Language Geography Research Articles

Global language geography and language history: challenges and opportunities

As the several thousand languages spoken by people all around the world became more and more systematically assessed and catalogued in the 20th century, it became clear that linguistic diversity is unevently distributed across the globe. Up to the present day, the reasons for that are poorly understood. Linguists are thus in the embarassing situation that they do not understand significant regularities in the way the objects of their study –languages– pattern; human sciences at large are faced with the fact that the way humans produce that key cultural product which is often seen as defining the essence of what makes them humans –language–remains in the dark. In this essay, I explore three interrelated strands of thought associated with the problem of explaining patterns in global language diversity to create a perspective that is different from those explored so far. First, I suggest that instead of looking at present-day levels of diversity and find parameters of variation between the regions in which they are spoken, we should take a process-based approach that looks into how these distributions were generated. Related to this point and in contradistinction to extant work, second, I advocate an inductive approach that departs from qualitative case studies which inform theory-building. Third, I ponder that, in contrast to the traditional focus of historical linguistics on language diversification and expansion, understanding how the ranges of languages are reduced might be the key missing piece of evidence in a global theory of language diversity and its genesis.

The significance of foreign language Geography teaching in the dual language secondary school programmes of the Northern Great Plain region

Dual language education has been present in numerous institutions across the Northern Great Plain region of Hungary. Educational centres across the region have been running dual language programmes in secondary grammar schools and vocational schools for decades. As regional centre and traditional educational hub, Debrecen is also represented by a number of schools offering international programmes. Although recent socioeconomic and education policy changes have forced schools for constant renewal, bilingualism in educational programmes managed to remain popular, partly due to the achievements of foreign language subject teaching. Through the alignment of subject-specific content and the development of language competence, this form of education effectively contributes to the improvement of students’ language skills, shapes their mindset and expands their further education and increases their market value as potential workforce. This study will explore the role and impact of foreign language Geography teaching across the secondary schools of the Northern Great Plain region through the lens of teaching and educational research, by discussing some of the relevant regional findings of a broader PhD dissertation (including school visits, final exam results and a recent nationwide teacher survey). Research findings prove that Geography has been a popular subject choice to be taught in foreign languages: it has been present in the majority of the 15 dual language secondary schools of the region, it has been playing an important role in vocational school programmes and it has been chosen as final exam subject by nearly 1,000 candidates.

Speaking Racism – Raciolinguistic Frontiers, Worth and Belonging in the Governing of Refugees in Norway

ABSTRACT This article explores the role that language requirements for residence and citizenship play in delineations of worth and belonging in the governing of refugees in Western Europe after 2015. In the past two decades residence and citizenship rights for migrants have increasingly become conditional on formalised language requirements. While language requirements embed promises of inclusion and opportunity, this framing skirts the ways in which they legitimate and reproduce racially charged inequalities. Based on rich ethnographic data from Norway, this article investigates how refugees encounter, perceive, and contest language requirements. By mobilising Kamran Khan’s notion of ‘raciolinguistic borders’ alongside Ann Laura Stoler’s notion of ‘interior frontiers’, I explore how language requirements are heard to ‘speak racism’. I argue that a political geography of language provides a timely and needed contribution to the geopolitical toolbox, and more specifically, to geographical explorations of the racial taxonomies of contemporary European border regimes.

German Theoryals Geographie im Konjunktiv, oder: „Was nie geschrieben wurde, lesen“

Abstract. „German Theory“ is a theory that has not yet been written, but could have been. „Theory“ is here understood as a “territory of thought” that transcends the boundaries of its origins, and travels to other sites. „French Theory“, for example, is the label for the travel of French poststructuralism to Anglophone humanities. In this sense, „German Theory“ does not exist (yet), but as this paper will argue, it exists as a potentiality that has not (yet) actualized. To show this potential, this paper turns to the work of Friedrich A. Kittler. To illustrate why Kittler did not become a cornerstone of „German Theory“, and to discuss how it could have been, this paper proceeds in two steps: first, it traces the recent history of the reception of Foucault in German language geography and the humanities. This analysis shows that Kittler and German language geography morphed Foucault's discourse theory into two distinct thought styles – the „discourse school“ in German language geography into a „textual“ one; Kittler into a „materialist“ one. This incompatibility of thought styles, this paper asserts, obstructed the travel of Kittler to Anglophone geography, although Kittler's notion of „materiality of communication“ resonates with the „material turn“ in Anglophone geography. Nor did the Foucault of the „discourse school“ travel to Anglophone geography. Kittler's „German Foucault“ travelled to Anglophone media studies as „German School“, though. In the last part of the paper, I ask the question how Kittler's „German Foucault“ could have travelled to (anglophone) geography and what could have been gained theoretically through this travel.

