Module 3_Week 3_Population, Languages, and World Religion_Human Geography

Module 3

Population, Languages, and World Religion

A. Population Growth

Sometime in 2017, a human birth raised the Earth’s population to 7.5 billion

people. In 1999, the count reached 6 billion. In 2017, the world was adding an additional

83 million people annually, or some 230,000 per day. By contrast, it took from the

beginning of human history to about the year 1800 to reach 1 billion, and another 130

years to add the second billion. However, the annual rate of population increase has

slowed from a peak value of 2.1 percent in 1962 to 1.1 percent in 2017. Even with the

slowing rate of population growth, the United Nations in 2017 projected that the world

would likely be home to 9.8 billion inhabitants in 2050. Projections of world population

contain uncertainty that increases as they extend further into the future. The U.N.

projections for the year 2100 range from 9.5 to 13.3 billion, with a best projection of 11.2

billion. U.N. projections for 2300 range from 2.3 to 36 billion.

The implications of the present numbers and the potential increases in population

are of vital current social, political, and ecological concern. Population numbers were

much smaller some 12,000 years ago when continental glaciers began their retreat, people

spread to formerly unoccupied portions of the globe, and human experimentation with

food sources initiated the Agricultural Revolution. The 5 or 10 million people who then

constituted all of humanity obviously had considerable potential to expand their numbers.

In retrospect, we see that the natural resource base of the Earth had a population-

supporting capacity far in excess of the pressures exerted on it by early hunting and

gathering groups.

Some observers maintain that despite a large and growing world population, the

adaptive and exploitive ingenuity of humans will generate solutions to resource

shortages. To them, population growth means more pressure for innovations and a larger

pool of human talent to generate those innovations. Others, however, frightened by the

resource demands of a growing world population that had already expanded fourfold—

from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion—in the century from 1900 to 2000, compare the Earth to a

lifeboat or spaceship with an ever-increasing number of passengers. They point to

recurring problems of malnutrition and starvation (though these are realistically more a

matter of failures of distribution than of inability to produce enough food worldwide).

They cite global climate change, air and water pollution, the loss of forest and farmland,

rising prices of many minerals and fossil fuels, and other evidences of strains on world

resources as signs that the world population has reached the Earth’s physical capacity.

On a worldwide basis, populations grow only one way: The number of births in a

given period exceeds the number of deaths. Ignoring for the moment regional population

changes resulting from migration, we can conclude that humans have been highly

successful in overcoming natural controls on their numerical growth. In contrast, current

estimates of slowing population growth and eventual stability clearly indicate that

humans by their individual and collective decisions may effectively limit growth and

control global population numbers. The implications of these observations will become

clearer after we define some terms important in the study of population and explore their

significance.

B. Population Definitions

Demographers employ a wide range of measures of population composition and

trends, though all their calculations start with a count of events: of individuals in the

population, of births, deaths, marriages, and so on. Demographers convert those counts to

rates to make them more meaningful and useful in population analysis. Rates simply

record the frequency of occurrence of an event during a given time frame for a designated

population—for example, the marriage rate as the number of marriages performed per

1,000 population in the United States last year. Demographers also place populations into

cohort groups as they calculate birth rates, death rates, and so on. A cohort is a population

group unified by a specified temporal characteristic—the age cohort of 0–4 years,

perhaps, or the college class of 2025.

The crude birth rate (CBR), often referred to simply as the birth rate, is the annual

number of live births per 1,000 population. It is “crude” because it relates births to total

population without regard to the age or sex composition of that population. The birth rate

of a country is, of course, strongly influenced by the age and sex structure of its

population, the customs and family size expectations of its inhabitants, and its population

policies. Because these conditions vary widely, recorded national birth rates vary—as of

2017, from a high of 48 in Niger in subSaharan Africa to 8 per 1,000 in Hong Kong,

Japan, and South Korea in Asia and Greece, Italy, Monaco, Portugal, and San Marino in

Europe. Birth rates of 30 or above per 1,000 are considered high and are found in sub-

Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, the Palestinian Territory, Timor-Leste, and

Yemen. In these countries, poverty is widespread and a high proportion of the female

population is young. In many of them, birth rates may be significantly higher than official

records indicate.

Birth rates of less than 18 per 1,000 are reckoned low and are characteristic of

industrialized, urbanized regions. Overall, the Caribbean, East Asia, Europe, North

America, Oceania, and South America have low birth rates. In recent years, low birth

rates have been observed in an increasing number of developing states. Some of these,

such as China (see “China’s Way— and Others”), have adopted effective government-led

population programs. In others, changed cultural norms have reduced desired family size.

Transitional birth rates (between 18 and 30 per 1,000) characterize developing and newly

industrializing regions such as Central America, Central Asia, South Asia, Western Asia,

Southern Africa, and Northern Africa.

Crude birth rates display such regional variability because of differences in age

and sex composition and/or disparities in births among those of reproductive-age. The

rate is “crude” because its denominator contains persons who have no chance at all of

giving birth—males, young girls, and older women. For example, we would expect a

very low crude birth rate in a community with a high percentage of elderly. The total

fertility rate (TFR) is a more refined and thus more accurate measure for showing the rate

and probability of reproduction among fertile females, the only segment of population

capable of bearing children.

Although a TFR of 2.0 would seem sufficient exactly to replace present

population (one baby to replace each parent), in reality replacement levels are reached

only with TFRs of 2.1 to 2.3 or more. The fractions over 2.0 are required to compensate

for mortalities that occur before women complete their childbearing years. The concept

of replacement level fertility is useful here. It marks the level of fertility at which each

successive generation of women produces exactly enough children to ensure that the

same number of women survive to have offspring themselves. In general, then, the higher

the level of mortality in a population, the higher the replacement level of fertility will be.

For Mozambique early in the 21st century, the replacement level fertility was 3.4 children

per woman.

On a worldwide basis, the TFR in 2017 was 2.5, down from 3.6 a quarter century

earlier. The more developed countries recorded a 1.6 TFR in 2017. That decrease has

been dwarfed by the rapid changes in reproductive behavior in much of the developing

world. Since 1960, the average TFR in the less-developed world has fallen by half from

the traditional 6.0 or more to 2.6 in 2017. That dramatic decline reflects the fact that

women and men in developing countries are marrying later and having fewer children,

following the pattern earlier set in the developed world. There has been, as well, a great

increase in family planning and contraceptive use. In 2017, the United Nations reported

that 85 percent of the global demand for family planning and contraceptives had been

met.

