Cultural Geography Language 1

CULTURAL
GEOGRAPHY:
LANGUAGE
Krezz Ann R. Esguerra
Jenny Roselyn C. Lucila
BSED-III SOCIAL STUDIES
Objectives:
 Compare the differences between race and ethnicity.
 Describe where other language families are distributed.
 Analyze why people preserve local languages and why
languages around the planet are disappearing.
 Trace where religions originated and diffused around the
world.
 Determine why territorial conflicts arise among religious
groups.
A.What is Language, and What
role do languages play in
cultures?
Language
- The French government has worked
diligently, even aggressively, to protect the
French language, dating back to 1635 and
the creation of the Académie Française,
an institution charged with standardizing
and protecting the French language.
-In addition to demonstrating the conflicting
forces of globalized language and local or
national language, the example of France
reveals that language is much more than a
way of communicating.
- A language is a set of sounds and
symbols that is used for communication.
But language is also an integral part of
culture, reflecting and shaping it.
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
• Language is one of the cornerstones of culture; it shapes our very
thoughts.
• Language reflects where a culture has been, what a culture values,
even how people in a culture think, describe, and experience events.
• The easiest way to understand the role of language in culture is to
examine people who have experienced the loss of language under
pressure from others.
• Shared language makes people in a culture visible to each other and
to the rest of the world.
• Language helps to bind a cultural identity.
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
• Language helps to bind a cultural identity.
• Language can reveal much about the way people and cultures view.
• Language is so closely tied to culture that people use language as a
weapon in cultural conflict and political strife.
LANGUAGE
• Many geography textbooks differentiate languages based on
a criterion of mutual intelligibility. Mutual intelligibility means
that two people can understand each other when speaking.
• Linguists have rejected the criterion of mutual intelligibility as
strongly as geographers have rejected environmental
determinism. First, mutual intelligibility is almost impossible to
measure. weight of political and social institutions that lie
behind it. A further complication with the mutual intelligibility
test is revealed in Scandinavia.
Standardized Language
• Language is dynamic: new discoveries, technologies, and
ideas require new words. Technologically advanced societies
are likely to have a standard language, one that is published,
widely distributed, and purposefully taught.
• Example, In China, the government chose the Northern
Mandarin Chinese heard in and around the capital, Beijing as
the official standard language.
DIALECTS
• Language is dynamic: new discoveries, technologies, and ideas
require new words. Technologically advanced societies are likely to
have a standard language, one that is published, widely distributed,
and purposefully taught.
• Linguists think about dialects in terms of dialect chains, distributed
across space.
• Language is an umbrella for collection of dialects.
• A single word or group of words can reveal the source area of the
dialect.
• Linguistic geographers map the extent of particular words, marking
their limits as isoglosses.
• An isogloss is a geographic boundary within which a particular
linguistic feature occurs, such a boundary is rarely a simple line.
• Linguistic who study dialects examine the pronounciation,
vocabularies, use of colloquial phrases and syntax to determine iso-
gloss.
WHY ARE LANGUAGES DISTRIBUTED
THE WAY THEY ARE?
• At the global scale, we classify languages into language
families. Within a single language family, the languages have
a shared but fairly distant origin. We break language families
into sub-families (divisions within a language family).
• Subfamilies consist of individual languages, whose spatial
extent is smaller, and every individual language has its
dialects, whose territorial extent is smaller still.
DEFINITION AND DEBATE
Language families and subfamilies seem to be a logical way to
classify languages, the classification of languages is subject to
intense debate. Defining a language family is a daunting
challenge: some linguists argue that there are not just a few, but
many dozens of language families.
DEFINITION AND DEBATE
Language Formation
• In the process of classifying languages, linguists and
linguistic geographers study relationships among
languages, looking for similarities and differences
within and among languages.
• A sound shift is a slight change in a word across

languages within a subfamily or through a language
family from the present backward toward its origin.
Language Formation
A. Reconstructing the Vocabulary of Proto Indo European
and Its ancient ancestor
• Backward reconstruction- technique used by

linguistic to track sound shift and hardening of
consonant “backward” toward the original language.
• Deep reconstruction-it is possible to deduce a large
part of the vocabulary of an extinct language, it may
be possible to recreate the language that preceded it
Language Formation
B. Locating the Heart of Proto-Indo-European
• August Schliecher- a german, who was the first
compare the worlds language families to the branches
of tree.
• He suggest language divergence which occurs when
spatial interaction among speakers of a language
breaks down and the language fragments first into
dialects and then into discrete tongues.
• Language convergence – can take place, collapsing
two language into one.
Tracking the divergence, convergence, extinction, and locations of the languages derived from Proto-Indo-
European, linguiststheorize that the hearth of the Proto-
Indo-European language was somewhere in the vicinity of the Black Sea or east-central Europe. From this hearth, Proto-
Indo-European speakers dispersed, vocabularies grew, and linguistic divergence occurred, spurring new languages.
Language Formation
C. Tracing the Routes of Diffusion of Proto-Indo
European
• Conquest theory- holds that early speakers of Proto-
Indo European Language spread from east to west on
the horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and
beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-
European Languages.

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CULTURAL

• A sound shift is a slight change in a word across

• Backward reconstruction- technique used by

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