Pg 35

Goode's World Atlas

Cultural Geography

Quiz Region: Europe (again; pages 154-155)

Schedule adjustment: The quiz on November 11 will cover general concepts of cultural geography and cultural change, based on the November 4 lecture. (Vocabulary terms will appear below after class.)

The quiz on November 18 will cover concepts of language, based on the November 11 lecture. Terms will appear below.

Required Readings

For the November 11 quiz:

Read the National Geographic article about Hip Hop culture as a case study of cultural geography.

For the November 18 quiz:

The NY Times recently published three relevant articles about language. Read about a language controversy in Turkey, the restrictions of pictographic orthography, and the advantages of using an alphabet.

A useful outline of the eight stages of language death is at the Endangered Languages website. You should know the difference between living, dead, and dying languages. These NPR clips (both the audio and video clips) offer some relevant information as well.

Key Terms & Concepts

For the November 11 quiz: (with apologies to the diligent among you for my delay in updating this page)

Culture - A group's way of life, including the shared system of social meanings, values, and relations that is transmitted between generations

Subsystems of culture:

Technological subsystem
the instruments & tools people use in daily life; evidence called "artifacts"
Sociological subsystem
how the individual functions relative to the group (e.g., family, church, state); evidence called "sociofacts"
Ideological subsystem
ideas, beliefs, & knowledge, as well as the ways we express those things in our speech & communication; evidence called "mentifacts"

Mechanisms for Cultural change:

Innovation (cultural evolution)
change occurs from within a given culture
Diffusion
a new idea spreads away from its place of origin; can occur in several unique geographic patterns (i.e., contiguous, cascade, hierarchical)
Acculturation
one culture adopts the traits of another, more dominant culture
Syncretism
aspects of several cultures combine to form something new
Isolationism
one culture refuses to adopt the traits of another

For the November 18 quiz:

\Why do we study language from a geographic perspective?

  1. Language is the primary tool used to transmit and reflect everything about one's culture. (Listen to this NPR clip about a new word that recently has become a part of the Vietnamese vocabulary.)
  2. Language shows the footprint of the colonial history of a place (for example, why do Brazilians speak Portuguese?)
  3. Language is a central mentifact of one's cultural identity
  4. Language is a key to the development of international trade & other inter-cultural relations
  5. Language can develop into a hot political issue (for example, there is an ongoing debate about what the official language of the United States should be. See also the article about speaking Kurdish in Turkey.)

Useful tools for exploring the geography of language:

  1. Etymology - the study of word origins and history (what are the roots of most of the words in a particular language?)
  2. Linguistics - the study of the structure and grammar of a language (what other languages share similar patterns?)
  3. Orthography - the study of writing systems (alphabetic or pictographic?)
  4. Toponymy - the study of place names (we tend to name places after our cultural heroes, ancestors, ancestral hometowns, etc.)

  • Language — Organized system of speech by which people communicate with each other with mutual comprehension

  • Language family — Group of languages thought to have a common origin in a single, earlier tongue (e.g., English is a modern variant within the Indo-European family)

  • Standard language — accepted community norms of syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation (i.e., the "rules" that you learn in grammar class)

  • Official language — language in which official records are kept & government business is conducted (including tax forms, license records, schooling, etc.)

  • Dialect — ordinary speech of some subdivision of a population (may be defined by profession, social status, or geographical region)

  • Native language — the language that an infant learns to speak from birth. No one language is any "easier" for children to learn; in fact, the brain is hardwired so infants can effortlessly learn multiple languages from the earliest stages of life. When a child is raised to in a multilingual family, speech development may be (but not necessarily) delayed by a few months at most.

  • Lingua franca — language used for communication between people with different native tongues. English and French are commonly used for this purpose in global settings (e.g., United Nations business).

  • Pidgin — a syncretic language that arises to facilitate communication between speakers of more than one native tongue; a pidgin is nobody's native tongue; it emerges in specific circumstances and does not persist after those circumstances end.

  • Creole — a syncretic language that develops when the conditions that led to the emergence of a pidgin persist over the long term; a creole has complex grammatical rules (which are probably not the same as the rules of any single standard language)

Additional Information

Follow this link to National Geographic's World Music site. (This site was created several years ago, so many of its links are no longer functional - but it still has some great content if this is a topic that interests you.)

Here is a great map-generation tool from the Modern Language Association. You can view language data for the entire country, or for any state, broken down to the county level. You can also compare any two maps side by side.

Here is the link to the fun survey questions about dialect. (This is the one with all the cool pronunciation and vocabulary differences.)

National Geographic has recently begun sponsorship of a new program to document and record dying languages before they are lost forever. There are some fascinating compilations of sound clips and dictionaries at the Living Tongues website (especially in the Projects Index link).

If language is a topic that you find interesting, you might enjoy surfing through the PBS Do You Speak American site. It's a great general site with tons of good information about standard English and dialects, the English-only debate, and other related topics.