In fact, demographers have long assumed that recently observed developing

country—and therefore global—fertility rate declines to the replacement level would

continue and in the long run lead to stable population numbers. However, nothing in logic

or history requires population stability at any level. Indeed, the experience of sub-

replacement fertility in most developed countries suggests the real possibility of absolute

decline. World regional and national fertility rates reported in Appendix B and other

sources are summaries that conceal significant variations between population groups.

India’s published TFR of 2.3 is a pooled number that hides the variation between a low

value of 1.4 in the state of Goa and 3.4 in Bihar. The U.S. 2015 national average fertility

rate of 1.8 does not reveal that the TFR for Hispanics was 2.1, compared to only 1.3 for

American Indians and Alaska Natives.

The crude death rate (CDR), also called the mortality rate, is calculated in the

same way as the CBR: the annual number of events per 1,000 population. In the past, a

valid generalization was that the death rate, like the birth rate, varied with national levels

of development. In the past, the highest rates (more than 20 per 1,000) were found in the

less-developed countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; lowest rates (less than 10)

were associated with developed states of Europe and North America. That correlation

mostly disappeared as dramatic reductions in death rates occurred in developing countries

in the years following World War II. Infant mortality rates and life expectancies

improved as antibiotics, vaccinations, and pesticides were made available in almost all

parts of the world and as increased attention was paid to sanitary facilities and safe water

supplies.

Modern medicine and sanitation have increased life expectancy and altered age-

old relationships between birth and death rates. In the early 1950s, only five countries, all

in northern Europe, had life expectancies at birth of more than 70 years. By 2015, the

average life expectancy at birth for the global population had risen to 71.4 years. The

leading causes of death are now non-communicable diseases such as heart disease and

stroke. The availability of clean water and sanitation varies regionally, and the least

developed countries have least benefited from them. In low-income countries, leading

causes of death also include communicable diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and

water-borne diseases caused by a lack of sanitation, such as cholera, dysentery, and

typhoid.

Starting in the 1950s, global life expectancies increased by about 3 years per

decade. But in the 1990s, HIV/AIDS undermined global improvements in life

expectancies. AIDS is the fifth most common cause of death in low-income countries and

is forecast to surpass the Black Death of the 14th century—which caused an estimated 25

million deaths in Europe and 13 million in China—as history’s worst-ever epidemic.

According to a report by UNAIDS, AIDS-related illnesses had killed 35 million people

by 2017. The United Nations estimated 37 million people were HIV positive in 2017.

Some 70 percent of those infected live in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV (originally a

disease of monkeys) first established itself as a virulent human epidemic strain in the

1950s.

A population pyramid is a powerful means of visualizing and comparing a

population’s age and sex composition. The term pyramid describes the diagram’s shape

for many countries in the 1800s, when the display was created: a broad base of younger

age groups and a progressive narrowing toward the apex as older populations were

thinned by death. Now many different shapes are formed, each reflecting a different

population history (Figure 4.9), and some suggest population profile is a more

appropriate label. By showing the size of different age cohorts, the pyramids highlight the

impact of “baby booms,” population-reducing wars, birth rate reductions, and external

migrations.

A rapidly growing country such as Nigeria has most people in the lowest age

cohorts; the percentage in older age groups declines successively, yielding a classic

pyramid shape with stepped sides. Typically, life expectancy is reduced in older cohorts

of less-developed countries, so that for Nigeria, the proportion of the population in older

age groups is lower than in, for example, New Zealand. Female life expectancy and

mortality rates may also be affected by cultural rather than economic developmental

causes (see the feature “Millions of Women Are Missing”). In New Zealand, a wealthy

country with a very slow rate of growth, the population is nearly equally divided among

the age groups, giving a “pyramid” with almost vertical sides. Below-replacement

fertility rates create a pyramid with smaller cohorts at the bottom, as in the case of Japan.

Among older cohorts, as Japan shows, there may be more women than men because of

the greater life expectancy of the former. The impacts of war, as Russia’s 2018 pyramid

vividly demonstrated, were evident in that country’s depleted age cohorts and male-

female disparities. The sharp contrasts between the pyramids for Japan and Nigeria are

representative of the differing population concerns of the developing and developed

regions of the world. Within countries, people sort themselves out geographically in ways

that are clearly revealed in the population pyramids for different communities.

Population pyramids also foretell future problems resulting from present

population policies or practices. The strict familysize rules and widespread preferences

for sons in China, for example, skews the pyramid in favor of males. On current

evidence, about 1 million excess males a year enter an imbalanced marriage market in

China. The 40 million bachelors China is likely to have in 2020, unconnected to society

by wives and children, may pose threats to social order and, perhaps, national stability

not foreseen or planned when family control programs were put in place, but clearly

suggested by population pyramid distortions.

Knowledge of a country’s sex and age distributions also enables demographers to

forecast its future population levels, though the reliability of projections decreases with

increasing length of forecast (Figure 4.13). Thus, a country with a high proportion of

young people will experience a high rate of natural increase unless there is a very high

mortality rate among infants and juveniles or fertility and birth rates change materially.

The rate of natural increase of a population is derived by subtracting the crude death rate

from the crude birth rate. Natural means that increases or decreases due to migration are

not included. If a country had a birth rate of 22 per 1,000 and a death rate of 12 per 1,000

for a given year, the rate of natural increase would be 10 per 1,000. This rate is usually

expressed as a percentage, that is, as a rate per 100 rather than per 1,000. In the example

given, the annual increase would be 1 percent.

The rate of increase can be related to the time it takes for a population to double if

the present growth rate remains constant— that is, the doubling time. Table 4.2 shows

that it would take 70 years for a population with a rate of increase of 1 percent

(approximately the rate of growth of South America in 2017) to double. A 2 percent rate

of increase—recorded in 2017 by Namibia—means that the population would double in

only 35 years. (Population doubling time can be roughly estimated by applying the Rule

of 70, which works for exponential growth and simply involves dividing 70 by the

growth rate.) How could adding only 20 people per 1,000 cause a population to grow so

quickly? The principle is the same as that used to compound interest in a bank.

