5.1 Classification of Languages

• Languages change in response to place and social and economic change.

  • Languages may be rigorously preserved as essential elements of cultural identity but they are abandoned in acceptance of a new society. The same goes for religion.

• Language is any systematic method of communicating ideas, attitudes, or intent through the use of mutually understood signs, sounds, or gestures.

  • There are about 4000-6000 languages on the planet.

• Half the planet is fluent in 8 of the thousands of languages

• By 2100, there will only be about 600 languages left as kids are not being taught or are not using them in everyday use.

• Family relationships between languages can be recognized through similarities in their vocabulary and grammar.

  • Linguists break apart words and understand the history behind them and the era.

• Half the world speaks the languages found in the Indo-European family.

• Languages may spread through migration in a process called relocation diffusion.

• Hierarchical diffusion of an official or prestigious language within urban centers and centers of power has occurred in many societies.

  • Ex. English being forced in India.

• As a diffusion process, language spread may be impeded by barriers or promoted by their absence. Cultural barriers may retard or prevent language adoption.

• Physical barriers to language spread have also left their mark.

  • In the Hindu Kush mountains, Indo-European languages spread rapidly through the Indus and Ganges river and the lowlands of India but they could never break past the mountains.

• Changes in languages tend to go unnoticed for years.

• Migration, segregation, and isolation give rise to separate, mutually unintelligible languages. Changes occur naturally in word meaning, pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax.

• Many languages have taken words from other languages

  • Spanish, English, and French all have some similar words.

  • Even with the rise of technology people have been bringing in words from all sorts of languages and adapting them to their culture.

• English itself is a product of change and diffusion, an offspring of proto-Germanic.

  • Brought to England in the 5th or 6th century

  • By the 9th century, they had completely adopted standard old English.

  • During the 15th and 16th centuries, English as spoken in London emerged as the basic form of Early Modern English.

  • Now it is an official language in 60 countries with over 1 billion speakers.

• The standard language of a region is based on what was developed in the most populous and economically advanced region of a country.

  • There are exceptions like standard German is based on that used in theatres.

• Speech variants in the same language are called a dialect

  • Mainstream cultures are more likely to use non-standard languages like in social settings.

  • Dialects are also different in different settings. Ex. Professional.

  • Linguistic geography also affects what people use and say.

  • Geographic or regional dialects may be recognized at different scales.

    • British, American, Indian, and Australian English are all acknowledged distinctive dialects of the same evolving language.

    • The States itself has many different dialects.

• In the past 400 years, more than 100 new languages have been created by the global mixing of people and cultures.

  • These are called pidgins

  • If this is the first language someone learns and their other native tongue is lost it’s called a creole.

• A lingua franca is an established language used habitually for communication by people whose native tongues are mutually incomprehensible.

• Governments may designate a single tongue as a country’s official language, the required language of instruction in the schools and universities, government business, the courts, and other official and semi-official public and private activities.

• America has no official language and 21% of the population speaks another language at home.

• Some countries like Canada and Finland are legally bilingual.

5.2 Language, Territoriality, and Cultural Identity

• Language is the defining characteristic of ethnic and cultural identity.

• Schools in Europe are encouraged to teach other languages to build relations with other countries.

• Language also shows the geography and cultures of where it was founded.

  • Ex. Russia has many words for snow and ice, Japan has more than 20 words for rice, Hawaiians have 47 words for banana.

5.3 Language on the Landscape: Toponymy

• Toponymy is the study of place names, a special interest of cultural geography.

• Places like Winchester and Manchester have the suffix chester because it comes from the Latin word castra which means “camp”

• Place names, whatever their language of origin, frequently consist of two parts: generic (classifying) and specific (modifying or particular).

  • Ex. Big River in English is translated into Rio Grande in Spanish, Mississippi in Algonquin, and Ta Ho in Chinese.

• European colonists and their descendants gave new place names to a physical landscape already extensively named by indigenous peoples,

5.4 Religion and Culture

• Religion: it involves practices of formal or informal worship and addresses questions of meaning and ultimate significance.

  • Nonreligious belief and value systems exist like humanism and marxism

  • Religious beliefs may justify social inequalities or work to eliminate them through activism.

  • Some religions make a subtle cultural stamp on the landscape through recognition of particular natural or cultural features as sacred.

    • These sacred places are infused with special religious significance and are sites of reverence, fear, pilgrimage, or worship. Grottos, lakes, single trees or groves, rivers such as the Ganges or Jordan, or special mountains or hills, such as Mount Ararat or Mount Fuji.

