Human Geography Emergency Remote Learning Resources Culture Unit Part 2 (Language)

Hello Geography family; here are the resources to answer the key questions for the language part of the culture unit.

"Where Are Languages Distributed?" Ethnologue estimates that the world has an estimated 7,102 languages...11 of which are spoken by at least 100 million people each (including English with the others being German, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Japanese, Lahnda, and Mandarin).

In Canada more than 200 languages were reported in the 2011 Canadian Census of Population as a home language or mother tongue. Quite obviously English and French are the most widely spoken languages however Cantonese, Mandarin, Hindi-Punjabi, Arabic, Spanish are also widely spoken. According to the 2011 Census, almost 213,500 people reported an Aboriginal mother tongue and nearly 213,400 people reported speaking an Aboriginal language most often or regularly at home (Language families include Algonquian, Inuit, Athapaskan, Salish, Tsimshian, Wakashan, Kutenai, Haida and Michif). You'll need to look at language families from pages 146-149 of the Cultural Landscape book in order to fill in the chart.





"Why Is English Related to Other Languages"? English is part of the Indo-European language family. A language family is a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history. Indo-European is divided into eight branches. Four of the branches—Indo-Iranian, Romance, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic—are spoken by large numbers of people while the four less extensively used Indo-European language branches are Albanian, Armenian, Greek, and Celtic. English is part of the West Germanic group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.





And to help you with language diffusion for Indo-European languages (remember the question about the nomadic warrior and sedentary farmer hypotheses?)



"Why Do Individual Languages Vary Among Places"? To help with this, look at dialect and accent. A dialect is a regional variation of a language distinguished by distinctive vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation. Generally, speakers of one dialect can understand speakers of another dialect. Due to its widespread diffusion around the world, English has an especially large number of dialects and subdialects. So look at English and the accents that developed here in Canada, in the United States and see how they are different from UK English. Also look at when dialects become languages...like Catalán...Is There a Place in America Where People Speak Without Accents?







For key question "Why Do People Preserve Local Languages?" look at multilingual states and linguistic diversity in Switzerland, Belgium, Nigeria and here in Canada. Try to examine Celtic languages like Welsh, Irish, Breton, Scottish, and Cornish to see how they are being preserved along with Francophone Cajun in Louisiana and Aboriginal languages (in Both Australia and Canada) and Maori (in New Zealand). Finally, look at English as a lingua franca. From the article The many languages missing from the internet...

There are nearly 7,000 languages and dialects in the world, yet only 7% are reflected in published online material, according to Whose knowledge?, a campaign that aims to make visible the knowledge of marginalised communities online. While Facebook supports up to 111 languages, making it the most multilingual online platform, a survey published by Unesco in 2008 found that 98% of the internet’s web pages are published in just 12 languages, and more than half of them are in English. 

Please take a moment to read The alphabets at risk of extinction. and examine pidgin, Fringlish, Spanglish and Denglish.







From Lera Boroditsky in Scientific American:

A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Research into how the languages we speak shape the way we think is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and construct reality and how we got to be as smart and sophisticated as we are. And this insight, in turn, helps us understand the very essence of what makes us human. 

From A silenced tongue: the last Nuchatlaht speaker dies

Without a geographic and population base to cling to, minority languages seldom tread water for more than a generation or two before going under. Chances are, if your grandparents came to B.C. speaking something other than English, you can’t speak their mother tongue...The question has to be asked: Why fight the tide? The answer: Language is key to retaining culture...That’s not just important to those within the culture, but to all of us. “What the survival of threatened languages means, perhaps, is the endurance of dozens, hundreds, thousands of subtly different notions of truth,” argued Canadian author Mark Abley in his book Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages. Lose a language and you lose the nuanced perspectives it contains, the ones that offer a different view of the world.

And from Wade Davis

“Language is not merely a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. It is a flash of the human spirit, the means by which the soul of each particular culture reaches into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the …mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.”