennsylvania, as well as two New Jersey and Delaware.

The Middle Atlantic colonies also attracted many German, Dutch, and Swedish immigrants who learn their English from the English-speaking settlers in the area.

• The English dialects are now spoken in the US Southeast and New England are easily recognizable.

  • Current distinctions result from the establishment of independent and isolated colonies in the 17th century.

  • The dialect spoken in the Middle Atlantic colonies differs significantly from those spoken farther north and south because most of the settlers came from the north rather than the south of England or from other countries.

CURRENT DIALECT DIFFERENCES IN THE EAST.

• Major dialect differences continue to exist within the United States, primarily on the East Coast, although some distinctions can be found elsewhere in the country.

  • Two important isoglosses separate the Eastern United States into three major dialect regions, known as the Northern, Midlands, and Southern.

  • Some words are commonly used within one of the three major dialect areas but rarely and the other two.

  • In most instances, these words relate to rural life, food, and objects from daily activities.

  • Language differences tend to be greater in rural areas than in cities because farmers are relatively isolated from interaction with people from other dialect regions.

• Many words that were once regionally distinctive are now national in distribution.

  • Mass media, especially television and radio, influence the adoption of the same words throughout the country.

  • Nonetheless, regional dialect differences persist in the United States.

  • For example, the word for soft drink varies.

    • Most people in the Northeast and Southwest, as well as the St. Louis area, use soda to describe a soft drink.

    • Most people in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Northwest prefer pop.

    • Southerners refer to all soft drinks as coke.

PRONUNCIATION DIFFERENCES.

• Regional pronunciation differences are more familiar to us than word differences, although it is harder to draw precise isoglosses for them.

• The southern dialect includes making such words as half and mine into two syllables (“ha-lf” and “mi-yne”), pronouncing poor as po-ur, and pronouncing Tuesday and due with a /y/ sound (“Tyuesday” and “dyue”).

• The New England dialect is well known for dropping the /r/ sound, so that heart and lark are pronounced “hot” and “lock.”

• Also, ear and care are pronounced with /ah/ substituted for the /r/ endings.

• This characteristic dropping of the /r/ sound is shared with speakers from the south of England and reflects the place of origin of most New England colonists.

• It also reflects the relatively high degree of contact between the two groups.

• Residents of Boston, New England’s main port city, maintained especially close ties to the important parts of Southern England, such as London, ply mouth, and Bristol.

• Compared to other colonists, New Englanders received more exposure to changes in pronunciation that occurred in Britain during the 18th century.

• The New England and Southern Accents sound unusual to the majority of Americans because of standard pronunciation throughout the American West comes from the Middle Atlantic states rather than the New England and Southern regions.

  • This pattern occurred because most western settlers came from the Middle Atlantic states.

• The diffusion of particular English dialects into the middle and western parts of the United States is a result of the westward movement of colonists from the three dialect regions of the East.

  • The area of the Midwest south of the Ohio River was settled first by colonists from Virginia and the other southern areas.

  • The Middle Atlantic colonies sent most of the early settlers north of the Ohio River, although some New Englanders moved to the Great Lakes area.

  • The pattern by which dialects diffuse West red resembles the diffusion of East Coast house types discussed in Chapter 4.

• As more of the west was open to settlement during the 19th century, people migrated from all parts of the East Coast.

  • The California Gold Rush attracted people from throughout the East, many of whom subsequently moved to other parts of the West.

  • The mobility of Americans has been a major reason for the relatively uniform language that exists throughout much of the West.

KEY ISSUE 2 - Why Is English Related to Other Languages?

• English is part of the Indo-European language family.

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

  • Indo-European is the world’s most extensively spoken language family by a wide margin.

Indo-European Branches

• Within a language family, a language branch is a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago.

  • Differences are not as extensive or as old as with language families, and archaeological evidence can confirm that the branches derived from the same family.

• Indo-European is divided into eight branches.

  • Four of the branches—Indo-Iranian, Romance, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic—are spoken by large numbers of people.

    • Indo-Iranian languages are clustered in South Asia, Romance languages in southwestern Europe and Latin America, Germanic languages in northwestern Europe and North America, and Balto-Slavic languages in Eastern Europe.

  • The four less extensively used Indo-European language branches are Albanian, Armenian, Greek, and Celtic.

Germanic Brach of Indo-European

• German may seem a difficult language for many English speakers to learn, but the two languages are actually closely related.

  • Both belong to the Germanic language branch of Indo-European.

• A language group is 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.

  • West Germanic is the group within the Germanic branch of Indo-European to which English belongs.

  • Although they sound very different, English and German are both languages in the West Germanic group because they are structurally similar and have many words in common.

• West Germanic is further divided into High Germanic and Low Germanic subgroups, so named because they are found in high and low elevations within present-day Germany.

  • High German, spoken in the southern mountains of Germany, is the basis for the Modern Standard German language.

  • English is classified in the Low Germanic subgroup of the West Germanic group.

    • Other Low Germanic languages include Dutch, which is spoken in the Netherlands, as well as Flemish, which is generally considered a dialect of the Dutch spoken in Northern Belgium.

    • Afrikaans, a language of South Africa, is similar to Dutch because Dutch settlers migrated to South Africa 300 years ago.

    • Friesian is spoken by a few residents of the northeastern Netherlands.

    • A dialect of German spoken in the northern lowlands of Germany's also classified as Low Germanic.

• The Germanic language Branch also includes North Germanic languages, spoken in Scandinavia.

  • These four Scandinavian languages—Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic—all derive from Old Norse, which was the principal language spoken throughout Scandinavia before AD 1000.

    • Four distinct languages emerged after that time because of migration in the political organization of the region into four independent and isolated countries.

Indo-Irandian Branch of Indo-European

• The branch of the Indo-European language family with the most speakers is Indo-Iranian.

  • This Branch includes more than 100 individual languages.

  • The branch is divided into an eastern group (Indic) and a western group (Iranian).

INDIC (EASTERN) GROUP OF INDO-IRANIAN LANGUAGE BRANCH.

