GEOG 102 Language Map Exercise                                               Name:__________________________

1. Turn to p. 53. What kind of thematic map is this? Area class

2. Look at the Americas.  Describe the distribution of American Indian languages.  What factors human and/or physical factors might have contributed to the pattern? American Indian languages are confined to high latitude, high altitude, rain forest, and desert regions. These languages survive in mostly remote or difficult environments (tropical rainforest, desert, mountains) that did not attract large populations of European settlers. And, so, indigenous languages survived.

3. Now view the European Languages map at this link http://www.eupedia.com/europe/maps_of_europe.shtml - languages. On this map different shades of green, blue/purple and orange/red represent three different sub-families of the Indo-European language family. Green represents the Germanic sub-family. Blue/purple represents the Romance sub-family. Orange/red represents the Slavic sub-family. Capital letters refer to sub-families of within each language family.           

      Use this online map and the map on p. 174-75 in your atlas to list the countries in which languages from each of these 3 subfamilies are spoken.

Germanic Ireland, Great Britain, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria,         Switzerland

Romance _France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Romania

Slavic _Slovenia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Russia, Ukraine , Bosnia, Serbia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Belarus

5. Turn again to the Languages map, p. 53.  Languages from which language family are spoken in most of India? Indo-European

6. Describe the distribution of the Austronesian language family. The Austronesia family extends from Madasgascar eastward across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia and the islands of the South Pacific.