Language - Human Geography: People, Place and Culture - page 184

Indo-European language, its speakers encircling the
world with more than 300 million in North America, 70
million in Britain and Ireland, 25 million in Australia and
New Zealand, and tens of millions more in South Africa,
India, and elsewhere in the postcolonial world. Hundreds
of millions of people speak versions of English as a sec-
ond or third language. Our map cannot refl ect this, but
the Indo-European family has actually diffused even more
than Figure 6.8 suggests.
Sometimes you will see Chinese listed as the
language with more speakers than any other, but herein
lies still another complication. Although Figure 6.8
shows China and neighboring areas to be the heart-
land of the Sino-Tibetan language family, “Mandarin”
Chinese, called Putonghua in China, is in common use
by less than half of China's population of 1.34 billion.
A detailed language map of China reveals more than
1400 dialects, most of them mutually incomprehensible.
What unites the “People of Han” is not their ability to
understand each other's spoken word, but their abil-
ity to read the characters in which Chinese is written.
When you watch television in China, you will see news
reports and other programs subtitled by Chinese char-
acters, so that even if the local news anchor speaks in
a dialect, the viewer can read and understand what is
being said. But this does not mean that a billion Chinese
speak Mandarin.
At the other end of the scale, the world map of
languages shows several language families spoken by
dwindling, often marginally located or isolated groups.
The Indo-European languages of European coloniz-
ers surround the language families of Southeast Asia.
Languages in the Austro-Asiatic language family sur-
vive in the interior of eastern India and in Cambodia
and Laos. Languages in the Austronesian family are
numerous and quite diverse, and many of the individual
languages are spoken by fewer than 10 million people.
Remoteness helps account for the remaining languages in
the Amerindian language family. These languages remain
strongest in areas of Middle America, the high Andes,
and northern Canada.
If we look carefully at the map of world language
families, some interesting questions arise. Consider, for
example, the island of Madagascar off the East African
coast. The primary languages people in Madagascar
speak belong not to an African language family but to the
Austronesian family, the languages of Southeast Asia and
the Pacifi c Islands. Why is a language from this family
spoken on an island so close to Africa? Anthropologists
have found evidence of seafarers from the islands of
Southeast Asia crossing the Indian Ocean to Madagascar.
At the time, Africans had not sailed across the strait to
Madagascar, so no African languages diffused to the
island, preserving the Southeast Asian settlements and
language for centuries. Later, Africans began to come to

Madagascar, but by that time the language and culture of
Southeast Asia had been well established.

Language Formation
In the process of classifying languages, linguists and
linguistic geographers study relationships among lan-
guages, looking for similarities and differences within
and among languages. One way to fi nd and chart simi-
larities among languages is to examine particular words,
looking for sound shifts over time and across 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. For example, Italian,
Spanish, and French are all members of the Romance lan-
guage subfamily of the Indo-European language family.
One way linguists and linguistic geographers can deter-
mine this is by looking at sound shifts for single words
across time (all three languages are derived from Latin)
and across languages. For example, the Latin word for
milk, lacte , became latta in Italian, leche in Spanish, and
lait in French. Also, the Latin for the number eight, oto ,
became otto , ocho , and huit , respectively. Even if linguists
did not already know that Italian, Spanish, and French
are languages rooted in Latin, they could deduce a con-
nection among the languages through the sound shifts of
particular words.
More than two centuries ago William Jones, an
Englishman living in South Asia, undertook a study of
Sanskrit, the language in which ancient Indian religious
and literary texts were written. Jones discovered that
the vocabulary and grammatical forms of Sanskrit bore
a striking resemblance to the ancient Greek and Latin
he learned while in college. “No philologer [student
of words] could examine all three,” Jones wrote, “with-
out believing them to have sprung from some common
source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” His idea was a
revolutionary notion in the 1700s.
During the nineteenth century Jakob Grimm, a
scholar and a writer of fairy tales, suggested that sound
shifts might prove the relationships between languages in
a scientifi c manner. He explained that related languages
have similar, but not identical, consonants. He believed
these consonants would change over time in a predictable
way. Hard consonants, such as the v and t in the German
word vater , softened into vader (Dutch) and father
(English). Using Grimm's theory that consonants became
softer as time passed and sounds shifted, linguists realized
that consonants would become harder as they went “back-
wards” toward the original hearth and original language.
From Jones's notions and Grimm's ideas came the
fi rst major linguistic hypothesis, proposing the existence
of an ancestral Indo-European language called Proto-
Indo-European . Discovery of a Proto-Indo-European