• The most widely used languages in India, as well as in the neighboring countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, belong to the Indo-European language family and, more specifically, to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European.

• One of the main elements of cultural diversity among the 1 billion-plus residents of India is language.

  • Ethnologue identifies 438 languages currently spoken in India, including 29 by at least 1 million people.

• The official language of India is Hindi, which is an Indo-European language.

  • Originally a variety of Hindustani 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.

• After India became an independent state in 1947, Hindi was proposed as the official language, but speakers of other languages strongly objected.

  • Consequently, English—the language of the British colonial rulers—has been retained as an official language.

  • Speakers of different Indian languages who wish to communicate with each other sometimes are forced to turn to English as a common language.

• India also recognizes 22 so-called scheduled languages, including 15 Indo-European, four Dravidian, two Sino-Tibetan, and one Austro-Asiatic.

  • The government of India is obligated to encourage the use of these languages.

• Hindi is spoken in many different ways—and therefore could be regarded as a collection of many individual languages.

  • But there is only one official way to write Hindi, using a script called Devanagari, which has been used in India since the 17th century AD.

  • Local differences arose in the spoken forms of Hindi but not in the written form because until recently view speakers of that language could read or write it.

• 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 speakers are Muslims and their holiest book (the Quran) is written in Arabic.

IRANIAN (WESTERN) GROUP OF INDO-IRANIAN LANGUAGE BRANCH.

• Indo-Iranian languages are also spoken in Iran in neighboring countries in southwestern Asia.

• These form a separate group from Indic within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family.

  • The major Iranian group in languages include Persian (sometimes called Farsi) in Iran, Pashto in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, and Kurdish, used by the Kurds of western Iran, northern Iraq, and eastern Turkey.

  • These languages are written in the Arabic alphabet.

Balto-Slavic Branch of Indo-European

• The other Indo-European language Branch with large numbers of speakers is Balto-Slavic.

  • Slavic was once a single language, but differences developed in the 17th century AD, and several groups of Slavs migrated from Asia to different areas of Eastern Europe and thereafter lived in isolation from one another.

  • As a result, that Branch can be divided into east, west, and south Slavic groups as well as a Baltic Group.

EAST SLAVIC AND BALTIC GROUPS OF THE BALTO-SLAVIC LANGUAGE BRANCH.

• The most widely used Slavic languages are the Eastern ones, primarily Russian, which is spoken by more than 80% of the Russian people.

  • Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

• The importance of Russian increased with the Soviet Union's rise to power after the end of World War II in 1945.

  • Soviet officials Force native speakers of other languages to learn Russian as a way of fostering cultural unity among the country's diverse peoples.

  • In Eastern Europe countries that were dominated politically and economically by the Soviet Union, Russian was taught as the second language.

  • The presence of so many non-Russian speakers was a measure of cultural diversity in the Soviet Union, and the desire to use languages other than Russian was a major drive in its breakup.

  • With the demise of the Soviet Union, the newly independent republics adopted official languages other than Russian, although Russian remains the language for communications among officials and countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union.

• After Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian are the two most important East Slavic languages and are the official languages in Ukraine and Belarus.

  • Ukraine has a Slavic word meaning “border,” and Bela- is translated as “white.”

WEST AND SOUTH SLAVIC GROUPS OF THE BALTO-SLAVIC LANGUAGE BRANCH.

• The most spoken West Slavic language is Polish, followed by Czech and Slovak.

  • The latter two are quite similar, and speakers of one can understand the other.

• The government of the former state of Czechoslovakia tried to balance the use of the two languages, even though the country contained twice as many Czechs and Slovaks.

  • For example, the announcers on televised sports events used one of the languages during the first half and switched to the other for the second half.

  • These balancing measures were effective in promoting National Unity during the Communist era, but in 1993, four years after the fall of Communism, Slovakia split from the Czech Republic.

  • Slovak rekindled their long-suppressed resentment of the perceived dominance of the national culture by the Czech ethnic group.

• The most important South Slavic language is the one spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia.

  • Bosnian and Croats write the language in the Roman alphabet, whereas Montenegrins and Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet).

• When Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia were all part of Yugoslavia, the language was called Serbo-Croatian.

  • This name now offends Bosnians and Croatians because it recalls when they were once in a country that was dominated by Serbs.

  • Instead, the names Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are preferred by the people in these countries, to demonstrate that each language is unique, even though linguists consider them one.

• Differences have crept into the language of the South Slavs.

  • 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.

  • In the future, after a generation of isolation and hostility among Bosnians, Croats, and Serbs, the languages spoken by the three may be sufficiently different to justify their classification as distinct languages.

• In general, differences among all the Slavic languages are relatively small.

  • A Czech, for example, can understand most of what is said or written in Slovak and could become fluent without much difficulty.

  • However, because language is a major element in people's cultural identity, relatively small differences among Slavic as well as other languages are being preserved and even accentuated in recent independence movements.

Roman Branch of Indo-European

• The Romance language branch evolved from the Latin language spoken by the Romans two thousand years ago.

  • The four most widely used contemporary Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian.

  • Spanish and French or two of the six official languages of the United Nations.

• The European regions in which these four languages are spoken correspond somewhat to the boundaries of the modern states of Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy.

  • Rugged mountains service boundaries among these four countries.

  • France is separated from Italy by the Alps and from Spain by the Pyrenees, and several mountain ranges mark the border between Spain and Portugal.

  • Physical boundaries such as mountains are strong intervening obstacles, creating barriers to communication between people living on opposite sides.

• The fifth most important Romance language, Romanian, is the principal language of Romania and Moldova.

  • It is separated from the other Romance-speaking European countries by Slavic-speaking peoples.

• The distribution of Romance languages shows the difficulty in trying to establish the number of distinct languages in the world.

  • In addition to the five languages already mentioned, two other official Romance languages are Romansh and Catalan.

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

    • Catalan is the official language of Andorra, a tiny country of 70,000 inhabitants situated in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France.

    • 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.

