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OVERVIEW
1. Language and religion are basic components of culture. They are mentifacts, serving to identify, to unite, and to divide different population groups while also affecting the sociological and material subsystems of a culture.
2. Thousands of languages exist, but only a few have large numbers of speakers. Languages have common roots in protolanguages, and linguistic diversity is reduced by recognizing language families. Present world linguistic patterns reflect past migrations and conquests that have spread a few languages widely and have caused many others to diminish in importance or disappear.
3. Language spread displays all forms of spatial diffusion and acculturation. Cultural and physical diffusion barriers may be recognized in the present world pattern of languages.
4. Languages are dynamic; they change through isolation, through cultural contact, and through time. Those speaking a common tongue are members of a speech community that may have both a standard language and social and regional dialects.
5. As spatial phenomena, languages and their dialects may be mapped. Linguistic geography deals with standard language regions and with boundaries of dialect word choice and pronunciation (isoglosses and isophones). The patterns discerned-as in the United States-display both regional variation and evidence of past diffusion paths from distinctive hearth areas. Toponymy, the study of place names, helps trace those migrations and the presence of former populations within areas.
6. Pidgins, creoles, and lingua francas are languages developed or adopted to foster communication between speakers of different tongues. Official languages may serve the same function.
7. Religions, like languages, have spatial extent and serve to identify, unite, and divide culture groups. Geographers classify religions as universalizing, ethnic, and tribal. Universalizing faiths are most widely distributed; ethnic religions are most closely identified with specific regions and cultures. Tribal religions are being lost through absorption and conversion. Secularism (indifference to or rejection of religion) may be prominent in some societies by personal choice or by imposition.
8. Each of the limited number of major religions has its own mix of cultural values and its own pattern of innovations and, perhaps, diffusion. Each has a distinctive impact on the cultural landscape.
9. The principal religions reviewed in the text are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and East Asian ethnic religions. Their respective origins, diffusion paths and landscape evidences are discussed.