Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Guest Field Note
Greenville, North Carolina
Greenville, North Carolina, changed West Fifth
Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in 1999.
Originally, African American leaders wanted all
of Fifth Street renamed—not just part of it—
but residents and business owners on the east-
ern end strongly opposed the proposal. After
driving and walking down the street, I quickly
realized that King Drive marked an area that was
predominantly black with limited commercial
development, whereas East Fifth was mostly
white and more upscale. When I interviewed
members of Greenville's African American com-
munity, they expressed deep frustration over
the marginalization of the civil rights leader. In
the words of one elected offi cial, “The accomplishments of Dr. King were important to all Americans. A whole man deserves
a whole street!” Naming streets for King is a controversial process for many cities, often exposing continued racial tensions
and the potential for toponyms to function as contested social boundaries within places.
Credit: Derek Alderman, East Carolina University
Figure 6.21
Summary
The global mosaic of languages refl ects centuries of divergence, convergence, extinction,
and diffusion. Linguists and linguistic geographers have the interesting work of uncov-
ering, through deep reconstruction, the hearths of the world's language families. Some
languages, such as Basque, defy explanation. Other languages are the foci of countless
studies, many of which come to differing conclusions about their ancient origins.
As certain languages, such as English and Chinese, gain speakers and become
global languages, other languages become extinct. Some languages come to serve as the
lingua franca of a region or place. Governments choose offi cial languages, and through
public schools, educators entrench an offi cial language in a place. Some countries, faced
with the global diffusion of the English language, defend and promote their national
language. Whether requiring signs to be written a certain way or requiring a television
station to broadcast some proportion of programming in the national language, gov-
ernments can preserve language, choose a certain dialect as the standard, or repel the
diffusion of other languages.
Regardless of the place, the people, or the language used, language continues to
defi ne, shape, and maintain culture. How a person thinks about the world is refl ected in
the words used to describe and defi ne it.
Answer to Final Thinking Geographically Question: Los Angeles, California.
Geographic Concepts
language
mutual intelligibility
standard language
dialects
dialect chains
isogloss
language families
subfamilies
sound shift
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