  • A third Romance language, Sardinian—a mixture of Italian, Spanish, and Arabic—was once the official language of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.

• In addition to these official languages, several other Romance languages have individual literary traditions.

  • And Italy, Ladin (not Latin) is spoken by 30,000 people living in South Tyrol, and Friulian is spoken by 80,000 people in the northeast.

  • Ladin and Friulian (along with the official Romansh) are dialects of the Rhaaeto-Romanic.

• A Romance tongue called Ladino—a mixture of Spanish, Greek, Turkish, and Hebrew—is spoken by 100,000 Sephardic Jews, most of whom now live in Israel.

  • None of these languages have official status in any country, although they are used in literature.

ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES.

• The Romance languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian, are part of the same Branch because they all developed from Latin, the “Roman language.”

  • The rise and importance of the city of Rome 2,000 years ago brought a diffusion of its Latin language.

• At its height in the second century AD, 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.

  • As the Conquering Roman armies occupied the provinces of this vast Empire, they brought the Latin language with them.

  • In the process, the languages spoken by the natives of the provinces were either extinguished or suppressed in favor of the language of the conquerors.

• Even during the time of the Roman Empire, Latin varied to some extent from one province to another.

  • The empire grew over a period of several hundred years, so the Latin used in each province was based on that spoken by the Roman army at the time of occupation.

  • The Latin spoken in each province also integrated words from the language formerly spoken in the area.

• The Latin that people in the provinces learned was not the standard literary form but a spoken form, known as a Vulgar Latin from the Latin word referring to “the masses” of the populace.

  • Vulgar Latin was introduced to the provinces by the soldiers stationed throughout the empire.

  • For example, the literary term for “horse” was equus, from which English has arrived such a word as equine and equestrian.

• Following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, communication among the former provinces declined, creating still greater regional variation in spoken Latin.

  • By the 8th century, regions of the former empire had been isolated from each other long enough for distinct languages to evolve.

  • But Latin persisted in parts of the former empire.

    • People in some areas reverted to former languages; others adopted the language of conquering groups of people from the north and east who spoke Germanic and Slavic.

• In the past, when migrants were unable to communicate with speakers of the same language back home, major differences armrest between the languages spoken in the old and new locations, leading to the emergence of distinct, separate languages.

  • This was the case with the migration of Latin speakers two thousand years ago.

ROMANCE LANGUAGE DIALECTS.

• Distinct romance languages did not suddenly appear in the former Roman Empire.

• As with other languages, they evolved over time.

  • Numerous dialects existed within each province, many of which are still spoken today.

  • The creation of standard national languages, such as French and Spanish, was relatively recent.

• The dialect of the Ile-de-France region, known as Francien, became the standard form of French because the region included Paris, which became the capital and largest city of the country.

  • Francien French became the country's official language in the 16th century, and local dialects tended to disappear as a result of the capital’s longtime dominance over French political, economic, and social life.

• The most important surviving dialect difference within France is between the north and the south.

  • The northern dialect is known as langue d’oil and the southern as langue d’oc.

    • It is worth exploring these names, for they provide insight into how languages evolve.

• The terms are derived from different ways in which the word for “yes” was said.

• A province where the southern dialect is spoken in Southwestern France is known as Languedoc.

  • The southern French dialect is now sometimes called Occitan, derived from the French region of Aquitaine, which in Frech has a similar pronunciation to Occitan.

  • About 2 million people in southern France speak one of a number of Occitan dialects, including Auvergnat, Gascon, and Provencal.

• Spain, like France, contains many dialects during the Middle Ages.

  • One dialect, known as Castalian, arose during the ninth century in Old Castile, located in the north-central part of the country.

  • The dialect spread southward over the next several hundred years as independent kingdoms were unified into one large country.

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

  • At that time, Castalian became the official language for the entire country.

  • Regional dialects, such as Aragon, Navarre, Leon, Asturias, and Santander, survive only in secluded rural areas.

  • The official language of Spain has not called Spanish, although the term Castalian is still used in Latin America.

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

  • Approximately 90% of the speakers of these two languages live outside of Europe, mainly in Central and South America.

  • Spanish is the official language of 18 Latin American states, 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.

• These two Romance languages were diffused to the Americas by Spanish and Portuguese explorers.

  • The division of Central and South America into Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking regions is the result of a 1493 decision by Pope Alexander VI to give the western part or portion of the new world to Spain in the eastern part to Portugal.

    • The Treaty of Tordesillas, find a year later, carried out the papal decision.

• The Portuguese and Spanish languages spoken in the Western Hemisphere differ somewhat from the European versions, as is the case with English.

  • The members of the Spanish Royal Academy meet every week in a mansion in Madrid to clarify the rules for the vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation of the Spanish language around the world.

  • The Academy's official dictionary, published in 1992, has added hundreds of “Spanish” words that originated either in the regional dialects of Spain or the Indian languages of Latin America.

• Brazil, Portugal, and several Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa agreed in 1994 to standardize the way common language is written.

  • Many people in Portugal or upset that the new standard language more closely resembles the Brazilian version, which eliminates most of the accent marks and the agreement recognizes as standard thousands of words that Brazilians have added to the language.

• The standardization of Portuguese is a reflection of the level of interaction that is possible in the modern world between groups of people who live tens of thousands of kilometers apart.

  • Books and television programs produced in one country fuse rapidly the other countries where the same language is used.

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN DIALECTS AND LANGUAGES.

• Difficulties arise in determining whether two languages are distinct or whether they're merely two dialects of the same language:

• Gallican, spoken in Northwestern Spain in northeastern Portugal, is as distinct from Portuguese as, say, Catalane is from Spanish.

However, Catalane is generally classified as a distinct language, and garlic and is classified as a dialect of Portuguese.

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

• Flemish, the official language of Northern Belgium, is generally considered a dialect of the Dutch.

• Several languages of Italy are viewed as different enough to merit consideration as languages to Sting from Italian according to Ethnologue.

• 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.

  • A creole or creolized language is defined as a language that results from the mixing of the colonizer’s language and the indigenous language of the people being dominated.

