Language - Human Geography: People, Place and Culture - page 182

WHY ARE LANGUAGES DISTRIBUTED
THE WAY THEY ARE?
The fi rst step in mapping the distribution of world
languages is to classify languages. Linguists and linguistic
geographers classify languages in terms that are also used
in biology and for the same reasons: like species, some lan-
guages are related and others are not. 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), where the

Linguist Bert Vaux's study of dialects in American English
points to the differences in words for common things such
as soft drinks and sandwiches. Describe a time when you
said something and a speaker of another dialect did not
understand the word you used. Where did the person with
whom you were speaking come from? Was the word a term
for a common thing? Why do you think dialects have differ-
ent words for common things, things found across dialects,
such as soft drinks and sandwiches?

60°

LANGUAGE FAMILIES
OF THE WORLD

40° 40°

ATLANTIC

1 INDO-EUROPEAN

2 AFRO-ASIATIC

OCEAN

Tropic of Cancer

3 NIGER-CONGO

20° 20° 20°

4 SAHARAN

5 SUDANIC

PACIFIC

6 KHOISAN

Equator

0°

7 URALIC

8 ALTAIC

OCEAN

9 SINO-TIBETAN

10 JAPANESE AND KOREAN

20° 20° 20°

Tropic of Capricorn

11 DRAVIDIAN

12 AUSTRO-ASIATIC

13 AUSTRONESIAN

40° 40° 40° 40°

TRANS-NEW GUINEA AND
AUSTRALIAN

14

15 AMERINDIAN

OTHERS

160° 140° 120° 80° 60° 40°

60° 60° 60° 60°

UNPOPULATED AREAS

SOUTHERN
OCEAN

0 1000 2000 3000 Kilometers

0 1000 2000 Miles

Figure 6.8
Language Families of the World. Generalized map of the world distribution of language
families. Adapted with permission from : Hammond, Inc., 1977.