Here, then, lies the answer to the earlier question. Even small annual additions

accumulate to large total increments because we are dealing with geometric or

exponential (1, 2, 4, 8) rather than arithmetic (1, 2, 3, 4) growth. The ever-increasing

world base population has reached such a size that each additional doubling results in an

astronomical increase in the total. A simple mental exercise suggests the inevitable

consequences of such doubling, or J-curve, growth. Take a very large sheet of the

thinnest paper you can find and fold it in half. Fold it in half again. After seven or eight

folds, the sheet will have become as thick as a book—too thick for further folding by

hand. If you could make 20 folds, the stack would be nearly as high as a football field is

long. From then on, the results of further doubling are astounding. At 40 folds, the stack

would be well on the way to the moon, and at 70, it would reach twice as far as the

distance to the nearest star. Rounding the bend on the J-curve, which Figure 4.15

suggests the world population did around 1900, fostered dire predictions of inevitable

unsupportable pressures on the planet’s population support capabilities.

C. The Demographic Transition Model and Equation

Exponential population growth cannot continue indefinitely on a finite planet.

Some form of braking mechanism must operate to control population growth. If

voluntary population limitation is not undertaken, involuntary controls such as famine,

disease, or resource wars may occur. One attempt to summarize the observed voluntary

population control that has accompanied economic development and modernization is the

demographic transition model. The model traces the changing levels of human fertility

and mortality associated with industrialization, health care improvements, urbanization,

and changing cultural attitudes regarding childbearing. As societies move through the

model’s stages, high birth and death rates are replaced by low rates (Figure 4.16). During

the intermediate stages of the model, populations grow rapidly before stabilizing in the

final stage.

The first stage of the demographic transition model is characterized by high birth

and high (but fluctuating) death rates. Birth rates and death rates are similar, and

population grows slowly. Demographers think that it took from approximately 1 c.e. to

1500 c.e. for the population to increase from 250 million to 500 million, a doubling time

of a millennium and a half. Growth was not steady, of course. There were periods of

regional expansion that were usually offset by sometimes catastrophic decline. Wars,

epidemics, poor harvests, and natural disasters took heavy tolls. For example, the bubonic

plague (the Black Death), which swept across Europe in the 14th century, is estimated to

have killed between one-third and one-half of the population of that continent and

epidemic diseases brought by Europeans to the Western Hemisphere are believed to have

reduced New World native populations by 95 percent within a century or two of first

contact. The high birth rates, high death rates, and slow population growth of the first

stage describe all of human history until about 1750 c.e., when Western Europe entered

stage two of the transition. Over the past 150 years, the decline in death rates that

signaled the transition to stage two diffused around the globe. Today, death rates in even

the poorest countries are below 20 per 1,000 and no country remains in stage one of the

demographic transition.

The second stage of the transition model is usually associated with the

consequences of Europe’s Industrial Revolution and modernization. Rapid population

growth during the second demographic stage results as birth rates outstrip death rates.

Life expectancies increase dramatically due to advances in medicine, sanitation,

agricultural productivity, and food distribution. Urbanization during the second stage

provides the stage on which sanitation, medical, and food distribution improvements are

concentrated (Figure 4.17). Birth rates do not fall as soon as death rates; ingrained

cultural beliefs and social relationships—mentifacts and sociofacts—change more slowly

than technologies. In most traditional societies, large families are valued for their social

and economic advantages. Children are the focus of activities and rituals by which culture

is transmitted, and in low-income families, they contribute economically by starting work

at an early age, especially on farms or family businesses, and by supporting their parents

in old age.

The third stage of the demographic transition occurs when birth rates decline as

people begin to control family size. In urbanized, industrialized cultures, raising children

is expensive. In fact, such cultures may view children as economic liabilities rather than

assets. The elderly rely on government pension programs rather than their children. In

addition, declining childhood mortality rates make parents feel that they can have fewer

children, knowing that most of them are likely to survive. When the birth rate falls and

the death rate remains low, the rate of population increase slows. The classic

demographic transition model ends with a fourth and final stage characterized by very

low, nearly equal birth and death rates. At this point, a condition of zero population

growth approaches as natural increase rates drop to zero. With longer life expectancies

and fewer births, a significant aging of the population accompanies this stage.

The original transition model was devised to describe the experience of northwest

European countries as they transitioned from rural-agrarian societies to urban-industrial

ones. It may not accurately predict the course of events for all developing countries. In

Europe, church and municipal records, some dating from the 16thLcentury, show that

people tended to marry late, if at all. In England before the Industrial Revolution, as

many as half of all women in the 15–50 age cohort were unmarried. Infant mortality was

high, life expectancy low. With the coming of industrialization in the 18th and 19th

centuries, immediate factory wages instead of long apprenticeship programs permitted

earlier marriage and more children. Because improvements in sanitation and health came

only slowly, death rates remained high. Around 1800, 25 percent of Swedish infants died

before their first birthday. Population growth rates remained below 1 percent per year in

France throughout the 19th century.

Beginning about 1860, first death rates and then birth rates began their significant,

though gradual, decline. This “mortality revolution” came first, as an epidemiological

transition: formerly fatal epidemic diseases became endemic (that is, essentially continual

within a population). As people developed partial immunities, mortality rates declined.

Improvements in livestock raising, crop rotation, fertilizer use, and new crops from

overseas colonies (the potato was an early example) raised the level of health of the

European population in general.

In Europe, the striking reduction in death rates was echoed by similar declines in

birth rates as societies began to alter their traditional concepts of ideal family size. In

cities, child labor laws and mandatory schooling meant that children no longer were

important contributors to family economies. As “poor-relief” legislation and other forms

of social welfare substituted for family support structures, the value of children as a

social safety net declined. Family consumption patterns altered as the Industrial

Revolution made widely available consumer goods that once were considered luxuries.