Geolocation of multiple sociolinguistic markers in Buenos Aires.

Analysis of language geography is increasingly being used for studying spatial patterns of social dynamics. This trend is fueled by social media platforms such as Twitter which provide access to large amounts of natural language data combined with geolocation and user metadata enabling reconstruction of detailed spatial patterns of language use. Most studies are performed on large spatial scales associated with countries and regions, where language dynamics are often dominated by the effects of geographic and administrative borders. Extending to smaller, urban scales, however, allows visualization of spatial patterns of language use determined by social dynamics within the city, providing valuable information for a range of social topics from demographic studies to urban planning. So far, few studies have been made in this domain, due, in part, to the challenges in developing algorithms that accurately classify linguistic features. Here we extend urban-scale geographical analysis of language use beyond lexical meaning to include other sociolinguistic markers that identify language style, dialect and social groups. Some features, which have not been explored with social-media data on the urban scale, can be used to target a range of social phenomena. Our study focuses on Twitter use in Buenos Aires and our approach classifies tweets based on contrasting sets of tokens manually selected to target precise linguistic features. We perform statistical analyses of eleven categories of language use to quantify the presence of spatial patterns and the extent to which they are socially driven. We then perform the first comparative analysis assessing how the patterns and strength of social drivers vary with category. Finally, we derive plausible explanations for the patterns by comparing them with independently generated maps of geosocial context. Identifying these connections is a key aspect of the social-dynamics analysis which has so far received insufficient attention.

„Geografe, nüme schlafe!“: Radikale Geographie in Zürich (1980–1990)

Abstract. In early summer 1980, radical geography students rallied around the slogan „Geografe nüme schlafe!“ („Geographers, stop sleeping!“) to take part in the radical youth movement that shook the city of Zurich at that time. In turn, these activist students brought these struggles back into the university and the geography department, where they confronted the professorate with their demands for a new curriculum. This paper argues that the antagonistic Stimmung, in which these struggles took place, produced a radical „thought style“ that flourished in a specific constellation of „thought events“: a prominent theory seminar in 1980, the AK WissKri, a network of radical geography students, the „Geoscope“ journal and, finally, a number of diploma theses on feminist, urban and historical geography. In these thought events, a radical geography materialized outside and beyond the mainstream of German language geography. Building on archival material and narrative interviews, this paper documents these student initiatives for a radical geography, and illustrates the precarious conditions of possibility of radical geography, in Zurich, and beyond.

The relationship of language and spatial identity in historical geography research: a review of (multi)disciplinary approaches

Language use and spatial identity research are topics of interest in linguistics, geography, anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Accordingly, there are numerous related terms that originated in one discipline but are also used in other disciplines, making them multi-disciplinary. Research on terminology in the field of language use has shown great diversity (linguistic geography, areal or spatial linguistics, linguistic geography, the geography of language, geolinguistics). The paper analyzes and defines the aforementioned concepts, their connection with individual disciplines, and discusses individual terminological shortcomings. The aim of this paper is to review the field of research regarding the use of language and spatial identity in a broader sense, and especially the position of and approaches to research within historical geography. The paper analyzes a sample of 124 articles (published mainly in Croatian and English) according to author(s), research objective, methodology, and period of publication. Based on this, three characteristic periods during which research developed and changed have been distinguished.

지역언어학적 관점으로 보는 현대중국어 방언과 소수 민족 언어의 언어 지리 유형과 언어접촉 - 연구개 비음을 중심으로

The aim of this study is to provide an areal typology of Chinese (including minority languages) by producing the world atlas of language structures and to explore language contact and language geography types. This study also discusses the sprachbund in China based on describing the areal distribution of a velar nasal features of different Chinese dialects and minority languages. In this study, there are three objectives: (1) To organize velar nasal features and to produce the world atlas of language structures of Chinese languages. (2) To analyze areal typology of Chinese (including minority languages) based on the geographical distribution of /ŋ/; (3) To discuss about the language contact and sprachbund of Chinese languages in view of areal typology focused on consonant features. Finally, this study shows that the feature of velar nasal /ŋ/ is distributed along the belt connected to Northern and Eastern Siberia, the East Coast of China and Southeast Asia. Also we refer to a view of the origin of the languages of the Pacific Northeast Asian and language family by Katsumi Matsumoto(2006).