  • A creolized language forms when the colonized group adopts the language of the dominant group but makes some changes, so just simplifying the grammar and adding words from their former language.

    • The word creole derives from a word in several romance languages for a slave who was born in the master's house.

Origin and Diffusion of Indo-European

• If Germanic, Romance, Balto Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages are all part of the same Indo-European language family, then they must be descended from a single common ancestral language.

  • Unfortunately, the existence of a single ancestor—which can be called Proto-Indo-European—can not be provided with certainty, because it would not have existed thousands of years before the invention of writing or recorded history.

• The evidence that Proto-Indo-European once existed is internal, driven by the physical attributes of words themselves in various Indo-European languages.

  • Because all Indo-European languages share these similar words, linguists believe the words must represent things experienced in the daily lives of the original Proto-Indo-European speakers.

  • Other words cannot be traced back to a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor and must have been added later after the root language split into many branches.

  • Therefore, linguists conclude the original Proto-Indo-European speakers probably lived in a cold climate or one that had a winter season but did not come in contact with oceans.

• Linguists and anthropologists generally accept that Proto-Indo-European must have existed, but they disagree on when and where the language originated in the process and routes by which it diffused.

  • The debate over the place of origin and passive diffusion is significant because one theory argues that language is diffused primarily through warfare and conquest, and the other theory argues that the diffusion resulted from the peaceful sharing of food.

• Scholars disagree on where and when the first speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived.

• Nomadic Warrior Thesis.

  • One influential hypothesis, espoused by Marija, is the first Proto-Indo-European speakers were the Kurgan people, whose homeland was in the steppes near the border between present-day Russia and Kazakhstan.

    • The earliest archaeological evidence of the Kurgans dates to around 4300 BC.

  • The Kurgans were nomadic herders.

    • Among the first to domesticate horses and cows, they migrated in search of grasslands for their animals.

    • This took them westward through Europe, eastward to Siberia, and southeastward to Iran and South Asia.

• Between 3500 and 2500 BC, Kurgan warriors, using their domesticated horses as weapons, conquered much of Europe and South Asia.

Sedentary Farmer Thesis

• Archaeologist Colin Renfrew argues that the first speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived 2,000 years before the Kurgans, in Eastern Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey.

  • Biologist Russell D. Gray supports the Renfrew position but dates the first speakers even earlier, at around 6700 BC.

• Renfrew believes they diffused from Anatolia West route to Greece and from Grease Westward to Italy, Sicily, Corsica, the Mediterranean coast of France, Spain, and Portugal.

• From the Mediterranean Coast, the speakers migrated northward toward central and northern France and onto the British Isles.

• Indo-European is also said to have diffuse northward from Greece to word the Danube River (Romania) and westward to Central Europe, according to Renfrew.

  • From there the language diffused northward toward the Baltic Sea and eastward toward the Dniester river near Ukraine.

  • From the Dniester River, speakers migrated eastward to the Dnepr River.

• The Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family originated either directly through migration from Anatolia along the south shores of the Black and Caspian Seas by way of Iran and Pakistan, or indirectly by way of Russia and north of the Black and Caspian Seas.

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

  • The language triumphed because its speakers became more numerous and prosperous by growing their own food instead of relying on hunting.

• Regardless of how Indo-European diffuse, communication was poor among different peoples, whether warriors or farmers.

• After many generations of complete isolation, individual groups evolve increasingly distinct languages.

KEY ISSUE 3 - Where Are Other Language Families Distributed?

• This section describes where different languages are found around the world.

• The several thousand spoken languages can be organized logically into a small number of language families.

• Larger language families can be further divided into language branches and language groups.

Classification of Languages

• A language in the Indo-European family, such as English, is spoken by 46 percent of the world.

• A language in the Sino-Tibetan family, such as Mandarin is spoken by 21 percent of the world, mostly in China.

• A language in the Afro-Asiatic family, including Arabic, is spoken by 6 percent, mostly in the Middle East.

• A language in the Austronesian family is spoken by 6 percent, mostly in Southeast Asia.

• A language in the Niger-Congo family is spoken by 6 percent, mostly in Africa.

• A language in the Dravidian family is spoken by 4 percent, mostly in India.

• A language in the Altatic family is spoken by 2 percent, mostly in Asia.

• A language in the Austro-Asiatic family is spoken by 2 percent, mostly in Southeast Asia.

• Japanese*, a separate language family, is spoken by 2 percent.*

• The remaining 5 percent of the world’s people speak a language belonging to one of the 100 smaller families.

• Language families form the trunks of the trees, whereas individual languages are displayed as leaves.

  • The larger the trunks and leaves are, the greater the number of speakers of those families and languages.

  • Some trunks divide into several branches, which logically represent language branches.

• Linguists speculate that language families were joined together as a handful of superfamilies tens of thousands of years ago.

  • Superfamilies are shown as roots below the surface because their existence is highly controversial and speculative.

Distribution of Language Families

• Nearly one-half of the people in the world speak an Indo-European language.

• The second-largest family is Sino-Tibetan, spoken by one-fifth of the world.

  • Another half-dozen families account for most of the remainder.

Sino-Tibetan Family

• The Sino-Tibetan family encompasses languages spoken in the People’s Republic of China—the world’s most populous state at more than 1 billion—as well as several smaller countries in Southeast Asia.

  • The languages of China generally belong to the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan family.

• There's no single Chinese language.

• Rather the most important is Mandarin (or, as the Chinese call it, pu tong hua—”common speech”).

  • Spoken by approximately three-fourths of the Chinese people, Mandarin is a by a wide margin the most used language in the world.

  • Once the language of emperors in Beijing, Mandarin is now the official language of both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, as well as one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

  • Other Sinitic branch languages 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.

  • However, the Chinese government is imposing Mandarin countrywide.

• The relatively small number of languages in China (compared to India, for example) is a source of national strength and unity.

  • Unity is also fostered by a consistent written form for all Chinese languages.