For some, children came to be seen as hindrance rather than aid to social mobility,

lifestyle improvement, and self-expression. Perhaps most important were changes in the

education levels, career opportunities, and social status of women that spread the

conviction that control over childbearing was within their power and to their benefit.

The dramatic decline in mortality that had emerged gradually throughout the

European world diffused with startling speed to developing countries after 1950. The

increasing availability in developing countries of Western technologies of medicine and

public health, including antibiotics, insecticides, sanitation, immunization, infant and

child health care, and the eradication of smallpox, dramatically increased life

expectancies. Such imported technologies and treatments accomplished in a few years

what it took Europe 50 to 100 years to experience. Sri Lanka, for example, sprayed

extensively with DDT to combat malaria; life expectancy there jumped from 44 years in

1946 to 60 only eight years later. With similar public health programs, India also

experienced a steady reduction in its death rate after 1947. Simultaneously, with

international sponsorship, food aid cut the death toll of developing states during drought

and other disasters. Thus, the second stage of the demographic transition—declining

death rates accompanied by continuing high birth rates—diffused worldwide.

Change in a region’s population stems from three basic life events: people are

born, they migrate, and they die. Migration involves the long-distance movement of

people from one residence to another. When that relocation occurs across political

boundaries, it affects the population structure of both the origin and destination regions.

The demographic equation summarizes the contribution made to regional population

change over time by the combination of natural change (births minus deaths) and net

migration (difference between in-migration and out-migration). Zero population growth

(ZPG) is the condition for individual countries when births plus immigration equals

deaths plus emigration. On a global scale, of course, all population change is accounted

for by natural change. The impact of migration on the demographic equation often

increases as the population size of the areal unit decreases.

In the past, emigration proved an important device for relieving the pressures of

rapid population growth during the demographic transition for many European countries

(Figure 4.20). For example, in one 90-year span, 45 percent of the natural increase in the

population of the British Isles emigrated, and between 1846 and 1935, some 60 million

Europeans of all nationalities left that continent. Today, the major population relocations

connect growing countries going through the second and third stages of the demographic

transition with aging societies in the fourth stage. Yet, despite recent massive movements

of economic and political refugees across Asian, African, and Latin American

boundaries, emigration today provides no comparable relief valve for developing

countries. Total population numbers are too great to be much affected by migrations of

even millions of people. In only a few countries—Afghanistan, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti,

and Syria, for example—have as many as 10 percent of the population emigrated in

recent decades.

Where cross-border movements are massive enough, migration may have a

pronounced impact on the demographic equation and result in significant changes in the

population structures of both the origin and destination regions. Past European and

African migrations, for example, not only altered but substantially created the population

structures of new, sparsely inhabited lands of colonization in the Western Hemisphere

and Australasia. In some decades of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, 30 percent to

more than 40 percent of population increase in the United States was accounted for by

immigration. Similarly, eastward-moving Slavs colonized under populated Siberia and

overwhelmed native peoples.

D. World Population Distribution

The world’s population is not uniformly distributed over the Earth. The most

striking feature of the world population distribution map (Figure 4.21) is the very

unevenness of the pattern. Some land areas are nearly uninhabited, others are sparsely

settled, and still others contain dense agglomerations of people. Until about 2007, rural

folk outnumbered urban people. After 2007, however, urbanites will remain dominant

with cities capturing most of the world’s population growth. Earth regions of apparently

very similar physical makeup show quite different population numbers and densities,

perhaps the result of differently timed settlement or of settlement by different cultural

groups. Northern and Western Europe, for example, inhabited thousands of years before

North America, contain as many people as the United States on 70 percent less land; the

present heterogeneous population of the Western Hemisphere is vastly more dense than

was that of earlier Native Americans.

We can draw certain generalizations from the uneven distribution of population

shown in Figure 4.21. First, 88 percent of all people live north of the equator and two-

thirds of the total dwell in the midlatitudes between 20° and 60° North (Figure 4.22).

Second, a large majority of the world’s inhabitants occupy only a small part of its land

surface. More than half the people live on about 5 percent of the land. Third, people

congregate in lowland areas; their numbers decrease sharply with increases in elevation.

Temperature, length of growing season, slope and erosion problems, even oxygen

reductions at very high altitudes, all appear to limit the habitability of higher elevations.

One estimate is that 34 percent of all people live below 100 meters (330 ft), a zone

containing about 17 percent of total land area. Fourth, although low-lying areas are

preferred settlement locations, not all such areas are equally favored. Continental margins

have attracted the densest settlement. On average, density in coastal areas is twice the

world’s average population density. Low temperatures and infertile soils of the extensive

Arctic coastal lowlands of the Northern Hemisphere have restricted settlement there.

Mountainous or desert coasts are sparsely occupied at any latitude, and some tropical

lowlands and river valleys that are marshy, forested, and disease-infested are also

unevenly settled.

The term ecumene is applied to permanently inhabited areas of the Earth’s

surface. The ancient Greeks used the word, derived from their verb “to inhabit,” to

describe their known, inhabited world between what they believed to be the unpopulated,

searing hot “torrid” tropical zone and the permanently frozen northern “frigid” zone.

Clearly, natural conditions are less restrictive than Greek geographers believed. Both

ancient and modern technologies have rendered habitable areas that natural conditions

make forbidding. Irrigation, terracing, diking, and draining are among the methods

devised to extend the ecumene locally.

Although the ancient Greeks were wrong in labeling the tropics uninhabitable, the

observation that some places are uninhabitable appears remarkably astute. The

nonecumene, the uninhabited or very sparsely occupied zone, includes the permanent ice

caps of the Far North and Antarctica and large segments of the tundra and coniferous

forest of northern Asia and North America. But the nonecumene is not continuous, as the

ancients supposed. It is discontinuously encountered in all portions of the globe and

includes parts of the tropical rain forests of equatorial zones, deserts of both the Northern

and Southern Hemispheres, and high mountain areas.

Even parts of these unoccupied or sparsely occupied districts have localized dense

settlement nodes or zones based on irrigation agriculture, mining and industrial activities,

and the like. Perhaps the most striking case of settlement in an environment elsewhere

considered part of the nonecumene world is that of the dense population in the Andes

Mountains of South America and the plateau of Mexico. Here Native Americans found

temperate conditions away from the dry coast regions and the hot, wet Amazon basin.

