century has made English into the most widely used lingua franca in history, a
trend accelerated by expansion of the Internet and the dissemination of English-
language music, film, and other entertainment media.Linguistic Geography
One of the “pillars” of human culture is a complex language. Human language and
dialects are spatially distributed over theEarth’ssurface, and linguistic geography
is the study of this distribution. Geographers who focus on the locational dynamics
of language may examine many aspects of linguistic diversity. Where are the
boundariesof language families, how do languages migrate across space, and
what is the relationship between language andcultural identityare only a few
of the relevant questions that linguistic geography addresses. Linguisticland-
scapesare constantly changing on multiplescales, a fact that forces linguistic
geographers to approach their subject in a variety of methodological ways, and
from a range of perspectives. Linguistic geography may involve the study of a
local dialect, a national language, the relationship among languages in a given
place, the impact of English as a globallingua franca, or many other characteris-
tics of spoken and written communication.
Languages and dialects typically dominate a given space, orlanguageregion.
The location of such regions is frequently changing and is not always determined
simply by political boundaries. In addition, variations in dialect and usage may
often be associated with a specific space. There are almost 7,000 languages spoken
in the world today, but approximately 500 of these tongues are classified as “near
extinct,” meaning that there are only a few individuals who continue to speak
and/or write the language. Hundreds of languages have died out over the course
of history, but in many cases remnants of such tongues continue to “survive” in
living languages. For example, Latin is often labeled a “dead language,” but in fact
dozens of phrases in English are either directly incorporated from Latin or are
modified forms of the original word. In specialized fields such as law, Latin
phrases such aspro bono, quid pro quo, andhabeas corpusare part of the everyday
vocabulary. Languages move through space by the process ofcultural diffusion,
and the historicalmigrationof ethnic groups may sometimes be traced through lin-
guistic connections. It is believed that successive waves of Celtic, Germanic, and
later Slavic peoples all migrated into Europe from western or central Asia, because
of the linguistic linkages these groups share with other speakers of Indo-European
languages. The migration pattern of peoples like the Zulu in southern Africa may
be identified in a similar fashion, through similarities with other groups using206 Linguistic Geography