• Many different religions have similar belief systems.

• Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are the major universalizing religions, faiths that claim applicability to all humans and proselytize, they seek to transmit their beliefs and convert others

  • Anyone can join regardless of any nationality or previous belief.

• Ethnic religions have strong territorial and cultural group identification. One usually becomes a member of an ethnic religion by birth or by the adoption of a complex lifestyle and cultural identity, not by a simple declaration of faith

• Tribal, or traditional religions, are special forms of ethnic religions distinguished by their small size, their unique identity with localized culture groups not yet fully absorbed into modern society, and their close ties to nature.

5.5 Patterns and Flows

• Ethnic religions, unless their adherents are dispersed, tend to be regionally confined or to expand only slowly and over long periods.

• More than half of the world believes in Christianity, Islam or Buddhism

• Tribal religions are found principally among peoples who have not yet been fully absorbed into modern cultures and economies or who are on the margins of more populous and advanced societies.

5.6 The Principal Religions

• Judaism

  • The belief in a single god laid the foundation for both Christianity and Islam.

  • Emerged 3000-4000 years ago in the Near East.

  • Theirs became a distinctively ethnic religion, the determining factors of which are descended from Israel (the patriarch Jacob), the Torah (law and scripture), and the traditions of the culture and the faith.

  • Two separate branches of Judaism developed in Europe during the Middle Ages.

  • Eastern Europe had many of the Jewish immigrants that came to the United States came during the later 19th and early 20th centuries and so were German-speaking countries due to the holocaust.

  • The holocaust killed ⅓ of the Jewish population

  • The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of the goal of Zionism, the belief in the need to create an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine.

• Christianity

  • Christianity started due to a man named Jesus, a Jewish preacher of the 1st century of the Common Era, the followers thought he was Christ, the saviour promised in the Jewish Scriptures.

    • Spread quickly through the Roman Empire and missionaries took it along the ports and to major cities

    • This was expansion diffusion

  • For the Western Church, Rome was where it spread from through hierarchical diffusion, to provincial capitals and smaller Roman settlements of Europe.

  • From there it spread to pagan rural areas and contagious diffusion spread Christianity throughout the continent.

  • The Eastern Church expanded into the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Near East.

  • The Protestant Reformation of the 15th and 16th centuries split the church in the west, leaving Roman Catholicism supreme in southern Europe but installing a variety of Protestant denominations and national churches in western and northern Europe. The religion also spread as Spain, England, France and Portugal went across the world.

  • Although it still accounts for nearly one-third of the world’s population, its popularity in some regions where it once was strongest has declined

• Religions and Landscapes of Christianity

  • The split between the Western and Eastern Churches was initially unrelated to dogma but the divide in the map can still be seen.

  • In the United States and Canada, the beliefs and practices of various immigrant groups and the innovations of domestic congregations have created a particularly varied spatial pattern.

  • In America, there’s plenty of different identities in Christianity like the Mormons and the Baptist presence.

  • In Canada, the three top Christian groups are Roman Catholic, the United Church of Canada, and Anglican, together comprising 60 percent of the country’s population.

    • The “No Religion” category ranks second with 16 percent

    • Muslims comprise about 2 percent, and Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists are each about 1 percent.

• Islam

  • Islam which means “submission” (to the will of God) comes from the same Judaic roots as Christianity and is similar to monotheistic beliefs. Muhammed is revered as the prophet of Allah.

  • Succeeding and completing the work of earlier prophets of Judaism and Christianity, including Moses, David, and Jesus.

  • The Koran, the holy book of the Muslims, contains not only rules of worship and doctrine, but also instructions on the conduct of human affairs

    • All Muslims are expected to observe the five pillars of the faith: (1) repeated saying of the basic creed; (2) prayers five times daily at appointed times; (3) a month of daytime fasting during Ramadan; (4) almsgiving; and, (5) if possible, a pilgrimage to Mecca.

  • Islam crosses boundaries of race, ethnicity, language, and social status. Muhammed was a resident of Mecca but fled in 622 CE to Medina, where the Prophet proclaimed a constitution and announced the universal mission of the Islamic community

    • Bt 632 all of Arabia joined Islam

    • And spread all over Asia and at the expense of Hinduism into northern India.

  • In Western Europe, 700 years of Muslim rule in much of Spain were ended by Christian reconquest in 1492.