  • Although the words are pronounced differently in each language, they are written the same way.

• The structure of Chinese languages is quite different from Indo-European.

  • They are based on 420 one-syllable words.

  • This number far exceeds the possible one-syllable sounds that humans can make, so Chinese languages use each sound to denote more than one thing.

  • The Listener must infer the meaning from the context in the sentence and the intonation the speaker uses.

    • In addition, two one-syllable words can be combined into two syllables, forming a new word.

• The other distinctive characteristic of the Chinese languages is the method of writing.

• The Chinese languages are written with a collection of thousands of characters.

  • Some of the characters represent sounds pronounced in speaking, as in English.

  • However, most are ideograms, which represent ideas or concepts, not specific pronunciations.

  • The system is intricate and mature, having developed over 4,000 years.

  • The main language problem for the Chinese is the difficulty in learning to write because of the large number of characters.

    • The Chinese government reports that 16% of the population over age 16 is unable to read or write more than a few characters.

Other East and Southeast Asian Language Families

• In addition to Sino-Tibetan, several other language families spoken by large numbers of people can be found in East and Southeast Asia.

  • 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.

• Austronesian. Spoken by about 6% of the world's people, speakers of Austronesian languages are mostly in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country.

  • With its inhabitants dispersed among thousands of islands, Indonesia has an extremely large number of distinct languages and dialects; 722 actively used languages are identified by the Ethnologue.

  • Indonesia's most widely used first language is Javanese, spoken by 85 million people, mostly on the island of Java, where two-thirds of the country's population is clustered.

• 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.

  • This is strong evidence of migration to Madagascar from present-day Indonesia.

    • Malayo-Polynesian people apparently sailed in small boats across the Indian Ocean to reach Madagascar approximately 2,000 years ago.

• Austro-Asiatic. Spoken by about 2% of the world's population, Austro-Asiatic is based in Southeast Asia.

  • Vietnamese, the most spoken tongue of the Austro-Asiatic language family, is written with our familiar Roman alphabet, with the addition of a large number of diacritical marks above the vowels.

  • The Vietnamese alphabet was devised in the seventh century by Roman Catholic missionaries.

• Tai Kadai. Once classified as a branch of the Sino-Tibetan, the principal languages of this family are spoken in Thailand and neighboring portions of China.

  • Similarities with the Austronesian family leave some linguistics scholars to speculate that people speaking these languages may have migrated from the Philippines.

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

  • Chinese cultural traits have diffused into Japanese society, including the original form of writing the Japanese language.

  • But the structures of the two languages differ.

  • Foreign terms may be written with one of the sets of phonetic symbols.

• Korean. Usually classified as a separate language family, Curry may be related to the Altaic languages of Central Asia or to Japanese.

  • Unlike sino-tibetan languages in Japanese, Korean is written not with ideograms but in a system known as hankul (also called hangul and onmun).

  • In this system, each letter represents a sound, as in Western languages.

  • More than half of the Korean vocabulary derives from Chinese words.

    • In fact, Chinese and Japanese words are the principal sources for creating new words to describe new technology and concepts.

Languages of the Middle East and Central Asia

• Major language families in the Middle East and Central Asia include Afro-Asiatic and Altaic.

• Uralic languages were once classified as Altaic.

• Afro-Asiatic. Arabic is a major language of this family, an official language in two dozen countries of the Middle East, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations.

  • In addition to the 200 million plus native speakers of Arabic, a large percentage of the world's Muslims have at least some knowledge of Arabic because Islam's holiest book, the Quran (Koran), was written in that language in the seventh century.

  • The family also includes Hebrew, the language of the Bible.

• Altaic. These languages are thought to have originated in the steeps bordering the Qilian Shan and Altai mountains between Tibet and China.

  • Present distribution covers an 8000-kilometer (5,000-miles) band of Asia.

  • That Altaic language was by far the most speakers is Turkish.

• Turkish was once written with Arabic letters.

  • But in 1928 the Turkish government, led by Kemal Ataturk, ordered that the language be written with the Roman alphabet instead.

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

• With the Soviet Union government of the Altaic-speaking region of Central Asia, the use of Altaic languages was supposed to create a homogeneous natural culture.

  • What element of Soviet policy was to force everyone to write with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, even though some have traditionally employed Arabic letters.

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

    • People in these countries are no longer forced to learn Russian and write Cyrillic letters.

• Uralic. Every European country is dominated by Indo-European speakers, except for three—Estonia, Finland, and Hungary.

  • The Estonians, Finns, and Hungarians speak languages that belong to the Uralic family.

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

  • Uralic languages are traceable back to a Common Language, Proto-Uralic, first used 7,000 years ago by the people living in the Ural Mountains of present-day Russia, north of the Kurgan homeland.

  • Migrants carried the Uralic languages to Europe, carving out homelands for themselves in the midst of Germanic and Slavic-speaking peoples, and retaining their language is a major element of cultural identity.

African Language Families

• No one knows the precise number of languages spoken in Africa, and scholars disagree and classify those known into families.

  • In the eighteen-hundreds, European missionaries in colonial officers began to record African languages using the Roman and Arabic alphabet.

  • More than one thousand distinct languages and several thousand named dialects have been documented.

    • Most like a written tradition.

• African language families have a broad view and countries like Nigeria have a complex pattern of multiple tongues.

  • This great number of languages results from at least five thousand years of minimal interaction among the thousands of cultural groups inhabiting the African continent.

  • Each group develops its own language, religion, and other cultural traditions in isolation from other groups.

• In Northern Africa, the language pattern is relatively clear, because Arabic, an Afro-Asiatic language, dominates, although in a variety of dialects.

  • In sub-Saharan Africa, however, languages grow far more complex.

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

  • One of these languages—Swahili—is the first language of only 800,000 people and an official language in only one country (Tanzania), but it is spoken as a second language by approximately 30 million Africans.

• Especially in rural areas, the local language is used to communicate with others from the same village, and Swahili is used to communicate without service.

  • Swahili originally developed through interaction among African groups with Arab traders, so its vocabulary has strong are big influences.