Névföldrajzi kutatások – egy családnév földrajzi és történelmi háttere

Language geography studies the spatiality of language. The examination of the Hungarian (geographic) place and personal names, tribe names as well as the family names, looks back about one and a half centuries. However, today’s name geography has only emerged through digital databases and computer-aided cartography. Geographers, however, have generally not been very concerned with the spatial nature of linguistic phenomena. The following is an attempt to address this gap in the scholarship by focusing on the example of the Gabor family name and its name variants in geographic and historical contexts. Amongst Hungarian family names which have been inherited from the 15th and 16th centuries, Gabor is very common, and the oldest use of which was derived from the father’s personal name. Such is the surname of Gabor, whose spatial distribution and temporal changes are presented in the study, with special attention to historical and political influences. The research was based on three databases: the first census of the country after it was completely liberated from Ottoman rule for the purpose of recording the taxpayer (1720); the Internet database of the First World War Loss List (RadixIndex), and data from Hungarian, Slovak, and Austrian web telephone books (no data from Romania and Serbia).

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ МЕКСИКАНСЬКИХ НАЦІОНАЛЬНИХ ГАСТРОНОМІЧНИХ СИМВОЛІВ

This article studies national gastronomic symbols of Mexicans and their special value in cultural and language world pictures in order to conduct etymologic, linguo-cultural and conceptual analysis of meanings of lexical and phraseological units. The object of the research is Mexican national gastronomic symbols as the target of reflection of gastronomic picture of the world of Mexicans. The article grounds on the role of national gastronomic symbols and the variability of their reflections in the language, emphasizes that the language of symbols is the universal language of culture, which expresses its specific features. The author uses the descriptive method of research with the elements of comparable and dialectical analysis for the complex study of the Mexican national gastronomic symbols and for determination their semantic and culturological peculiarities. The material for the analysis is selected by means of continuous selection method. The author pays special attention to semantics of gastronomic symbols, their cultural connotations and means of verbalization. The results of the research can be used in language geography courses, in the research of the problems connected with national and cultural features of the Mexican variant of the Spanish language, as well as in the study of cross-cultural communication. National gastronomic symbols are characterized by the biggest quantity of associations in language consciousness of Mexicans and wide range of senses.

The Twitter of Babel: Mapping World Languages through Microblogging Platforms

Large scale analysis and statistics of socio-technical systems that just a few short years ago would have required the use of consistent economic and human resources can nowadays be conveniently performed by mining the enormous amount of digital data produced by human activities. Although a characterization of several aspects of our societies is emerging from the data revolution, a number of questions concerning the reliability and the biases inherent to the big data “proxies” of social life are still open. Here, we survey worldwide linguistic indicators and trends through the analysis of a large-scale dataset of microblogging posts. We show that available data allow for the study of language geography at scales ranging from country-level aggregation to specific city neighborhoods. The high resolution and coverage of the data allows us to investigate different indicators such as the linguistic homogeneity of different countries, the touristic seasonal patterns within countries and the geographical distribution of different languages in multilingual regions. This work highlights the potential of geolocalized studies of open data sources to improve current analysis and develop indicators for major social phenomena in specific communities.

Multilayered regionalization in Northern Europe

The broadening and deepening of Europe as a macro-region impels processes of expansion, contraction and transformation in sub-regions positioned within the EU and across the EU’s border. Recent arguments stress the idea of regionalization as a multi-layered process. Using Northern Europe as a study site, three such layers are explored: territorially bounded regionalization in the voting patterns of the Eurovision Song Contest, networked regionalization in the membership of intergovernmental organizations, and fluid regionalization in the geography of language. The associated regionalization processes are explained and visualized using mixed methodologies. Across these three layers of regionalization we can see the persistence of a Scandinavian core, but various territorial, networked and fluid forms of regionalization are stretching and pulling at the edges of Nordic regionalizations.

