Linguistic Geography

One of the “pillars” of human culture is a complex language. Human language and dialects are spatially distributed over the Earth’s surface, and linguistic geography is the study of this distribution. Geographers who focus on the locational dynamics of language may examine many aspects of linguistic diversity. Where are the boundaries of language families, how do languages migrate across space, and what is the relationship between language and cultural identity are only a few of the relevant questions that linguistic geography addresses. Linguistic landscapes are constantly changing on multiple scales, a fact that forces linguistic geographers to approach their subject in a variety of methodological ways, and from a range of perspectives. Linguistic geography may involve the study of a local dialect, a national language, the relationship among languages in a given place, the impact of English as a global lingua franca, or many other characteristics of spoken and written communication.

Languages and dialects typically dominate a given space, or language region. The location of such regions is frequently changing and is not always determined simply by political boundaries. In addition, variations in dialect and usage may often be associated with a specific space. There are almost 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, but approximately 500 of these tongues are classified as “near extinct,” meaning that there are only a few individuals who continue to speak and/or write the language. Hundreds of languages have died out over the course of history, but in many cases remnants of such tongues continue to “survive” in living languages. For example, Latin is often labeled a “dead language,” but in fact dozens of phrases in English are either directly incorporated from Latin or are modified forms of the original word. In specialized fields such as law, Latin phrases such as pro bono, quid pro quo, and habeas corpus are part of the everyday vocabulary. Languages move through space by the process of cultural diffusion, and the historical migration of ethnic groups may sometimes be traced through linguistic connections. It is believed that successive waves of Celtic, Germanic, and later Slavic peoples all migrated into Europe from western or central Asia, because of the linguistic linkages these groups share with other speakers of Indo-European languages. The migration pattern of peoples like the Zulu in southern Africa may be identified in a similar fashion, through similarities with other groups using Bantu tongues. Thus linguistic geography articulates both contemporary language patterns and those of the past in many instances.