The fertile high basins have served a large population for more than a thousand years.

Even with these locally important exceptions, the nonecumene portion of the

Earth is extensive. Some 35 to 40 percent of all the world’s land surface is inhospitable

and without significant settlement. This is, admittedly, a smaller proportion of the Earth

than would have qualified as uninhabited in ancient times, or even during the 19th

century. Since the end of the Ice Age some 11,000 to 12,000Lyears ago, humans have

steadily expanded their areas of settlement.

E. Population Density

The boundaries of the ecumene could only be extended as humans learned to

support themselves from the resources of new settlement areas. The size of the population

that could be supported depended on the resource potential of the area and the

technologies and social organization possessed by the occupying culture group. The term

population density expresses the relationship between number of inhabitants and the area

they occupy. Density figures are useful representations of regional variations of human

distribution. The crude density, or arithmetic density, of population is the most common

and simplistic variation. It calculates the number of people per unit area of land, usually

within the boundaries of a political entity. All that is required is information on total

population and total land area, both commonly available for national or other political

units. The figure can, however, be misleading and may obscure as much as it reveals.

Its usefulness is improved if the area in question can be subdivided into

comparable regions or units. For example, it is more revealing to know that in 2010, New

Jersey had a density of 467 and Wyoming of 2 persons per square kilometer (1,196 and

5.8 per sq mi) of land area than to know only that the figure for the United States was 32

per square kilometer (99.6 per sq mi). Another potential refinement of crude density

relates population not simply to total area of national territory but to that area of a country

that is or may be cultivated; that is, to arable land. When total population is divided by

arable land area alone, the resulting figure is the physiological density, which provides a

measure of the population pressure exerted on agricultural land.

The calculation of physiological density, however, has its own limitations. It

depends on uncertain definitions of arable and cultivated land and assumes that all arable

land is equally productive. Agricultural density is another useful variant. It simply

excludes city populations from the physiological density calculation and reports the

number of rural residents per unit of agriculturally productive land. It is, therefore, an

estimate of the number of farmers per unit area and offers insights into the type of

agriculture practiced in a country.

After comparing population densities, it is common to draw conclusions about

overcrowding or overpopulation. However, it is wise to remember that labeling a place

overcrowded involves making value judgments regarding the amount of space needed per

person. To someone from Wyoming, New York City might feel overcrowded, while to a

New Yorker, Wyoming is likely to feel underpopulated. Overpopulation refers to the

situation in which an environment or territory cannot support its present population and

involves many factors other than just population density. Overpopulation is a reflection,

not of numbers per unit area but of the carrying capacity of the land, the prevailing

agricultural technology, and the ability to afford imported food. A region devoted to

energy-intensive commercial agriculture that makes heavy use of irrigation, fertilizers,

and biocides can support more people at a higher level of living than one engaged in the

slash-and-burn agriculture that will be described in Chapter 8. An industrial society that

takes advantage of resources such as coal and iron ore and has access to imported food

will not feel population pressure at the same density level as a country with rudimentary

technology. In fact, we should be careful in borrowing the concept of carrying capacity

from ecology because compared to other animals, humans are distinguished by their

ability to adopt new production technologies, to increase their appetite for consumption

far beyond biological requirements, and to trade resources globally.

F. Population Data and Projections

Population geographers, demographers, planners, governmental officials, and a

host of others rely on detailed population data to make their assessments of present

national and world population patterns and to estimate future conditions. Birth rates and

death rates, rates of fertility and the age and sex composition of the population are all

necessary ingredients for their work. In some countries, using the values for demographic

variables specific to individual regions or ethnic groups is essential to making accurate

projections.

The data that demographers use come primarily from the United Nations

Statistical Office, the World Bank, the Population Reference Bureau, and ultimately,

from national censuses and sample surveys. Unfortunately, the data are far from perfect.

A national census is a massive undertaking. In developing regions, isolation and poor

transportation, insufficiency of funds and trained census personnel, high rates of illiteracy

limiting the type of questions that can be asked, and populations suspicious of

government data collectors serve to restrict the frequency, coverage, and accuracy of

population reports.

However derived, detailed data are published by the major reporting agencies for

all national units even when those figures are of poor quality. For years, data on the total

population, birth and death rates, and other vital statistics for Somalia were regularly

reported and annually revised. The fact was, however, that Somalia had never had a

census and had no system whatsoever for recording births. Seemingly precise data were

regularly reported as well for Ethiopia. When that country had its first-ever census in

1985, at least one data source had to drop its estimate of the country’s birth rate by 15

percent and increase its figure for Ethiopia’s total population by more than 20 percent.

And a disputed 1991 census of Nigeria officially reported a population of 89 million, still

the largest in Africa but far below the then generally accepted and widely cited estimates

of between 105 and 115 million Nigerians. The 2006 census in Nigeria was surrounded

by protests, boycotts, and fraud charges despite leaving out questions about religious and

ethnic identity that were controversial in a country with more than 250 ethnic groups and

a population nearly evenly divided between Muslims and Christians.

For all their inadequacies and imprecisions, current data reported for country units

form the basis of population projections, estimates of future population size, age, and sex

composition based on current data. Projections are not forecasts, and demographers are

not the social science equivalent of meteorologists. Weather forecasters work with a

myriad of accurate observations applied against a known, tested model of the atmosphere.

The demographer, in contrast, works with sparse, imprecise, out-of-date, and missing

data applied to human actions that will be unpredictably responsive to stimuli not yet

evident.

Population projections, therefore, are based on assumptions for the future applied

to current data that are, themselves, frequently imperfect. Because projections are not

predictions, they can never be wrong. They are simply the inevitable result of

calculations about fertility, mortality, and migration rates applied to each age cohort of a

population now living, and the making of birth rate, survival, and migration assumptions

about cohorts yet unborn. Of course, the perfectly valid projections of future population

size and structure resulting from those calculations may be dead wrong as predictions.

