GEOG 1HA3 Lecture 7: The Geography of Language
11 Apr 2018
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Document Summary
65% of canadians speak more than one language. Language: a fundamentally way that we distinguish between cultural groups. Languages is a cultural variable: a learned behaviour. Language is a useful tool to delimit groups and region. As many as 7000 languages existed prior to the period of european colonization. Today, less than 6000 (ie. north america and africa) Negative: loss of culture akin to declining biodiversity. Language family: a group of closely related languages that likely share a common (and ancient) origin. Language branch: a subset of language family, and with a more recent origin (ie. past several thousand years) Romance languages (ie. french, spanish, italian, etc. ) Germanic languages (ie. english, german, dutch, etc. ) European colonization: the spread of into-european language (eg. english and spanish) A single hearth area (eastern europe near the black sea) and then diffusion. Cultural adaptation resulted in many different languages emerging from this one common source. English: mixing together of many other languages.
