No matter where you are in the world, it’s snack time here on Crash Course Geography,
and everyone’s invited!
If April, one of our consultants, was ordering from a cafe in Ohio in the US, she’d say,
“Hi, could I get a tea and banana muffin, please.”
But if Zohra, our other consultant, orders from a food stall in Kolkata in India, she’d
say,”[भईया एक चाय और एक ठोंगा केला चिप्स देना.”
In both places, they ordered really similar snacks.
In fact, chai and tea are pretty close to the two words most of the rest of the world
uses to talk about this universal drink.
Which is wild when you think about all the ways we name other things, like apples.
As people move around the world, their words and ideas move too.
Like the drink tea originated in China, and where in China different traders encountered
tea has a big influence on what word they took back to their language.
If the traders came by land or from what we know as Portugal, they likely met people speaking
Mandarin and Cantonese who pronounced this character as “cha” which is where today
we get chai.
But other traders learned of it from people speaking Southern Hokkien who pronounced it “te.”
And today, most of the world’s spoken languages still reflect this history.
So learning how words move and what activities prompt that movement can tell us a lot about
how ideas move around the world.
I’m Alizé Carrère, and this is Crash Course Geography.
INTRO
While we can’t explore every cultural trait in the world, language is an important system
of spoken, signed, or written symbols humans use to express themselves.
It’s a major marker of identity that often unites members of the same nation, or people
with similar cultural identity.
And it’s a cultural trait that has enormous power because language helps other cultural
traits move through the spoken, visual, tactile, and musical word.
As people we’re constantly moving, changing, and adapting, and our culture is no exception.
One of the biggest changes in our history -- and the one pretty familiar to us here
on Crash Course! -- happened about 15,000 years ago when some humans began to shift
from hunting and gathering food to cultivating crops in one place.
Agriculture was a major innovation, or cultural change that came from within different cultural
groups -- in fact, several groups independently invented agriculture and with it, a whole
new way of life with new social systems.
But there have been many more innovations before, after, and during the agricultural revolution.
Like cave art or steel beam architecture.
Eventually, populations increased, and there were territorial disputes between hunter gatherers
and agricultural communities.
Which might not seem important for language, but as different groups disputed and negotiated
territory, they had to interact and this was one way cultural traits like language were shared.
Today we can map out particular cultural traits to see where they’re used and maybe get
a sense of their journey over time.
We might have to dig through historical records, anthropological studies, libraries, and museums
too, but visualizing cultural traits spatially like this can maybe even uncover the cultural
hearth, or origin, of a trait.
Which is what happened with language.
Language as a whole can be broken into major language families from which all of the specific
languages we speak branch out, like a tree.
And each family is a group of languages with a common origin, or linguistic hearth.
There are roughly 7,000 spoken and signed languages actively used around the world today,
and it’s difficult to know how many have stopped being used over the centuries.
Language is key to communicating, and languages, phrases, or even individual words have been
borrowed and mangled like we’re playing an uncountable number of games of telephone
all at once.
In geography we call this diffusion, which is a way to understand how ideas and things
move around the world.
So with tea, that original word branches from the Sino-Tibetan family, through the Sinastic
language group.
From there, Mandarin branched out.
Not all Sino-Tibetan languages would have had the word cha at first -- this is one of
the largest language families in the world!
But those who spoke Mandarin and Cantonese did have cha, and when people speaking other
languages learned it, they modified it, and worked it into their language.
And on and on, diffusing through other languages.
Which would be really cool to visualize.
Different cultural traits imprint on the landscape in particular ways that we can see -- and can map!
Which is part of how we can locate different cultural hearths.
In general, languages can be hard to map.
Because people can speak more than one language, and as we mentioned last time, sometimes one
language has more power than others, and it isn’t always easy to know the full extent
of where a language is used.
Like, [Zohra and I are pretty lucky, because] by knowing two languages, we can communicate
in a large number of places around the world.
English, French, and Hindi are all lingua francas -- languages that were adopted in
an area to make communication easier between people who don’t originally speak the same
language, like for trade.
In fact, there are dozens of lingua francas around the world.
And in a place like Sub-Saharan Africa, many people are also multilingual, meaning they
speak more than one language.
People of different ethnicities may share an official language, but also have a language
they speak at home, or mother tongue, and even a local language.
And we haven’t even gotten into dialects or accents!
So the location of ethnic groups, or people who share the same heritage, is one reasonable
way to approximate who uses what language where.
A large continent like Africa is home to about 6 language families that grew and diffused
out of the 4 to 5 major linguistic hearths of Africa.
There are at least 13 subfamilies and then hundreds of local languages that developed from there.
Specifically, we know the region around what we now call Nigeria and Cameroon is home to
the beginnings of what is known as proto-Bantu languages which are languages that were spoken
about 5,000 years ago in this region of Africa.
Language is often shared through a type of relocation diffusion, which is when languages
or ideas move thanks to people uprooting and resettling.
