An Introduction to Human Geography The Cultural Landscape, 9e James M. Rubenstein. Chapter 5. Language. Victoria Alapo, Instructor Geog 1050. Language & Dialects. Language is a major difference in pattern of communication e.g. English, Yoruba, French, etc. Dialects
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English is the official language in 42 countries, including some in which it is not the most widely
spoken language. It is also used and understood in many others.
Hans Kurath (1949) divided the eastern U.S. into three dialect regions, whose distribution is similar to that of house types (Fig. 4-9).
The main branches of the Indo-European language family include Germanic,
Romance, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian. English is in the West Germanic group
The Romance branch includes three of the world’s 12 most widely spoken languages
(Spanish, French, and Portuguese), as well as a number of smaller languages and dialects.
Indo-European is the largest of four main language families in South Asia. The country of India has 18 official languages.
Distribution of the world’s main language families.
Languages with more than 100 million speakers are named.
The percentage of world population speaking each of the main language families. Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan together represent almost 75% of the world’s people.
Family trees and estimated numbers of speakers for the main world language families.
Chinese language ideograms mostly represent concepts rather than sounds.
The two basic characters at the top can be built into more complex words.
The 1,000 or more languages of Africa are divided among five main language families,
including Austronesian languages in Madagascar.
More than 400 languages are spoken in Nigeria, the largest country in Africa (by population). English, considered neutral, is the official language, see pg 167.
There has been much tension in Belgium between the Flemings, who live in the north and speak Flemish (a Dutch dialect), and the Walloons, who live in the south and speak French.
Switzerland remains peaceful with four official languages and a
decentralized government structure.
Although Canada is bilingual, French speakers are concentrated in the province of Québec, where 80% of the population speaks French.
The large majority of internet hosts in 1999 used English, Chinese,
Japanese, or European languages.
A large proportion of the world’s internet users and hosts are in the developed countries of North
America, Western Europe and Japan. 50% of people online and 75% of websites use English.