Remarks on the Geography of Language

Abstract

ANGUAGE exercises a decisive influence on the composition and distribution of intercommunicating social units-on who talks to whomand thus on the activities in which men are able to participate in groups. Without linguistic communication no organized social undertaking can proceed, and without a single, shared language such an undertaking becomes cumbersome and subject to many potential misunderstandings. There are only a few nations-for example, Belgium, Canada, and Switzerlandwhere leadership is successfully shared by two speech communities or more. I once heard a prominent American geographer ask whether the Latvians spoke Russian or German or perhaps a mixture of both. His unawareness that a Latvian language exists, and that it is affiliated to a well-studied and important branch of Indo-European-the Baltic-is all too typical of a large part of the geographical profession.' The structure and internal characteristics of language are properly the concern of professional linguists, and the function of language in communication is traditionally studied by some of the social scientists. But the distribution of linguistic usages and of social groupings based thereon is another important aspect of language, which is of major consequence for the geographer. Linguistic heterogeneity is one of the most obvious, most absolute, and most fixed of the categories of diversity that apply to human populations. The sharp discontinuities and the relatively uniform blocs that characterize modern linguistic communities strongly influence human behavior, and particularly the association of people and their interaction. Political, social, and economic structures are often closely correlated with linguistic usage, and distributional patterns of these phenomena tend to coincide strikingly with linguistic areal patterns. It is my purpose to set forth here some of the understandings of linguistic geography as pursued by the linguist; to consider the categories and classifi-