Linguistic Ecology

Environment and Vocabulary

Humankind’s relationship to the land played a strong role in the emergence of linguistic differences, even at the level of vocabulary. For example, the Spanish language—which originated in Castile, Spain, a dry and relatively barren land rimmed by hills and high mountains—is especially rich in words describing rough terrain, allowing speakers of this tongue to distinguish even subtle differences in the shape and configuration of mountains, as Table 4.3 reveals. Similarly, Scottish Gaelic possesses a rich vocabulary to describe types of topography; this terrain-focused vocabulary is an attribute of all of the Celtic languages spoken by hill peoples. In the Romanian tongue, also born of a rugged landscape, words relating to mountainous features emphasize use of that terrain for livestock herding. English, by contrast, which developed in the temperate wet coastal plains of northern Europe, is relatively deficient in words describing mountainous terrain (Figure 4.9). However, English abounds with words describing flowing streams and wetlands: typical physical features found in northern Europe. This vocabulary transferred well to the temperate East Coast of the United States. In the rural American South alone, one finds river, creek, branch, fork, prong, run, bayou, and slough. This vocabulary indicates that the area is a well-watered land with a dense network of streams.

Figure 4.9: A scene in the desert of the western United States. “Mountains,” yes, but what kind of mountains? (See Table 4.3.) The English language cannot describe such a place adequately because it is the product of a very different physical landscape, humid and cool. As a result, the ability of English speakers to name dryland environmental features will be less precise in such places.

(David Muench/Corbis.)

Thinking Geographically

Question

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Clearly, then, language serves an adaptive strategy. Vocabularies are highly developed for those features of the environment that involve livelihood. Without such detailed vocabularies, it would be difficult to communicate sophisticated information relevant to the community’s livelihood, which in most places is closely bound to the physical landscape.

The Environment Helps Shape Language Areas and Guide Migration

Environmental barriers and natural routes have often guided linguistic groups onto certain paths. The wide distribution of the Austronesian language group, as we have seen, was profoundly affected by prevailing winds and water currents in the Pacific and Indian oceans. The Himalayas and the barren Deccan Plateau deflected migrating Indo-Europeans entering the Indian subcontinent into the rich Ganges-Indus river plain. Even today in parts of India, according to Charles Bennett, the Indo-European/Dravidian “language boundary seems to approximate an ecological boundary” between the black soils of the plains and the thinner, reddish Deccan soils.

Because such physical barriers as mountain ridges can discourage groups from migrating from one area to another, they often serve as linguistic borders as well. In parts of the Alps, speakers of German and Italian live on opposite sides of a major mountain ridge. Portions of the mountain rim along the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East form the border between Semitic and Indo-European tongues. Linguistic borders that follow such physical features generally tend to be stable, and they often endure for thousands of years. By contrast, language borders that cross plains and major routes of communication are often unstable.

The Environment Provides Refuge

The environment also influences language insofar as inhospitable areas provide protection and isolation. Such areas often provide minority linguistic groups refuge from aggressive neighbors and are accordingly known as linguistic refuge areas. Rugged hilly and mountainous areas, excessively cold or dry climates, dense forests, remote islands, and extensive marshes and swamps can all offer protection to minority language groups. For one thing, unpleasant environments rarely attract conquerors. Also, mountains tend to isolate the inhabitants of one valley from those in adjacent ones, discouraging contact that might lead to linguistic diffusion.

Examples of these linguistic refuge areas are numerous. The rugged Caucasus Mountains and nearby ranges in central Eurasia are populated by a large variety of peoples and languages (Figure 4.10). In the Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico, an archaic form of Spanish survives, largely as a result of isolation that ended only in the early 1900s. Similarly, the Alps, the Himalayas, and the highlands of Mexico form fine-grained linguistic mosaics, thanks to the mountains that provide both isolation and protection for multitudinous languages. The Dhofar, a mountain tribe in Oman, preserves Hamitic speech, a language family otherwise vanished from all of Asia. Bitterly cold tundra climates of the far north have sheltered Uralic and Inuktitut speakers, and a desert has shielded Khoisan speakers from Bantu invaders. In short, rugged, hostile, or isolated environments protect linguistic groups that might otherwise be eclipsed by more dominant languages.

Figure 4.10: The environment is a linguistic refuge in the Caucasus Mountains. The rugged mountainous region between the Black and Caspian seas—including parts of Armenia, Russia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan—is peopled by a great variety of linguistic groups, representing three major language families. Mountain areas are often linguistic mosaics because the rough terrain provides refuge and isolation. For more information about this fascinating and diverse region, see Wixman, 1980.

Thinking Geographically

Question

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Still, environmental isolation is no longer the vital linguistic force it once was. Fewer and fewer places are so isolated that they remain little touched by outside influences. Today, inhospitable lands may offer linguistic refuge, but it is no longer certain that they will in the future. Even an island in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean does not offer reliable refuge in an age of airplanes, satellite communications, and global tourism. Similarly, marshes and forests provide refuge only if they are not drained and cleared by those who wish to use the land more intensively. The nearly 10,000 Gullah-speaking descendants of African slaves have long nurtured their distinctive African-influenced culture and language, in part because they reside on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and North Florida. Today, the development of these islands for tourism and housing for wealthy nonlocals threatens the survival of the Gullah culture and language, as has the out-migration of Gullah youth in search of better economic opportunities. The reality of the world is no longer isolation, but rather contact.