As the number of humans and the extent of the ecumene have expanded, attention

has turned to the possibility of overpopulation and the need for population control (Figure

4.26). Ancient Chinese thinker Confucius warned against rapid population growth, and

ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle gave careful thought to the ideal

population size for a city-state. All population projections include an assumption that at

some point in time, fertility rates will stabilize at replacement levels and population

growth will cease. Otherwise, future numbers become unthinkably large. At present

growth rates, there would be 1 trillion people living on the Earth four centuries from now.

Although there is reasonable debate whether the world is now overpopulated and what its

optimum or maximum sustainable populations might be, totals in the trillions are beyond

our imagination.

Population pressures do not come from the amount of physical space that humans

occupy. For example, it has been calculated that the entire human race could easily be

accommodated within the boundaries of the state of Delaware. The problems stem from

the energy, food, water, and other resources necessary to support the population and

absorb its waste products. Past technological changes have increased the carrying

capacity of the Earth, allowing humans to achieve higher plateau populations (Figure

4.27). Nonetheless, population will have to stop increasing at some point. The

demographic transition model provides the reassuring message that the decreases in birth

rates that accompany modernization will automatically bring about a condition of zero

population growth. However, the presence of a significant demographic divide between

the nearly stable populations of the developed countries and rapidly growing populations

in developing regions lead some observers to question the model’s universality.

According to these observers, completion of the demographic transition in the

leastdeveloped countries will not take place soon enough, if at all. If the demographic

transition is not completed soon enough, environmental limits will appear in more

dramatic fashion.

Arrayed against the pessimism of Malthus and the neoMalthusians are a number

of competing perspectives, most notably the Marxist critique of Malthus and the

economic theories of Esther Boserup and Julian Simon. Karl Marx rejected the

Malthusian interpretation of poverty, arguing that what appeared to be overpopulation

was actually the unemployed surplus labor population needed by the capitalist system.

Danish economist Esther Boserup developed the Boserup thesis, on the basis of detailed

historical and field studies, which argues that past agricultural improvements occurred as

a result of population pressure. In order to feed more people, farmers developed new

ways to use their land and labor more intensively. In other words, population growth was

a stimulus, not a deterrent, to development. American economist Julian Simon went

further, developing an optimistic cornucopian perspective on population growth. Simon

argued that resources do not exist in nature but are created by human ingenuity, which is

the world’s ultimate resource base. For example, a resource such as oil was just a black

gooey substance until humans discovered ways of refining it and capturing its energy

content. For cornucopians, more people means more scientists and inventors. Since the

time of Malthus, they observed, the world’s population had grown from 900 million to

more than 7 billion without the predicted dire consequences—proof that Malthus failed to

recognize the importance of technology in raising the carrying capacity of the Earth. Still

higher population numbers, they suggest, are sustainable, perhaps even with improved

standards of living for all.

G. Population Prospects

Regardless of population philosophies, theories, or cultural norms, the fact

remains that many or most developing countries are showing significantly declining

population growth rates. Global fertility and birth rates are falling to an extent not

anticipated by pessimistic Malthusians and at a pace that suggests a peaking of world

population numbers sooner—and at lower totals—than previously projected and possible

decline in the developed world. In all world regions, steady and continuous fertility

declines have been recorded over the past years, reducing fertility from global 5-children-

per-woman levels in the early 1950s to 2.5 per woman today. Most continuing population

growth in developed countries is due to momentum from the past, and aging will be an

inevitable consequence of the recent changes in fertility patterns.

For much of the last half of the 20th century, demographers and economists

focused on a “population explosion” and its implied threat of a world with too many

people and too few resources of food and minerals to sustain them. In the 21st century,

those fears were replaced by a new prediction of world regions with too few rather than

too many people. That possibility was suggested by two related trends. The first became

apparent by 1970 when total fertility rates (TFRs) of 19 countries, almost all of them in

Europe, had fallen below the replacement level—the level of fertility at which

populations replace themselves—of 2.1. Simultaneously, Europe’s population pyramid

began to become noticeably distorted, with a smaller proportion of young and a growing

share of middle-aged and retirement-age inhabitants. The decrease in native working-age

cohorts had already, by 1970, encouraged the influx of non-European “guest workers”

whose labor was needed to maintain economic growth and to sustain the generous

security provisions guaranteed to what was becoming the oldest population of any

continent.

Many countries of Western and Eastern Europe sought to reverse their birth rate

declines by adopting pronatalist policies. The communist states of the East rewarded

pregnancies and births with generous family allowances, free medical and hospital care,

extended maternity leaves, and child care. France, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, and

others gave similar bonuses or awards for first, second, and later births. Despite those

inducements, however, reproduction rates continued to fall. By the early 21st century,

every European country and territory had fertility rates below replacement levels. The

personal decisions that produced sub-replacement fertility were influenced by cultural

changes, increased educational levels of women, opportunities for women to work in

challenging careers, and the increasing cost of rearing children. Cultural expectations

about ideal family size have shifted downward, and an increasing number of adults are

choosing personal pursuits over family obligations. The effect on national growth

prospects has been striking. Every country in eastern Europe and most in southern Europe

are projected to shrink in population by 2050. Germany’s willingness to accept more than

one million Syrian refugees in 2015 to 2016 was strongly influenced by the country’s

prospect of population decline. Europe as a whole is forecast to shrink in population by

mid-century. “In demographic terms,” France’s prime minister remarked, “Europe is

vanishing.”

Reducing fertility levels to the replacement level of about 2.1 births per woman

does not mean an immediate end to population growth. Because of the age composition

of many societies, births will exceed deaths even as fertility rates per woman decline. The

reason is to be found in population (or demographic) momentum, which is similar to a car

continuing to coast for some time after the driver has lifted their foot from the accelerator

pedal. The key to momentum is the age structure of a country’s population.

Eventually, of course, young populations grow older, and even the youthful

developing countries are beginning to face the consequences of that reality. The problems

of a rapidly aging population that already confront the industrialized economies are now

being realized in the developing world as well. Throughout human history, young people

outnumbered the elderly; sometime between 2015 and 2020, persons 65 years and older

surpassed those under 5 years of age. Europe is the oldest world region and Africa is the

youngest. Japan leads the world in the percentage of its population aged 65 and older,

Italy and Germany are close behind. The progression toward older populations is

considered irreversible, the result of longer life expectancies and the now-global

demographic transition from high to low levels of fertility and mortality. The youthful

majorities of the past are unlikely to occur again.