  • By relocation diffusion, Islam was dispersed into Indonesia, southern Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. Muslims now form the majority population in 49 countries.

  • Islam is growing in Europe and North America. It’s second to Christianity but it is growing faster than any religion due to high rates of natural increase.

  • The mosque is a place of worship, community clubhouse, meeting hall, and school.

• Hinduism

  • Hinduism is the world’s oldest major religion, about 4,000 or more years old.

  • Its estimated 800 million Hindus are in India which makes up 80% of the population.

  • Hinduism derives its name from its cradle area in the valley of the Indus River. From that district of present-day Pakistan, it spread by contagious diffusion eastward down the Ganges River and southward throughout the subcontinent and adjacent regions by amalgamating, absorbing, and eventually supplanting earlier native religions and customs.

  • It has spread to all of Southeast Asia

  • Hinduism is growing in Western Europe and North America due to the relocation diffusion of its followers.

  • Hinduism is based on the concepts of reincarnation and passage from one state of existence to another in an unending cycle of birth and death in which all living things are caught.

  • All creatures are ranked, with humans at the top of the ladder. But humans themselves are ranked, and the social caste into which an individual is born is an indication of that person’s spiritual status.

  • The goal is to move the rank, The goal is to move the rank, eventually to end the cycle of reincarnation and to be at eternal peace with the Brahman (universal soul).

  • The caste is a structure of society and the primary aim is to participate in the social and ritual duties with the caste and profession.

    • Traditionally, each craft or profession is the property of a particular caste: Brahmins (scholar-priests), Kshatriyas (warrior-landowners), Vaishyas (businessmen, farmers, herdsmen), Sudras (servants and laborer). Dalits, or untouchables for whom the most menial and distasteful tasks were reserved.

  • Caste rules define who you can socialize with, who is an acceptable marriage partner, where you can live, what you may wear, eat, and drink, and how you can earn your livelihood.

  • The practice of Hinduism is rich with rites and ceremonies, festivals and feasts, processions and ritual gatherings of literally millions of celebrants.

  • Combining elements of Hinduism and Islam, Sikhism developed in the Punjab area of northwestern India in the late 15th-century CE. Sikhism is an ethnic religion with an estimated 24 million adherents

    • They are mostly in Punjab, and many have settled in the United Kingdom and Canada.

• Buddhism

  • The largest and most influential movement within Hinduism has been Buddhism.

  • Founded in the 6th-century BCE in northern India by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha (Enlightened One).

  • The Buddha’s teachings were more a moral philosophy that offered an explanation for evil and human suffering than a formal religion. He viewed the road to enlightenment and salvation to lie in understanding the “four noble truths”

    • Existence involves suffering; suffering is the result of desire; pain ceases when desire is destroyed; the destruction of desire comes through knowledge of correct behavior and correct thoughts.

  • Contagious diffusion spread the belief system throughout India. It was carried elsewhere into Asia by missionaries, monks, and merchants.

  • By the 8th century, its dominance in northern India was broken by conversions to Islam; by the 15th century, it had essentially disappeared from the Indian subcontinent.

  • Buddhism was implanted in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia in the 3rd century BCE

  • Buddhism has suffered greatly in Asian lands that came under communist control: Inner and Outer Mongolia, Tibet, North Korea, China, and parts of Southeast Asia. Communist governments abolished the traditional rights and privileges of the monasteries.

• East Asian Ethnic Religions

  • When Buddhism came to China about 1,500 to 2,000 years ago it was carried to Japan from Korea in the 7th century, it united well-established belief systems.

  • The Far Eastern ethnic religions are syncretisms (combinations of different beliefs and practices).

  • There are no places of worship or clergy in Confucianism, they did believe in heaven.

  • Buddhism also joined and influenced Japanese Shinto, the traditional religion of Japan that developed out of nature and ancestor worship. Shinto—the Way of the Gods—is a set of customs and rituals rather than an ethical or moral system.

• Secularism

  • One cannot assume that all people within a mapped religious region are adherents of the designated faith, or that membership in a religious community means active participation in its belief system

  • Secularism, a weakening of the influence of religion and indifference to or rejection of religious belief, is an increasing part of many modern societies.

  • The population of nonreligious persons is most pronounced in the industrialized nations and those now or formerly under communist regimes.

  • Half the population went to church in 1851 and the number is now around 8%.

  • Some churches in urban areas have been converted to arts facilities, stores, or restaurants, or simply boarded up.

  • Estimates put the world number of the nonreligious at 1.0 billion.