  • Also, Swahili is one of the few African languages with extensive literature.

• Nilo-Saharan. Languages of this family are spoken by a few million people in north-central Africa, immediately north of the Niger-Congo language origin.

  • Divisions within the Nilo-Saharan family exemplify the problem of classifying African languages.

  • Despite fewer speakers, the Nilo-Saharan family is divided into six branches, plus numerous groups and sub-groups.

    • The total number of speakers of each individual Nilo-Saharan language is extremely small.

• Khoisan. A distinctive characteristic of the Khoisan languages is the use of clicking sounds.

  • Upon hearing this, whites in southern Africa derisively and onomatopoeically named the most important Khoisan language Hottentot.

KEY ISSUE 4 - Why Do People Preserve Local Languages?

• The distribution of a language is a measure of the fate of an ethnic group.

  • English had diffused around the world from a small island in northwestern Europe because of the cultural dominance of England and the United States over other territories on Earth’s surface.

    • Icelandic remains a little-used language because of the isolation of the Icelandic people.

• As in other cultural traits, language displays the two competing geographic trends of globalization and local diversity.

• English has become the principal language of communication interaction for the entire world.

• At the same time, local languages endangered by the global domination of English are being protected and preserved.

Preserving Language Diversity

• Thousands of languages are extinct languages once in use—even in the recent past—but no longer spoken or read in daily activities by anyone in the world.

  • Ethnologue considers 473 languages as nearly extinct because only a few older speakers are still living, and they are not teaching the languages to their children.

  • According to Ethnologue, 46 of these nearly extinct languages are in Africa, 182 in the Americas, 84, in Asia, 9 in Europe, and 152 in the Pacific.

• When Spanish missionaries reached the eastern Amazon region of Peru in the sixteenth century, they found more than 500 languages.

  • Only 90 survive today, according to Ethnologue, and 14 of these face immediate extinction because fewer than a hundred speakers remain.

  • Upper is 92 surviving indigenous languages, only Cusco, a Quechuan language, is currently used by more than 1 million people.

• Gothic was widely spoken by people in Eastern and Northern Europe in the third century.

  • Not only is gothic extinct but so is the entire language group to which it belongs, the East Germanic group of the Germanic branch of Indo-European.

  • The last speakers of Gothic lived in Crimea in Russia in the sixteenth century.

  • The gothic language died because the descendants of the Goths were converted to other languages through processes of integration, such as political dominance and cultural preference.

    • For example, many Gothic people switch to speaking the Latin language after their conversion to Christianity.

    • Similarly, indigenous languages are disappearing in Peru as speakers switch to Spanish.

• Some endangered languages are being preserved.

  • The European Union has established the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL), based in Dublin, Ireland, to provide financial support for the preservation of several dozen indigenous, regional, and minority languages are spoken by 46 million Europeans.

  • Nonetheless, linguists expect that hundreds of languages will become extinct during the 21st century and that only about 300 languages are clearly safe from extinction because they are sufficient speakers and official government support.

Hebrew: Reviving Extinct Languages

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

  • Most of the Jewish Bible (Christian Old Testament) was written in Hebrew (a small part of it was written in another Afro-Asiatic language, Aramaic).

  • A language of daily activity in biblical times, Hebrew diminished in use in the fourth century BC and was thereafter retained only for Jewish religious services.

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

• When Israel was established as an independent country in 1948, Hebrew became one of the new country’s two official languages, along with Arabic.

  • Hebrew was chosen because the Jewish population of Israel consisted of refugees and migrants from many countries who spoke many languages.

  • Because here it was still used in Jewish prayers, no other language could so symbolically unify the disparate cultural groups in the new country.

• The task of reviving Hebrew as a living language was formidable.

  • Words had to be created for thousands of objects and inventions unknown in biblical times, such as telephones, cars, and electricity.

  • The revival effort was initiated by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who lived in Palestine before the creation of the State of Israel and he refused to speak any language other than Hebrew.

  • Ben-Yehuda is credited with the invention of 4000 new Hebrew words—related when possible to ancient ones—and the creation of the first modern Hebrew dictionary.

Celtic: Preserving Endangered Languages

• The Celtic branch of Indo-European is of particular interest to English speakers because it was a major language in the British Isles before the Germanic Angles, Jutes, and Saxons invaded.

  • 2000 years ago, Celtic languages were spoken in much of present-day Germany, France, and Northern Italy, as well as in the British Isles.

  • Today, Celtic languages survive only in remote parts of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland and on the Brittany Peninsula France.

• The Celtic language branch is divided into Goidelic (Gaelic) and Brythonic groups.

  • Two Goidelic languages survive—Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic.

  • 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.

• Irish Gaelic. Irish Gaelic and English are the Republic of Ireland’s two official languages.

  • Irish is spoken by 350,000 people on a daily basis, and 1.5 million say that they can speak it.

• Scottish Gaelic. In Scotland 59,000, or 1 percent of the people, speak Scottish Gaelic.

  • An extensive body of literature exists in Gaelic languages, including the Robert Burns poem Auld Lang Syne (“old long since”), the basis for the popular New Year’s Eve song.

  • Gaelic was carried from Ireland to Scotland about 1,500 years ago.

• Brythonic (Welsh). Wales—the name derived from the Germanic invaders’ word for foreign—was conquered by the English in 1283.

  • Welsh remained dominant in Wales until the nineteenth century when many English speakers migrated there to work in coal mines and factories.

  • A 2004 survey found 611,000 Welsh speakers in Wales, 22% of the population.

  • In some isolated communities in the Northwest, especially in the country of Gwynedd, 2/3 speak Welsh.

• Cornish. Cornish became extinct in 1777, with the death of the language’s last known native speaker, Dolly Pentreath, who lived in Mousehole (pronounced “muzzle”).

  • Before Pentreath died, an English historian recorded as much of her speech as possible so that future generations could study the Cornish language.

  • One of her last utterances was later translated as “I will not speak English… you ugly, black toad!”

