Diffusion of Language (College Board AP® Human Geography): Revision Note

Language families

• Language is a crucial component of the cultural landscape, and language contributes to group identity

  • Loss or extinction of a language can negatively impact group identity and cohesion

  • Language extinction occurs when a language is no longer spoken by anyone as their first language

• A language family refers to a group of languages that share a common ancestor language

• The Indo-European language family includes languages spoken as first languages by nearly half of the world’s population and is the largest language family

  • German, English, French, Spanish, and Hindi are included in the Indo-European language family

  • English is a Germanic language within the Indo-European language family

  • Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are all Romance languages within the Indo-European language family

Dialects

• Dialects are regional variations of a common language, which include some different vocabulary and pronunciations

  • Specific dialects can be found in both the Southern and Northeastern United States

  • British English and American English are two dialects of English

Isogloss

• An Isogloss is a boundary that separates regional language variations

  • For example, an isogloss line in Germany separates northern and southern German dialects

Cultural hearths

• A cultural hearth is the place where a cultural trait first develops before it diffuses outward

• Language families, languages, dialects, and world religions all diffuse from cultural hearths

• Ethnic cultures and gender roles also diffuse from hearths:

  • Ethnic cultures, including food, music, clothing, and customs, spread as members of a group migrate and form communities elsewhere, for example Chinatowns in cities such as San Francisco and Vancouver

  • Gender roles are the social expectations of how men and women should behave. They are often carried by religion and ethnic culture, so they diffuse along the same migration, trade, and conquest routes

Diffusion of language families

• The origin of language families can be traced back to their hearths

• Diffusion of language has occurred through travel, trade, migration, and conquest. For example:

  • The Roman Empire spread Latin across much of Europe

  • Arabic was distributed across North Africa through conquest and East Africa through trade

  • Spanish, French, and English diffused to the Americas through colonization

Representing language and religious diffusion

• The diffusion and distribution of language families and religions can be shown in several ways:

  • Maps, such as a world map shading each language family, or a map showing the spread of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula

  • Charts, such as a language family tree showing English and German branching from the Germanic branch of Indo-European, or a pie chart of the world’s population by religion

  • Toponyms (place names), which record the language and religion of the people who named a place. Spanish place names such as Los Angeles and Santa Fe in the southwestern US show earlier Spanish colonization and the diffusion of Christianity