Glossary - Human Geography: People, Place and Culture - page 500

productive region, the area with greatest centrality and accessibility ,
probably containing the capital city as well.
Creole language A language that began as a pidgin language but was
later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the mother
tongue.
Critical geopolitics Process by which geopoliticians deconstruct and
focus on explaining the underlying spatial assumptions and territorial
perspectives of politicians.
Crude Birth Rate (CBR) The number of live births yearly per thou-
sand people in a population.
Crude Death Rate (CDR) The number of deaths yearly per thou-
sand people in a population.
Cultural appropriation The process by which cultures adopt customs
and knowledge from other cultures and use them for their own benefi t.
Cultural barrier Prevailing cultural attitude rendering certain inno-
vations, ideas or practices unacceptable or unadoptable in that particular
culture .
Cultural complex A related set of cultural traits , such as prevailing
dress codes and cooking and eating utensils.
Cultural diffusion The expansion and adoption of a cultural element,
from its place of origin to a wider area.
Cultural ecology The multiple interactions and relationships be-
tween a culture and the natural environment.
Cultural hearth Heartland, source area, innovation center; place of
origin of a major culture .
Cultural landscape The visible imprint of of human activity and culture
on the landscape. The layers of buildings, forms, and artifacts sequentially
imprinted on the landscape by the activities of various human occupants.
Cultural trait A single element of normal practice in a culture , such
as the wearing of a turban.
Culture The sum total of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual be-
havior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society. This
is anthropologist Ralph Linton's defi nition; hundreds of others exist.
Custom Practice routinely followed by a group of people.
Cyclic movement Movement—for example, nomadic migration—
that has a closed route and is repeated annually or seasonally.
Deep reconstruction Technique using the vocabulary of an extinct
language to re-create the language that proceeded the extinct language.
Defi nition In political geography, the written legal description (in a
treatylike document) of a boundary between two countries or territories.
See also delimitation .
Deforestation The clearing and destruction of forests to harvest
wood for consumption, clear land for agricultural uses, and make way for
expanding settlement frontiers.
Deglomeration The process of industrial deconcentration in re-
sponse to technological advances and/or increasing costs due to conges-
tion and competition.
Deindustrialization Process by which companies move industrial
jobs to other regions with cheaper labor, leaving the newly deindustrial-
ized region to switch to a service economy and to work through a period
of high unemployment.
Delimitation In political geography, the translation of the written
terms of a boundary treaty (the defi nition ) into an offi cial cartographic
representation.
Demarcation In political geography, the actual placing of a political
boundary on the landscape by means of barriers, fences, walls, or other
markers.
Democracy Government based on the principle that the people are the
ultimate sovereign and have the fi nal say over what happens within the state.

Demographic transition Multistage model, based on Western
Europe's experience, of changes in population growth exhibited by
countries undergoing industrialization. High birth rates and death rates
are followed by plunging death rates, producing a huge net population
gain; this is followed by the convergence of birth rates and death rates at
a low overall level.
Dependency theory A structuralist theory that offers a critique of the
modernization model of development. Based on the idea that certain
types of political and economic relations (especially colonialism ) be-
tween countries and regions of the world have created arrangements that
both control and limit the extent to which regions can develop.
Deportation The act of a government sending a migrant out of its
country and back to the migrant's home country.
Desertifi cation The encroachment of desert conditions on moister
zones along the desert margins, where plant cover and soils are threat-
ened by desiccation—through overuse, in part by humans and their do-
mestic animals, and, possibly, in part because of inexorable shifts in the
Earth's environmental zones.
Deterritorialization the movement of economic, social and cultural
processes out of the hands of states.
Developing With respect to a country, making progress in technol-
ogy, production, and socioeconomic welfare.
Devolution The process whereby regions within a state demand and
gain political strength and growing autonomy at the expense of the cen-
tral government.
Dialect Local or regional characteristics of a language . While accent
refers to the pronunciation differences of a standard language, a dialect,
in addition to pronunciation variation, has distinctive grammar and vo-
cabulary.
Dialect chains A set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects near-
est to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related.
Diaspora From the Greek “to disperse,” a term describing forceful
or voluntary dispersal of a people from their homeland to a new place.
Originally denoting the dispersal of Jews, it is increasingly applied to
other population dispersals, such as the involuntary relocation of Black
peoples during the slave trade or Chinese peoples outside of Mainland
China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Diffusion The spatial spreading or dissemination of a culture element
(such as a technological innovation) or some other phenomenon (e.g., a
disease outbreak). See also contagious, expansion, hierarchical, relo-
cation , and stimulus diffusion .
Diffusion routes The spatial trajectory through which cultural traits
or other phenomena spread.
Digital divide the gap in access to telecommunications between de-
veloped and developing regions.
Disamenity sector The very poorest parts of cities that in extreme
cases are not even connected to regular city services and are controlled
by gangs or drug lords.
Dispersal hypothesis Hypothesis which holds that the Indo-
European languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were fi rst
carried eastward into Southwest Asia, next around the Caspian Sea, and
then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and on into the Balkans.
Distance Measurement of the physical space between two places.
Distance decay The effects of distance on interaction, generally the
greater the distance the less interaction.
Dollarization When a poorer country ties the value of its currency to
that of a wealthier country, or when it abandons its currency and adopts
the wealthier country's currency as its own.
Dot map Maps where one dot represents a certain number of a phe-
nomenon, such as a population.