• Breton. In Brittany—like Cornwall, an isolated peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean—around 250,000 speak Breton regularly.

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

• The survival of any language depends on the political and military strength of its speakers.

  • The Celtic language has declined because the Celts lost most of the territory they controlled to speakers of other languages.

  • In the 1300s, the Irish were forbidden to speak their own language in the presence of their English masters.

    • By the nineteenth century, Irish children were required to wear “tally sticks” around their necks at school.

    • The teacher carved a notch in the stick every day the child used an Irish word, and at the end of the day meted out punishment based on the number of tallies.

    • Parents encourage their children to learn English so that they could compete for jobs.

  • Most remaining Celtic speakers also know the language of their English or French conquerors.

• Recent efforts have prevented the disappearance of Celtic languages.

  • All local governments in utility companies are now obliged to provide services and Welsh.

    • Welsh language road signs have been posted throughout Wales, and the British Broadcasting Corporation produces Welsh language television and radio programs.

  • Knowledge of Welsh is not required for many jobs, especially in public service, media, culture, and sports.

• An Irish-language TV station began broadcasting in 1996.

  • English road signs were banned from portions of Western Ireland in 2005.

  • The revival is being led by young Irish living in other countries who wish to distinguish themselves from the English (in much the same way that Canadians traveling aboard off and make efforts to distinguish themselves from US citizens).

  • Irish singers, including many rock groups, have begun to record and perform in Gaelic.

• A few hundred people have become fluent in the formerly extinct Cornish language, which was revived in the 1920s.

  • Cornish is taught in grade schools and adult evening courses and is used in some church services.

  • Some banks accept checks written in Cornish.

  • After years of dispute over how to spell the revived language, various groups advocating for the revival of Cornish reached an agreement in 2008 on a standard written version of the language.

  • Because the language became extinct, it is impossible to know precisely how to pronounce Cornish words.

• The long-term decline of languages such as Celtic provides is an excellent example of the precarious struggle for survival that many languages experience.

  • Faced with the diffusion of alternatives used by people with greater political and economic strength, speakers of Celtic and other languages must work hard to preserve their linguistic-cultural identity.

Multilingual States

• Differences can arise at the boundary between two languages.

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

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

  • The language boundary sharply divides the country into two regions.

  • Antagonism between the Flemings and the Walloons is aggravated by economic and political differences.

  • Historically, the Walloons dominated Belgium's economy and politics, and French was the official state language.

• Motorists in Belgium clearly see the language boundary on expressways.

  • Heading north, the highway sign suddenly changed from French to Flemish at the boundary between Wallonia and Flanders, Brussels, the capital city, is an exception.

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

    • As an example, some stations on the subway map of Brussels or identified by two names—one French and one Flemish.

• In response to pressure from Flemish speakers, Belgium has been divided into two independent regions, Flanders and Wallonia.

  • Each elects an assembly that controls cultural affairs, public health, road construction, and urban development and its region.

  • But for many in Flanders, regional autonomy is not enough.

  • They want to see Belgium divided into two independent countries.

  • Were that to occur, Flanders would be one of Europe's richest countries and Wallonia one of the poorest.

• In contrast with Belgium, Switzerland peacefully exists with multiple languages.

  • The key is a decentralized government, in which local authorities hold most of the power, and decisions are frequently made by voter referenda.

  • Switzerland has four official languages—German (used by 65 percent of the population), French (18 percent), Italian (10 percent), and Romansh (1 percent).

    • Swiss voters made Romansh an official language in a 1938 referendum, despite the small percentage of people who use the language.

• Switzerland is divided into four main linguistic regions, but people living in individual communities, especially in mountains, may use a language other than the prevailing local one.

  • The Swiss relatively tolerant of speakers of other languages have institutionalized cultural diversity by creating a form of government that places considerable power in small communities.

Isolated Languages

• An isolated language is a language unrelated to any other and therefore not attached to any language family.

  • Similarities and differences between languages—our main form of communication—are a measure of the degree of interaction among groups of people.

• The diffusion of Indo-European languages demonstrates that a common ancestor dominated much of Europe before recorded history.

  • Similarly, the diffusion of Indo-European languages to the Western hemisphere is a result of conquest by Indo-European speakers in more recent times.

  • In contrast, isolated languages rise through a lack of interaction with speakers of other languages.

A PRE-INDO-EUROPEAN SURVIVOR: BASQUE.

• The best example of an isolated language in Europe is Basque, apparently, the only language currently spoken in Europe that survives from the period before the arrival of Indo-European speakers.

  • No attempt to link Basque to the common origin of the other European languages has been successful.

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

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

  • Basque’s lack of connection to other languages reflects the isolation of the Basque people in their mountainous homeland.

  • This isolation has helped them preserve their language in the face of the wide diffusion of Indo-European languages.

AN UNCHANGING LANGUAGE: ICELANDIC

• Icelandic is related to other languages in the North Germanic group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family.

  • Icelandic’s significance is that over the past thousand years it has changed less than any other in the Germanic branch.

  • As was the case with England, people in Iceland speak a Germanic language because their ancestors migrated to the island from the east, in this case from Norway.

    • Norwegian settlers colonized Iceland in AD 874.

• When an ethnic group migrates to a new location, it takes along the language spoken in the former home.

  • The language is spoken by most migrants—such as the Germanic invaders of England—changed in part through interaction with speakers of other languages.

  • But in the case of Iceland, the Norwegian immigrants had little contact with speakers of other languages when they arrived in Iceland, and they did not have contact with speakers of their language back in Norway.

  • After centuries of interaction with other Scandinavians, Norwegian and other North Germanic languages had adopted new worlds and pronunciations, whereas the isolated people of Iceland had less opportunity to learn new words and no reason to change their language.

Global Dominance of English

• One of the most fundamental needs in a global society is a common language for communication.

• Increasingly in the modern world, the language of international communication is English.

  • A Polish airline pilot who files over Spain speakers to the traffic controller on the ground in English.