H. Classification of Languages

On a clear, dark night, the unaided eye can distinguish between 4,000 and 6,000

stars, a number comparable to some estimates of the probable total number of the world’s

languages. In reality, no precise figure is possible, for even today in Africa, Latin

America, New Guinea, and elsewhere, linguists race to identify and classify the tongues

spoken by isolated peoples before some disappear. In the broadest sense, language is any

systematic method of communicating ideas, attitudes, or intent through the use of

mutually understood signs, sounds, or gestures. For our geographic purposes, we may

define language as an organized system of spoken words by which people communicate

with one another with mutual comprehension. But such a definition fails to recognize the

gradations among languages or to grasp the varying degrees of mutual comprehension

between two or more of them. The language commonly called Chinese, for example, is

more properly seen as a group of distinct but related languages— Mandarin, Cantonese,

Hakka, and others—that are as different from one another as are such comparably related

European languages as Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian. Chinese has uniformity

only in the fact that all of the varied Chinese languages are written alike. No matter how

it is pronounced, the same symbol for house or for rice, for example, is recognized by all

literate speakers of any Chinese language variant.

Languages differ greatly in their relative importance, if “importance” can be taken

to mean the number of people using them. More than half of the world’s inhabitants are

native speakers of just eight of its thousands of tongues, and at least half regularly use or

have competence in just four of them. That restricted language dominance reflects the

reality that the world’s linguistic diversity is rapidly shrinking. Of the at most 6,900

tongues still remaining, more than half are no longer being learned by children or used in

everyday life and are endangered. One estimate anticipates that no more than 600 of the

world’s current living languages will still be in existence in 2100.

Family relationship between languages can be recognized through similarities in

their vocabulary and grammar. By tracing regularities of sound changes in different

languages back through time, linguists are able to reconstruct earlier forms of words and,

eventually, determine a word’s original form before it underwent alteration and

divergence. Such a reconstructed earlier form is said to belong to a protolanguage. In the

case of the Romance languages, of course, the well-known ancestral tongue was Latin,

which needs no such reconstruction. Its root relationship to the Romance languages is

suggested by modern variants of panis, the Latin word for “bread”: pane (Italian), pain

(French), pan (Spanish), pão (Portuguese), pâine (Romanian). In other language families,

similar word relationships are less confidently traced to their protolanguage roots. For

example, the Germanic languages, including English, German, Dutch, and the

Scandinavian tongues, are related descendants of a less well-known protoGermanic

language spoken by peoples who lived in southern Scandinavia and along the North Sea

and Baltic coasts from the Netherlands to western Poland. The classification of languages

by origin and historical relationship is called a genetic classification.

The present world distribution of major language families (Figure 5.4) records not

only the migrations and conquests of our linguistic ancestors but also the continuing

dynamic pattern of recent human movement, settlement, and colonizations. Indo-

European languages have been carried far beyond their Eurasian homelands from the

16th century onward by western European colonizers in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and

Australasia. In the process of linguistic imposition and adoption, innumerable indigenous

languages and language groups have been modified or totally lost. Most of the estimated

1,000 to 2,000 Amerindian tongues of the Western Hemisphere disappeared in the face of

European conquest and settlement.

Language diffusion represents the increase or relocation over time in the

geographic area within which a language is spoken. The Bantu of Africa or the English-

speaking settlers of North America displaced preexisting populations and replaced the

languages previously spoken in the areas of penetration. Therefore, we find one

explanation of the spread of language families to new areas of occurrence in massive

population relocations such as those accompanying the colonization of the Americas or of

Australia. That is, languages may spread through migration in a process called relocation

diffusion.

Latin, however, replaced earlier Celtic languages in western Europe not by force

of numbers—Roman legionnaires, administrators, and settlers never represented a

majority population—but by the gradual abandonment of their former languages by

native populations brought under the influence and control of the Roman Empire and,

later, of the Western Christian church. Adoption rather than eviction of language was the

rule followed in perhaps the majority of historical and contemporary instances of

language spread. Knowledge and use of the language of a dominating culture may be

seen as a necessity when that language is the medium of commerce, law, civilization, and

personal prestige. Usually, those who are in or aspire to positions of importance are the

first to adopt the new language of control and prestige. Later, through schooling, daily

contact, and business or social necessity, other, lower social strata of society may

gradually be absorbed into the expanding pool of language adopters. It was on that basis,

not through numerical superiority, that Indo-European tongues were dispersed throughout

Europe and to distant India, Iran, and Armenia. Likewise, Arabic became widespread in

western Asia and North Africa not through massive population relocations but through

conquest, religious conversion, and dominating culture. Thus, languages may spread

through expansion diffusion as they acquire new speakers.

Hierarchical diffusion of an official or prestigious language within urban centers

and centers of power has occurred in many societies. In India during the 19th century, the

English established an administrative and judicial system that put a very high premium

on their language as the sole medium of education, administration, trade, and commerce.

Proficiency in it was the hallmark of the cultured and educated person (as knowledge of

Sanskrit and Persian had been under previous conquerors of India). English, French,

Dutch, Portuguese, and other languages introduced during the age of empire retain a

position of prestige and even status as the official language in multilingual societies, even

after independence has been achieved by former colonies. In Uganda and other former

British possessions in Africa, a stranger may be addressed in English by one who wishes

to display his or her education and social status, though standard Swahili, a second

language for many different culture groups, may be chosen if certainty of communication

is more important than prestige.

Migration, segregation, and isolation give rise to separate, mutually unintelligible

languages. Changes occur naturally in word meaning, pronunciation, vocabulary, and

syntax (the way words are put together in phrases and sentences). Because they are

gradual, minor, and readily adopted, such changes tend to go unnoticed. Yet,

cumulatively, they can result in language change so great that over the course of

centuries, an essentially new language has been created. The English of 17th-century

Shakespearean writings or the King James Bible (1611) sounds stilted to our ears. Few of

us can easily read Chaucer’s 14th-century Canterbury Tales, and the 8th-century Beowulf

is practically unintelligible.

