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Language Connections

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A small branch on a big tree

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YOU MUST DO THE LEG WORK;

First; go through the notes. You need to know both set of notes in and out.

Second; read through the articles.  Remember, in AP HUG the devil is in the details.

Third; write notes on the reading.  You aren't going to remember what was said in three days.

You want this A.  Get it.  I know you can do it.

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Language and Identity a powerful thing.

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When reviewing the influences of the following notable geographers, focus on the patterns and connections of the evolution of the key geographic concepts, models, and innovations.

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How does language fit our identity?

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Pidgeon and Creole

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Throughout the course of geographic history, exploration and trade have caused various populations of people to come into contact with each other. Because these people were of different cultures and thus spoke different languages, communication was often difficult. Over the decades though, languages changed to reflect such interactions and groups sometimes developed lingua francas and pidgins.

A lingua franca is a language used by different populations to communicate when they do not share a common language.

Generally, a lingua franca is a third language that is distinct from the native language of both parties involved in the communication. Sometimes as the language becomes more widespread, the native populations of an area will speak the lingua franca to each other as well.

A pidgin is a simplified version of one language that combines the vocabulary of a number of different languages. Pidgins are often just used between members of different cultures to communicate for things like trade. A pidgin is distinct from a lingua franca in that members of the same populations rarely use it to talk to one another. It is also important to note that because pidgins develop out of sporadic contact between people and is a simplification of different languages, pidgins generally have no native speakers.

The Lingua Franca

The term lingua franca was first used during the Middle Ages and described a language created as a combination of French and Italian that was developed by the Crusaders and tradesmen in the Mediterranean.

At first, the language was considered a pidgin as it consisted of simplified nouns, verbs, and adjectives from both languages. Over time the language developed into an early version of today's Romance languages.

Arabic was another early lingua franca to develop because of the sheer size of the Islamic Empire dating back to the 7th Century.

Arabic is the native language of the peoples from the Arabian Peninsula but its use spread with the empire as it expanded into China, India, parts of Central Asia, the Middle East, Northern Africa, and parts of Southern Europe. The empire's vast size exhibits the need for a common language. Arabic also served as the lingua franca of science and diplomacy in the 1200's because at that time, more books were written in Arabic than any other language.

The use of Arabic as a lingua franca and others such as the romance languages and Chinese then continued worldwide throughout history as they made it easier for diverse groups of people in different countries to communicate. For example, until the 18th Century, Latin was the main lingua franca of European scholars as it allowed easy communication by people whose native languages included Italian and French.

During the Age of Exploration, lingua francas also played an enormous role in allowing European explorers to conduct trade and other important communications in the various countries in which they went. Portuguese was the lingua franca of diplomatic and trade relations in areas like coastal Africa, portions of India, and even Japan.

Other lingua francas developed during this time as well since international trade and communication was becoming an important component to nearly every area of the globe.

Malay for instance was the lingua franca of Southeast Asia and was used by Arab and Chinese traders there prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Once they arrived, people like the Dutch and British used Malay to communicate with the native peoples.

Modern Lingua Francas

Today, lingua francas play an important role in global communication as well. The United Nations defines its official languages as Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. The official language of international air traffic control is English, while multilingual places like Asia and Africa define several unofficial lingua francas to facilitate easier communication between ethnic groups and regions.

The Pidgin

Although the first lingua franca that developed during the Middle Ages was first considered a pidgin, the term pidgin itself and the language that term describes originally developed out of contact between Europeans and people in the countries they visited from the 16th to the 19th Centuries. Pidgins during this time were usually associated with trade, plantation agriculture, and mining.

In order to create a pidgin, there needs to be regular contact between the people speaking different languages, there needs to be a reason for communication (such as trade), and there should be a lack of another easily accessible language between the two parties.

In addition, pidgins have a distinct set of characteristics that make them differ from the first and second languages spoken by the pidgin developers. For example, the words used in a pidgin language lack inflections on verbs and nouns and have no true articles or words like conjunctions. In addition, very few pidgins use complex sentences. Because of this, some people characterize pidgins as broken or chaotic languages.

Regardless of its seemingly chaotic nature though, several pidgins have survived for generations. These include the Nigerian Pidgin, the Cameroon Pidgin, Bislama from Vanuatu, and Tok Pisin, a pidgin from Papua, New Guinea. All of these pidgins are based mainly on English words.

From time to time, long-surviving pidgins also become more widely used for communication and expand into the general population. When this happens and the pidgin is used enough to become the primary language of an area, it is no longer considered a pidgin, but is instead called a creole language. An example of a creole includes Swahili, which grew out of Arabic and Bantu languages in eastern Africa. The language Bazaar Malay, spoken in Malaysia is another example.

