CONCLUSION

Language, then, is an essential part of culture that can be studied using the five themes of cultural geography. Language is firmly enmeshed in the cultural whole. Its families, dialects, vocabulary, pronunciation, and toponyms display distinct spatial variations that are shown on maps of linguistic culture regions. Languages are mobile entities, ebbing and flowing across geographical areas. Relocation and expansion diffusion, both hierarchical and contagious, are apparent in the movement of language. They are also shaped and reshaped with the changing needs of their users.

The globalization of language, through the expansion of ancient empires as well as today’s interlinked global exchanges, underscores the fact that human interactions are primarily language based. The progression of languages used from one, to many, and back again to a few—perhaps even to one—shows that the number of languages in existence is variable. The trend toward the dominance of a few “big” languages may afford opportunities to communicate on a global scale, but it also may signal the demise of much of the cultural richness across the Earth. Efforts to preserve and teach dying languages draw on the same cultural innovations that in other ways act to threaten the most vulnerable of tongues.

Language and physical environment interact in a nature-culture dynamic, with the physical environment helping to shape linguistic elements, such as vocabulary, and language shaping our use and perception of the environment. Finally, we can see language in the landscapes created by literate societies. The public signs, generic toponyms, and the sponsorship of the wealthy together create a linguistic landscape that can be read using one’s “geographic eyes.” Dominance of one group over another is often expressed in the latter’s exclusion from the linguistic cultural landscape.

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DOING GEOGRAPHY

Toponyms and Roots of Place

As you recall from this chapter, toponyms can give us important clues about the historical, social, political, and physical geography of a place. One example of this is the prevalence of indigenous place-names throughout the Americas, from Canada to Chile. You may say a place-name on a daily basis without being aware of its roots in an indigenous language. According to Charles Cutler, European settlers simply appropriated many of the Native American words for plants, animals, foods, and places with little or no modification in their pronunciation. These words are known as loanwords. For example, Milwaukee comes from an Algonquin word meaning “good spot or place,” and Chicago, also Algonquin in origin, probably means “garlic field.” The commonly used derogatory place-name Podunk is also indigenous in origin, from the Natick word for “swampy place.” In fact, the names of more than half of the states in the United States are of Native American origin.

For this exercise, you will explore toponyms in more detail.

Steps to Exploring Toponyms

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Match each of the terms on the left with its definition on the right. Click on the term first and then click on the matching definition. As you match them correctly they will move to the bottom of the activity.

Question

You can learn more about linguistic geography on the Internet at the following web sites:

Anderson, Greg, and David Harrison. 2007. “Language Hotspots.” Model developed at the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices/.

Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Bird, Steven. 2013. “Cyberlinguistics: Recording the World’s Vanishing Voices.” Phys.org. 12 March. http://phys.org/news/2013-03-cyberlinguistics-world-voices.html.

Cutler, Charles. 1994. O Brave New Words! Native American Loanwords in Current English. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Didion, Joan. 1987. Miami. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Dingemanse, Mark. “Bantu Expansion.” Wikipedia Commons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bantu_expansion.png.

Ford, Clark. “Early World History: Indo-Europeans to the Middle Ages.” http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cfford/342worldhistoryearly.html.

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Herman, R. D. K. 1999. “The Aloha State: Place Names and the Anti-Conquest ofHawaii.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89: 76-102.

Hill, Robert T. 1986. “Descriptive Topographic Terms of Spanish America.” National Geographic 7: 292-297.

Latrimer Clarke Corporation Pty Ltd. http://www.altapedia.com.

Pereltsvaig, Aysa. 2012. “Re-mapping the Languages of the Caucasus.” GeoCurrents, 1 June. http://geocurrents.info/place/russia-ukraine-and-caucasus/caucasus-series/re-mapping-languages-of-the-caucasus.

Pountain, Chris. 2005. “Varieties of Spanish.” Queen Mary School of Modern Languages. http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/cjpountain/varspanindex.htm.

Roberts, Sam. 2010. Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages. The New York Times, 28 April. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html?pagewanted=all.

Romaine, Suzanne. 2007. “Preserving Endangered Languages.” Language and Linguistics Compass, 1 (1-2): 115-132.

Sappenfield, Mark. 2006. “Tear up the Maps: India’s Cities Shed Colonial Names.” Christian Science Monitor, 7 September. http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0907/p01s02-wosc.html.

Stavans, Ilan. 2003. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. New York: Rayo.

U.S. English. http://www.us-english.org/view/13.

(For additional suggested readings, see the Contemporary Human Geography LaunchPad: http://www.macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/DomoshCHG1e.)

Abley, Mark. 2005. Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages. New York: Mariner Books. A fascinating journey across the global map of dwindling languages, exploring their diversity, their speakers, and their vulnerability to eclipse by the ever-more-dominant major tongues, especially English.

Comrie, Bernard, Stephen Matthews, and Maria Polinsky. 2003. The Atlas of Languages: The Origin and Development of Languages throughout the World. New York: Checkmark Books. Utilizes maps and illustrations to depict the origin and spread of the world’s 7000-plus languages.

Deutscher, Guy. 2010. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. New York: Metropolitan Books-Henry Holt. The author makes a convincing case that one’s native tongue substantively shapes a speaker’s experience of the world, in ways that are profoundly different from the experiences of speakers of other languages.

Kenneally, Christine. 2007. The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. New York: Penguin. Do languages really “evolve,” increasing in a linear fashion from the first grunts of cavemen millennia ago to today’s cacophony of 7000 different tongues? Kenneally traces both the science of language evolution and the history of its study.

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MacNeil, Robert, and William Cran. 2005. Do You Speak American? New York: Mariner Books. Spoken English in the United States displays a wealth of regional dialects, urban and rural differences, and historical as well as contemporary ties to languages spoken in other countries. The authors traveled the country documenting this fascinating language mosaic. A three-volume DVD of the same title is also available.

Ostler, Nicholas. 2005. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. New York: HarperCollins. This fascinating book explores the spread and evolution of languages through conquest, with many maps accompanying the text.

Pinker, Steven. 2007. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: Harper Perennial. Ever notice how linguistically inventive the average toddler is? This best seller looks at many angles of language development in humans, from its origins, to its social functions, to the instinct humans share to learn, understand, and speak language.

Rose-Redwood, Reuben, and Derek Alderman (eds.). 2011. Special Thematic Interventions Section: New Directions in Political Toponymy. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 10(1): 1-41. http://www.acme-journal.org/volume10-1.html. A collection of the latest geographic scholarship on political place-names.

Stewart, George R. 2008. Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. Originally written during World War II as a tribute to the diversity of American culture, Stewart’s exploration of the history of American place-names is as informative today as it ever was.

Wolfram, Walt, and Ben Ward. 2006. American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. A lively account of the rich linguistic topography of the United States.

World Englishes. Published by the International Association for World Englishes, the journal documents the fragmentation of English into separate languages around the world. Edited by Margie Berns and Daniel R. Davis.