Pripombe k konceptu geografije jezika

Jezik je brez dvoma eden najpomembnejših družbenih pojavov, ki ima s prostorom vrsto povezav. Medtem ko so v frankofonskih, anglofonskih in hispanskih deželah razvili neke oblike geografije jezika ali geolingvistike kot posebne geografske poddiscipline, so geografi v nemško govorečih državah temu posvetili nekaj pozornosti edino v okviru etnične geografije. Prispevek osvetljuje nekaj pomembnih prostorskih aspektov jezika in postavlja geografijo jezika kot subdisciplino kulturne geografije, ki tesno sodeluje z jezikoslovjem in zgodovino.

On the Uses of Yiddish Language Geography

There are a number of Yiddish linguistic atlases in existence, the most comprehensive of which is the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry ( LCAAJ ) now being published in its entirety. Often thought to be useful to linguists alone, these language-atlas materials on the contrary are a rich source of invaluable information useful to historians, sociologists, folklorists, and other scholars of Jewish history and culture. Examples discussed come from LCAAJ data on the eating habits and food taboos among the Jews of pre-World War II Eastern Europe—the preparation of gefilte fish and farfl —and Yiddish dialect variation in Eastern Europe. Yiddish dialect geography is a valuable resource for all scholars of Jewish history and culture and not linguists alone.

The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations

1. Introduction John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan 2. The Devaluation of Place in Social Science John A. Agnew 3. Place, Region and Modernity J. Nicholas Entrikin 4. Modernism, post-modernism and the struggle for place David Ley 5. Home and Class Among an American Landed Elite Peter J. Hugill 6. Social and Symbolic Places in Renaissance Venice and Florence Edward Muir & Ronald F. E . Weissman 7. Power and Place in the Venetian Territories Denis Cosgrove 8. Place, Meaning and Discourse in French Language Geography Vincent Berdoulay 9. Place and Culture: Two Disciplines, Two Concepts, Two Images of Christ and a Single Goal Miles Richardson 10. The Language and Significance of Place in Latin America David Robinson 11. The Power of Place in Kandy, Sri Lanka: 1780-1980 James S. Duncan 12. Beijing and the Power of Place in Modern China Marwyn S. Samuels & Carmencita Samuels.

A Geography of Language: Gaelic-Speaking in Perthshire, 1698-1879

To be anything more than a narrative of distributional shifts, the geographical study of languages and their change over space and time should investigate the social processes underlying language usage as well as the spatial extent of language areas. Studies of the changing geography of the Celtic languages within Great Britain have provided much insight into the nature and patterns of language shift over space and time and the social processes acting to change the extent of languages. The paper focusses upon the Gaelic language in the Scottish county of Perthshire for the period 1698 to 1879 and examines in detail the relationships between the spatial decline of the Gaelic-speaking area and the social processes of language change. Through analysis of several sources, the retreat of Gaelic Perthshire in that period is examined by parish and within particular parishes. The social and spatial decline of Gaelic is seen to be the result of educational policy, lack of Gaelic-speaking clergy and other related factors and was apparent in the varying use of Gaelic or English for particular social purposes by certain sections of the population. It is argued in conclusion that a 'geography of language' should seek to explain spatial patterns of language in terms of social usage and the changing patterns of usage over time, and should not concentrate upon one to the exclusion of the other.

Summary of Investigations Relating to the English Language Arts in Secondary Education: 1970

et al (1970) summarized investigations relating to reading. Marckwardt (1970) edited an NSSE yearbook on linguistics in school programs. Individual chapters of this volume summarize research on such topics as language acquisition and development in early childhood, language development in the school years, geography of language, structure of language, and so on. NCTE/ERIC produced reports containing summaries of experimental studies of interest to secondary English teachers on inservice education (Denby 1970 a), literary analysis (Denby 1970 b), references for curriculum planning (Harvey and Denby 1970; Kirkton 1970), poetry (Harvey 1970), and bilingual education (Malkoc and Roberts 1970). Also writing for NCTE/ERIC, O'Donnell (1970) reported priority

Chapter II: The Geography of Language

Chapter II: The Geography of Language

Remarks on the Geography of Language

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-

The Geography of Language

The Geography of Language