As the people here moved, they took their language and knowledge of agriculture with
them and encountered other groups speaking non-Bantu languages.
They’d modify their own language to incorporate some of those words.
And geographers and linguists use those words and other elements to reconstruct how language
has changed and which languages influenced those changes.
Like a few Bantu-based languages in southwest Africa have click consonants, which we think
mostly come from the influence of Khoisan languages.
For any similar languages we can look at where they’re spoken and their structure to put
together the connections and imagine the places both groups of people were in to influence
each other -- both for ancient and more modern populations.
Though we can also lose languages through diffusion.
As people move, their languages change or are replaced with new languages, and some
languages end up going dormant, or no longer having proficient users.
Often as people move or are occupied by other cultures, there’s pressure to assimilate,
or give up their cultural traits in favor of another set of cultural traits.
There can especially be pressure on immigrants or Indigenous peoples to change their languages.
And after decades of forced assimilation, across North and South America and Australia
and the Pacific Islands, there are now efforts to revitalize dormant Indigenous languages.
Both the Hawaiian and the Myaamia or Miami nations have programs to train preschoolers
and other education programs that immerse students in the Hawaiian or Myaamia language.
Other nations around the world have put in similar efforts.
And online the Endangered Languages Project creates a space for people around the world
to come together to preserve and revive languages and other cultural traits at risk of going dormant.
Cultural identity is deeply personal, and living out all of the traits of that culture,
including language, can help people feel an important connection to their history and community.
At other times, diffusion and the daily mixing of cultures can cause cultural traits to evolve
without one language going dormant.
Like one of the earliest recorded languages considered a lingua franca was born out of utility.
Trade on the Mediterranean was huge in the 1200s, but as people tried to trade their
goods, communication got in their way.
People struggled to identify languages they knew in common, and when they found words
everyone knew, they would use them.
Eventually this created a pidgin, or a simplified language and small vocabulary combining two
or more languages.
Today pidgin is spoken in places with a lot of language mixing, like Nigeria and Hawaii,
and creole languages -- which are leveled-up full-language versions-- are used by people
often in former colonies in places like Haiti, and other islands around the Caribbean.
Similarly, when people don’t have a full language in common, they might rely on having
a similar language origin.
Like we have evidence that Africans who were enslaved and forced to migrate to North and
South America used Bantu-based words they had in common to communicate, even if they
mostly spoke different languages.
And that theory seems plausible because of common words used in North America that seem
to have Bantu roots -- like safari (which in the Bantu language Swahili means travel,
but Bantu speakers may have gotten from Arabic), jazz (which could be from the Bantu word “jaja”
meaning cause to dance), or banjo, which is similar to a Bantu word “mbanza” for an
instrument with strings that are plucked.
But even a few words is enough to transport so much more.
As people move and language diffuses, they naturally carry all the other innovations
a culture has, especially stories, art, and music.
Instruments like the modern banjo have roots in the nations of Africa.
As Africans were enslaved and forced to move, they brought that knowledge with them, and
found ways to make similar instruments and similar sounds to the ones they had in their
homelands.
People across North and South America heard that music, and slowly, the music of the banjo
transferred and spread to those outside of the African cultural groups.
We call this contagion diffusion which is when innovations spread just by exposing others
to a new idea or object.
I actually just learned the banjo has ties to Africa this year, which was really interesting
when we think about how it’s so widely used today in types of music widely associated
with white people, like traditional bluegrass.
For an instrument like the banjo, we can see the ways that instrument in the US has been
culturally appropriated, meaning that other cultures, especially European cultures, adopted
that instrument, and created a culture of using it that erased its African roots.
Cultural change is inevitable.
As we learn and grow, each generation is often taught slightly different cultural traits
because of mixing and diffusion, and as people move around this globe, so do our cultural traits.
Every interaction creates a new space for growth, innovation, and change.
But restoring cultural connections to the past, like dormant languages and historical
connections to current cultural traits are important too.
Those efforts restore cultural ownership, and help those inside and outside of those
communities to recognize the contributions and humanity of our world’s cultures.
Understanding the movement and diffusion of language helps us understand other cultures,
get their jokes, see the world as someone else, and understand how so many other cultural
traits move.
And next time we’ll explore the movements of one other major cultural trait -- religion.
Many maps and borders represent modern geopolitical divisions that have often been decided without
the consultation, permission, or recognition of the land's original inhabitants.
Many geographical place names also don't reflect the Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples languages.
So we at Crash Course want to acknowledge these peoples’ traditional and ongoing relationship
with that land and all the physical and human geographical elements of it.
We encourage you to learn about the history of the place you call home through resources
like native-land.ca and by engaging with your local Indigenous and Aboriginal nations through
the websites and resources they provide.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geography which is filmed at the Team
Sandoval Pierce Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people.
If you want to help keep all Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our
community on Patreon.