Languages, Geography of

Language (in contrast to speech) may be understood in several ways: (a) as a means of organizing thought, (b) as a way of communicating for producing and sharing meaning, and (c) as a vehicle for bringing the world into consciousness. Thus, language is simultaneously a psychological, social, and cultural phenomenon. In many countries (e.g., Belgium, Canada), languages have deep political significance. Because languages are unevenly distributed across space, they are also inherently geographic as well.

Because languages are semantically and historically related to one another, it is common to group them into families of varying sizes. Linguists and cultural geographers typically maintain that there are roughly eight major language families as well as several others termed isolates.

By far the largest and most widespread of the major language families is the Indo-European, a group first identified by linguist William Jones during the 18th century. Starting with the migrations of the so-called Aryans circa 1500–2000 BC, perhaps as a result of their domestication of the horse, Indo-Europeans moved in two directions from their home-land near the Caucuses Mountains. One group moved east into northern India, becoming the basis of the Sanskrit-based Indic languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Urdu, Gujarati, Bihari, Marathi, and Nepali. Others remained in the Middle East, where they eventually became the Iranic family, including Farsi (formerly Persian), Kurdish, Armenian, and (in Afghanistan) Pashto. The other major branch of Indo-Europeans moved into Europe, where they diverged into several groups. These include the Latin-based Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, Romansch, and Romanian) that arose during the disintegration of the Roman Empire. Greek and Albanian form separate categories in their own right. Farther north, the Germanic languages include German, Dutch, the Scandinavian tongues, and English. Celtic, an early branch once widespread throughout Western Europe, today consists of Scottish and Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton in western France, and extinct tongues such as Cornish; this branch is in danger of disappearing. In Eastern Europe and Russia, the Slavic branch includes Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. The Baltic group of Lithuanian and Latvian is another.

With the expansion of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British colonialism, Indo-European languages were carried throughout much of the world, becoming dominant throughout the New World, Australia, and New Zealand (Figure 1). Today roughly half of the world speaks an Indo-European tongue of one sort or another. English in particular, riding the heels of the British and American empires, has become the lingua franca spoken by more people than any other tongue (when second-language speakers are included). English is unquestionably the world's dominant language in commerce, trade, scholarly publications, airlines, international finance, and tourism.

A second major language family is Afro-Asiatic, which extends across the Middle East and North Africa (Figure 2). This group includes most of the extinct or nearly extinct languages of the ancient Middle East such as Canaanite, Phoenician, Assyrian, and Aramaic (of which pockets survive). The dominant branch of Afro-Asiatic is Semitic, which includes Arabic (with numerous dialects) and Hebrew, which was a nearly extinct language before it was revived by Zionists at the end of the 19th century. Other branches include Berber, widespread in the Mahgreb, and Kushitic, the dominant family of Ethiopia (i.e., Amharic) and Somalia.

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