Language & Communications - AP Human Geography

Africa, home to over a thousand languages, has the most languages out of any continent. Many Africans speak two or more languages.

The lingua franca is the language of trade, used for merchants to communicate with others who do not speak their native language. In modern times, the lingua franca is English. English is taught in schools worldwide, and while it is not the most widely spoken language, it has become the language of trade worldwide.

Someone who is “bilingual” can speak two languages. For example, it is common for American children born to Latin-American immigrants to speak Spanish and English with equal fluency. They are said to be “bilingual.” Although someone who is bilingual may possess dual citizenship and may be born to parents of different ethnicities, this is not the definition of the word.

All of these languages are part of the Sino-Tibet family of languages except Russian, which is a variety of Old Slavic, which is part of the Indo-European language family. The Sino-Tibet language family is concentrated in east and southeast Asia. If it helps you remember “Sino” means concerned with or related to China.

Welsh, Irish, and Gaelic are considered part of the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages. Welsh is spoken by a minority of people in Wales, where the majority language is English. Welsh is fundamentally different in structure and sound than English. Both English and Welsh are, however, both part of the Indo-European language family so the difference is not nearly as great as the difference between, for instance, English and Thai.

Swahili is the most widely spoken language in the Niger-Congo language family, if the total number of speakers, rather than total number of native speakers is used as the primary determinant. It is spoken in Tanzania, Kenya, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and several other east African countries. It is the Lingua Franca of southeastern Africa.

A “creole” language is a language that has arisen from an earlier pidgin language and become the primary language for a specific cultural group. Creole languages are distinct from pidgin languages in that they are less fluid, more widely understood, and more defined linguistic features and boundaries. Class and cultural oppression may be factors in the development of a creole language, but they are not central factors to the definition of such languages.

All of these languages are part of the Latin branch of the Indo-European languages except Czech which is part of the Balto-Slavic language family along with Polish, Russian, and Bulgarian.

Mandarin, even though not spoken by all of the Chinese population, is nonetheless the most widely spoken language in the world. It has roughly a billion native speakers, far more than the roughly three-hundred and seventy-five million native speakers of English.

Indo-European, the language family that includes all European languages (which are widely spoken in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australasia) and Indian and Iranian, is spoken by slightly over fifty percent of the world’s population. The next largest is Sino-Tibet which is spoken by close to a quarter of the world’s population.

The most linguistically diverse regions, with the notable exception of a few nations in Oceania, are found in Africa and Asia. More specifically they are generally found in Sub-Saharan Central Africa and South and Southeast Asia. It is worth noting that in recent years the rate of linguistic diversity is declining even in these regions, as languages like English, French, Hindi, and Chinese extend their influence and wipe out local languages.

The word “Nostratic” is used to describe a hypothesized proto-macrolanguage family that was spoken by people somewhere in Asia roughly fifteen thousand years ago. According to the theory, all Indo-European, Dravidian, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, and Kartvelian languages derive from this one macrolanguage. The theory is widely contested by many geographers, but is extremely influential in the field of linguistic geography.

Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world. It is a reasonably small country, in relative land size and population size, but has over eight hundred spoken languages and several dead languages that are not spoken but are still understood. Papua New Guinea’s unique linguistic makeup is primarily a by-product of social customs that limit interactions between various tribal groups, as well as the geographic isolation of many regions of the country.

Persian is part of the Iranian language branch of the Indo-European language family. Yiddish, a High German language, and Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, are the only other languages on this list that are part of the Indo-European language family. Hebrew is a Semitic language, part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, and Tibetan is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family.

Africa, Asia, and Oceania are the three most linguistically diverse continents in the world. The least linguistically diverse is South America where Spanish is spoken throughout the continent, with the notable exception of Brazil where Portuguese is spoken. Linguistic diversity is a by-product of a region's historical trends. South America, once home to thousands of indigenous languages, was conquered by the Spanish and Portuguese in the era of European colonialism and those languages have grown in influence and homogeneity in the centuries since.

German is actually a High German language. Dutch is the only language on this list that is considered Low German. English is related to the Low German language (but has since been reclassified as Anglo-Frisian). French and Romanian are both Latin or “Romance” languages. Swedish is a Norse language. All of these languages are necessity part of the larger language family known as the Indo-European family.

The Hellenic language branch is a part of the Indo-European language family. Greek is the only major language in the world that falls under the category of Hellenic. The name “Hellenic” comes from the Greek word for their own country "Hellas."

A “dialect” is a regional variety of a language. Although it often manifests itself in different accents, this is not the only way this can occur. Although people in southern England and the west coast of the United States speak the same language, they also have phrases and words that the other would not use: different expressions, different mannerisms, and, yes, different accents. This is true throughout the English-speaking world (think about the difference between Australian, Canadian, American, and English ways of speaking). And it is also true for every other widespread or international language. People develop new ways of thinking and new phrases when placed in relative geographic isolation. In England, where the homogenizing impact of modern technology has had less relative time to affect change, dialects can change dramatically every hundred miles.

The Polish linguist L.L. Zamenhof is most famous for his attempts to create a universal second language, called “Esperanto.” In his attempts to accomplish this, Zamenhof incorporated linguistic features from a wide variety of languages. He envisioned the language as something with which people all over the world, regardless of native language, could use to communicate with one another. So far, it has not been adopted in the manner Zamenhof intended, but the idea remains interesting and influential.

The United States has no official language. The reason for this has its roots in notions of American liberty and the national and ethnic composition of the United States at the time of independence - although English was the most commonly spoken language, the people of the early United States were from all over Europe and spoke a wide variety of languages. It was deemed a violation of individual liberty to prescribe an official language in such a setting and this has persisted to this day.