Jennifer Gay
Period 2
De Blij Chapter 6 – Language
Language is a fundamental element of local and culture.
Language has increased cultural diversity and spread it throughout the world. has made it difficult prevent the use of foreign culture. The French government has been trying to protect the French language by creating the Académie .
A is a set of sounds and symbols that is used for communication. It shapes our thoughts and helps us represent everything we experience. Language reflects where a culture has been, what a culture values, and even how people in a culture think, describe, and experience things.
During , both away and within countries, colonizers commonly forced the colonized people to speak the language of the colonizer. These policies were enforced by governments and schools. American, Canadian, Australian, Russian, and New Zealand governments each had policies of forced during the 20 th
century.
Differentiation of Languages
Many geography textbooks differentiate languages based on mutual .
Mutual intelligibility means that two people can understand each other when speaking. For example, Spanish and Portuguese are very similar and could be recognized as separate but are mutually intelligible. However, it is impossible to measure and if was used as criteria to establish different languages, many would fail. Many linguistic geographer today recognize between and languages.
Technologically advance societies will most likely have a language that is published widely distributed, and purposefully taught. The government sustains the standard

Jennifer Gay language through official state examinations for teachers and civil servants. Today, many
Period 2 countries that have a standard language are more .
Variations of a standard language along regional or ethnic lines are called .
They can be determined by differences in vocabulary, (the way that words are put together to form phrases), pronunciation, cadence (the rhythm of speech), and even the pace.
Linguistics think about dialects in terms of dialect , distributed across space. This explains that dialects that are closest to each other geographically will be the most similar, but as you travel across the space, the dialects become less understandable to each other because less interaction occurs. An is a geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs, but such a boundary is rarely a simple line.
Distribution of Languages
At the global scale, we classify languages into language . Within each family, the languages have a shared, but somewhat distant origin. We can then break language families into - , where commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent. Within the Indo-European language family, is the most widely spoken language. The primary languages people in Madagascar speak belong not to an African-language family, but to the family.

Jennifer Gay
Period 2
Formation of Languages
One way linguists can find similarities among languages is examining slight changes in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin, called a . For example, the Latin work for milk, lacte, became latta in Italian, leche in Spanish, and lait in French.
The first linguistic hypothesis, proposed the existence of an ancestral Indo-European language called - - . Linguistics use a technique called backward to track sound shifts and hardening of consonants “backward” toward the original language. If it is possible to discover vocabulary of an language, a language without any native speakers, you could re-create the language through deep reconstruction. These extinct languages can be represented by branches on a language tree. Two Russian scholars also established key characteristics of the Proto-Indo-European language’s ancestor, the language.
In the mid-nineteenth century, it was suggested that new languages form through language , which occurs when spatial interaction amoung speakers of a language breaks down and the language fragments first into dialects and then into discrete tongues. This process happened between Spanish and Portuguese. If people with different languages have consistent spatial interaction, language can take place, collapsing two languages into one.

Jennifer Gay
Period 2
Locating the Hearth
British scholar Colin Renfrew developed his own theory regarding the diffusion of Proto-
Indo-European and agriculture called the . It claims that from Anatolia (present day Turkey, nearby the Fertile Crescent diffused Europe’s Indo-European languages from the western arc of the Crescent came the languages of North Africa and Arabia and from the Fertile Crescent’s eastern arc ancient languages spread into present-day
Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. The theory provides the explanation that early speakers of Proto-Indo-European spread from east to west on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues.
However, some linguistic geographers continue to favor the hypotheses, which states that the Indo-European languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were first carried eastward into Southwest Asia, around the Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and on into the Balkans.
Languages of Europe
The Indo-European language family is widely spread across the globe and is broken up into such as Romance, Germanic, and Slavic. The Romance languages
(French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese) lie in the areas that were once controlled

Jennifer Gay
Period 2 by the Roman Empire and the Germanic languages ( , German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) reflect the expansion of peoples out of northern Europe to the west and south.
Also, the languages (Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Serbo-
Croatian, and Bulgarian) developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in present-day
Ukraine close to 2000 years ago.
The Spread of Languages
The invention of the Gutenberg helped to spread literacy and raised contact between and among languages. A is a language used among speakers of different languages for the purposes of trade and commerce. It can be one language or mixture of or more different ones. When people speaking two or more languages are in contact and they combine parts of their languages in a simplified structure and vocabulary, we call it a language. A widely used lingua franca today is Swahili, of
East Africa. Swahili developed through trade and interaction from a mixture of and
Arabic. A language is a pidgin language that has developed a more complex structure and vocabulary and has become the native language of a group of people.
Language within a State
Only a few states, countries in which only one language is spoken, exist. They include Japan, Uruguay, Venezuela, Iceland, Denmark, Portugal, Poland, and
Lesotho. Countries in which more than on language is in use are called states.
This happened in Africa and Asia when colonizers threw together people who spoke different languages.

Jennifer Gay
Period 2
Countries with many languages often adopt an language to tie the people together. This often promotes communication and interaction among peoples who speak different local and regional languages. In former colonies, the official language is usually the ’s language that is used among the elite. has begun to arise as a global language used in international business and travel.
Toponyms
The names of places, also known as , are a part of the cultural landscape and give us an idea of history. They change when power is given or when countries become independent. People can also choose to change a toponym to memorialize an important person or event.