Lingua francas, pidgins, or creoles are significant to geography because each represents a long history of communication between various groups of people and is an important gauge of what was taking place at the time the language developed. Today, lingua francas especially but also pidgins represent an attempt to create universally understood languages in a world with growing global interactions.

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Throughout the course of geographic history, exploration and trade have caused various populations of people to come into contact with each other. Because these people were of different cultures and thus spoke different languages, communication was often difficult. Over the decades though, languages changed to reflect such interactions and groups sometimes developed lingua francas and pidgins.

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from research organizations

Why, and when, do we learn to speak the way that we do? Research from North Carolina State University on African-American children presents an unexpected finding: language use can go on a roller-coaster ride during childhood as kids adopt and abandon vernacular language patterns.

"We found that there is a 'roller-coaster effect,' featuring an ebb and flow in a child's use of vernacular English over the course of his or her language development," says Dr. Walt Wolfram, William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor of English Linguistics at NC State and co-author of several recent papers describing the research. "This was totally unanticipated." Vernacular English is defined here as culturally specific speech patterns that are distinct from standard English; in this case, the vernacular is African-American English (AAE).

One implication of the finding involves education, since teachers often advocate teaching standard English early in a childhood education. "This approach does seem to work at first," Wolfram says, "but it doesn't last." In other words, if a school system wants its students to graduate high school with a strong foundation in standard English, it may have to revisit standard English later in the education curriculum.

Specifically, the researchers found that children come to school speaking English with a relatively high number of vernacular features. Then, through the first four grades of elementary school, those features are reduced, as children adopt more standard English language patterns. As the children move toward middle school, the level of vernacular rises -- though many children often reduce their use of vernacular again as they enter high school.

"This finding reveals a cyclic pattern in the use of African-American vernacular English that no one expected to see during children's language development," says Janneke Van Hofwegen, a research associate at NC State and co-author of the study. "This wasn't even a hypothesis when we began the study."

The researchers note that, while their data looked solely at African-American children, the findings may be applicable more broadly to other groups.

The research stems from the longest, and largest, study ever to examine the longitudinal development of language in African-American children. The study began in 1990, following 88 African-American children from central North Carolina in order to track their language development. The study is ongoing, with 68 of the original participants still being tracked. The data is collected by the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute in Chapel Hill, N. C.

The retention rate of the participants is remarkably high, particularly given that approximately 71 percent of the children were living below the poverty line in 1990. "It's incredible, and gives us a rare opportunity to study language development in children," Wolfram says.

The study also gives researchers an impressive array of data, providing them with access to school and test data, as well as the data collected through the study's own interviews and surveys.

Researchers are currently assessing how and whether dialect use is related to literacy skills, as well as the role that mothers play in their children's use of vernacular.

Journal References:

1. Wolfram, Walt, Janneke Van Hofwegen, Mary Kohn, Jennifer Renn. Trajectories of Development in AAE: The First 17 Years. Proceedings of the Conference on African American Language in Popular Culture, (in press)

2. Janneke Van Hofwegen, Walt Wolfram. Coming of age in African American English: A longitudinal study. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2010; 14 (4): 427 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2010.00452.x

Cite This Page:

Below are relevant articles that may interest you. ScienceDaily shares links and proceeds with scholarly publications in the TrendMD network.

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child development; k-12 education; child psychology; educational psychology; language acquisition; learning disorders; literacy; numeracy

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Language patterns are roller-coaster ride during childhood development

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Why, and when, do we learn to speak the way that we do? New research on African-American children presents an unexpected finding: language use can go on a roller-coaster ride during childhood as kids adopt and abandon vernacular language patterns.

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ABOUT

The Pop vs Soda Page is a web-based project to plot the regional variations in the use of the terms "Pop" and "Soda" to describe carbonated soft drinks. You can help by filling out the survey!

THE SURVEY

Name and email address are optional. Hometown and state/province are also optional, but strongly encouraged. However, a valid zip or postal code is critical, because our software uses a database of zip codes and their latitudes and longitudes to plot the data on the map.

Currently the project is limited to English-speaking North America. Please stay tuned for an updated map which will include data for Canada.

Thank you for your participation!

STATISTICS
View the Pop vs. Soda statistics.
(Click here to find out what people are saying for "other".)

Created by Alan McConchie (@mappingmashups).
Further comments? E-mail pvs@popvssoda.com or twitter@pop_vs_soda

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The Pop vs Soda Page is a web-based project to plot the regional variations in the use of the terms "Pop" and "Soda" to describe carbonated soft drinks. You can help by filling out the survey! Name and email address are optional. Hometown and state/province are also optional, but strongly encouraged.

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What's Cooking on Thanksgiving - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com

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The terms cooks enter into search engines can provide clues as to what dishes are being cooked around the nation.

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Creation of a language, just so we can gossip.

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The residents of Boonville, CA are trying to save their local language, known as 'Boontling', which is more than 150 years old.

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Text Notes