  • Swiss bankers speak a dialect of German among themselves, but German bankers, they prefer to speak English rather than German.

  • English is the official language at an aircraft factory in France and an appliance company in Italy.

English: An Example of a Lingua Franca

• A language of international communication, such as English, is known as a lingua franca.

  • To facilitate trade, speakers of two different languages would create a lingua franca by mixing elements of the two languages into a simple common language.

  • The term, which means the language of the Franks, was originally applied by Arab traders during the Middle Ages to describe the language they used to communicate with Europeans, whom they called Franks.

• A group that learns English or another lingua franca may learn a simplified form, called a pidgin language.

  • To communicate with speakers of another language, two groups construct a pigeon language by learning a few of the grammar rules and words of a lingua franca, while mixing in some elements of their own languages.

  • A pidgin language has no native speakers—it is always spoken in addition to one’s native language.

• Other than English, modern lingua franca languages include Swahili in East Africa, Hindi in South Asia, Indonesian in Southeast Asia, and Russian in the former Soviet Union.

  • A number of African and Asian countries that became independent in the twentieth century adopted English or Swahili as an official language for government business, as well as for commerce, even if the majority of the people couldn’t speak it.

• The rapid growth in the importance of English is reflected in the percentage of students learning English as a second language in school.

  • More than 90 percent of students in the European Union learn English in middle or high school, not just in smaller countries like Denmark and the Netherlands but also in populous countries such as France, Germany, and Spain.

  • The Japanese government, having determined that fluency in English is mandatory in a global economy, has even considered adding English as a second official language.

• Foreign students increasingly seek admission to universities in countries that teach in English rather than in German, French, and Russian.

  • Students around the world want to learn English because they believe it is the most effective way to work in a global economy and participate in a global culture.

Expansion Diffusion of English

• In the past, a lingua franca achieved widespread distribution through migration and conquest.

  • Two thousand years ago, the use of Latin spread through Europe along with the Roman Empire, and in recent centuries use of English spread around the world primarily through the British Empire.

• In contrast, the recent growth in the use of English as an example of expansion diffusion, the spread of a trait through the snowballing effect of an idea rather than through the relocation of people.

  • First, English is changing through the diffusion of new vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation.

  • Second, English words are fused with other languages.

  • For a language to remain vibrant, new words and usage must always be coined to deal with new situations.

  • Unlike most examples of expansion diffusion, recent changes in English have percolated up from common usage and ethnic dialects rather than being directed down to the masses by elite people.

    • Examples include dialects spoken by African Americans and residents of Appalachia.

• Some African Americans speak a dialect of English heavily influenced by the group’s distinctive heritage of forced migration from Africa during the eighteenth century to be slaves in the southern colonies.

• In the twentieth century, many African Americans migrated from the South to the large cities in the Northeast and Midwest.

  • Living in racially segregated neighborhoods within northern cities and attending segregated schools, many African Americans preserved their distinctive dialect.

  • That dialect has been termed Ebonics, a combination of ebony and phonics.

• Natives of Appalachian communities, such as in rural West Virginia, also have a distinctive dialect, pronouncing hollow as “holler” and creek as “crick.”

• The use of Ebonics is controversial within the African American community.

  • On the one hand, some regard it as substandard a measure of poor education, and an obstacle to success in the United States.

  • Others see Ebonics as a means for preserving a distinctive element of African American culture and an effective way to teach African Americans who otherwise perform poorly in school.

• Similarly, speaking an Appalachian dialect produces both pride and problems.

  • An Appalachian dialect is a source of regional identity but has long been regarded by other Americans as a sign of poor education and an obstacle to obtaining employment in other regions of the United States.

Diffusion to Other Languages

• English words have become increasingly integrated into other languages.

  • Many French speakers regard the invasion of English words with alarm, but Spanish speakers may find the mixing of the two languages stimulating.

FRANGLAIS.

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

  • The French are particularly upset with the increasing worldwide domination of English, especially the invasion of their language by English words and the substitution of English for French as the most important language of international communications.

• French is an official language in 29 countries and for hundreds of years served as the lingua franca for international diplomats.

  • Many French are upset that English words were allowed to diffuse into the French language and destroy the language’s purity.

  • The widespread use of English in the French language is called Franglais, a combination of francais and anglais, the French words for French and English.

• Since 1635, the French Academy has been the supreme arbiter of the French language.

  • In modern times, it has promoted the use of French terms in France.

    • France’s highest court, however, rules in 1994 that most of the country’s laws banning franglais were illegal.

• Protection of the French language is even more extreme in Quebec, which is completely surrounded by English-speaking provinces and US states.

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

SPANGLISH.

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

  • In Miami’s large Cuban-American community, Spanglish is sometimes called Cubonics, a combination of Cuban and phonetics.

• As with franglais, Spanglish involves converting English words to Spanish forms.

  • Some of the changes modify the spelling of English words to conform to Spanish preferences and pronunciations, such as dropping final consonants and replacing v with b.

  • In other cases, awkward Spanish words or phrases are dropped in favor of English words.

• Spanglish is a richer integration of English with Spanish than the mere borrowing of English words.

  • New words have been invented in Spanglish that does not exist in English but would be useful if they did.

  • Spanglish also mixes English and Spanish words in the same phrase.

• 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.

  • Inevitably, critics charge that Spanglish is a substitute for rigorously learning the rules of standard English and Spanish.

  • And Spanglish has not been promoted for use in schools, as has Ebonics.

  • 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—English’s ability to invent new words and Spanish’s ability to convey nuances of emotion.

DENGLISH.

• The diffusion of English words into German is called Denglish, with the “D” for Deutsch, the German word for German.

• The German telephone company Deutsche Telekom, uses the German word Deutschlandverbindungen for long-distance and the Denglish word Cityverbindungen for local.

  • The telephone company originally wanted to use the English “German calls” and “city walls” to describe its long-distance and local services, but the Insitute for the German Langauge, which defines rules for the use of German, protested, so Deutsche Telehjom compromised with one German word and one Denglish word.

• English has diffused into other languages as well.