English itself is a product of change and diffusion, an offspring of proto-

Germanic (see Figure 5.3) descending through the dialects brought to England in the 5th

and 6th centuries by conquering Danish and North German Frisians, Jutes, Angles, and

Saxons. Earlier Celtic-speaking inhabitants found refuge in the north and west of Britain

and in the rugged uplands of what are now Scotland and Wales. Each of the transplanted

tongues established its own area of dominance, but the West Saxon dialect of southern

England emerged in the 9th and 10th centuries as Standard Old English on the strength of

its literary richness.

It lost its supremacy after the Norman Conquest of 1066, as the center of learning

and culture shifted northeastward from Winchester to London, and French rather than

English became the language of the nobility and the government. When the tie between

France and England was severed after the loss of Normandy (1204), French fell into

disfavor and English again became the dominant tongue, although now as the French-

enriched Middle English used by Geoffrey Chaucer and mandated as the official

language of the law courts by the Statute of Pleading (1362). During the 15th and 16th

centuries, English as spoken in London emerged as the basic form of Early Modern

English.

People who speak a common language such as English are members of a speech

community, but membership does not necessarily imply linguistic uniformity. A speech

community usually possesses both a standard language—comprising the accepted

community norms of syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation— and a number of more or

less distinctive dialects reflecting the ordinary speech of regional, social, professional, or

other subdivisions of the general population.

A dialect may become the standard language through connection with the speech

of the most prestigious and most powerful members of the community. A rich literary

tradition may help establish its primacy, and its adoption as the accepted written and

spoken norm in administration, economic life, and education will solidify its position,

eliminating deviant, nonstandard forms. The dialect that emerges as the basis of a

country’s standard language is often the one identified with its capital or center of power

at the time of national development. Standard French is based on the dialect of the Paris

region, a variant that assumed dominance in the latter half of the 12th century and was

made the only official language in 1539. Castilian Spanish became the standard after

1492 with the Castile-led reconquest of Spain from the Moors and the export of the

dialect to the Americas during the 16th century. Its present form, however, is a modified

version associated not with Castile but with Madrid, the modern capital of Spain.

Standard Russian is identified with the speech patterns of the former capital, St.

Petersburg, and Moscow, the current capital. Modern Standard Chinese is based on the

Mandarin dialect of Beijing. In England, Received Pronunciation— “Oxford English,”

the speech of educated residents of London and southeastern England and used by the

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)—was until recently the accepted standard. It is

now being modified, or replaced by a dialect called “Estuary English,” which refers to the

region around the lower River Thames in southeastern England.

Just as no two individuals speak exactly the same, all but the smallest and most

closely knit speech communities display recognizable speech variants called dialects.

Simply ordering a carbonated beverage in different parts of the United States offers

plenty of proof of regional speech variation (Figure 5.9). Vocabulary, pronunciation,

rhythm, and the speed at which the language is spoken may set groups of speakers apart

from one another and, to a trained observer, clearly mark the origin of the speaker. In

George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, on which the musical My Fair Lady was based,

Henry Higgins—a professor of phonetics—is able to identify the London neighborhood

of origin of a flower girl by listening to her vocabulary and accent. Sometimes, such

variants are totally acceptable; in others, they mark the speaker as a social, cultural, or

regional “outsider” or “inferior.” In the song “Why Can’t the English?” Professor

Higgins proclaims, “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him, the

moment he begins to talk he makes some other Englishman despise him.”

I. Language, Territoriality, and Cultural Identity

The designation of more than one official language does not always satisfy the

ambitions of linguistically distinct groups for recognition and autonomy. Language is a

defining characteristic of ethnic and cultural identity. Languages contain unique

expressions of a culture’s heritage. Thus, many groups from around the world believe

that losing their linguistic identity would be the worst and final evidence of

discrimination and subjugation. Language has often been the focus of separatist

movements among spatially distinct, minority linguistic groups.

In Europe, France, Spain, Britain—and Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union before

their dismemberment—experienced such language “revolts” and acknowledged,

sometimes belatedly, the local concerns that they express. After 1970, France dropped its

ban on teaching regional tongues and Spain relaxed its earlier total rejection of Basque

and Catalan as regional languages, recognizing Catalan as a co-official language in its

home region in northeastern Spain. In the United Kingdom, parliamentary debates

concerning greater regional autonomy have resulted in bilingual road and informational

signs in Wales, a publicly supported Welsh-language television channel, and compulsory

teaching of Welsh in all schools in Wales.

In fact, throughout Europe nonofficial native regional languages have increasingly

not only been tolerated, but encouraged as a buffer against the loss of regional institutions

and traditions threatened by a multinational “superstate” under the EU. The Council of

Europe, a 41-nation organization promoting democracy and human rights, has adopted a

charter pledging encouragement of the use of indigenous languages in schools, the media,

and public life. The language charter acknowledges that cultural diversity is part of

Europe’s wealth and heritage and that its retention strengthens, not weakens, the separate

states of the continent and the larger European culture realm as a whole. In North

America, the designation of French as the official language of the Canadian province of

Quebec reinforces and sustains the distinctive cultural and territorial identity that is so

important to the Québecois. Quebec’s language laws enforce a French appearance to the

landscape, requiring that billboards and commercial signs give priority to the French

language.

Even more than in its role in ethnic identity and separatism, language embodies

the culture complex of a people, reflecting environment, experience, and shared

understandings. Arabic has 80 words related to the camel, an animal on which a regional

culture relied for food, transport, and labor, and Japanese contains more than 20 words

for various types of rice. Russian is rich in terms for ice and snow, indicative of the

prevailing climate of its linguistic cradle; Hawaiians reportedly have 108 words for sweet

potato, 65 for fishing net, and 47 for banana. The 15,000 tributaries and subtributaries of

the Amazon River have obliged the Brazilians to enrich Portuguese with words that go

beyond river. Among them are paraná (a stream that leaves and reenters the same river),

igarapé (an offshoot that runs until it dries up), and furo (a waterway that connects two

rivers).

Most—perhaps all—cultures display subtle or pronounced differences in ways

males and females use language. Most have to do with vocabulary and with grammatical

forms peculiar to individual cultures. For example, among the Caribs of the Caribbean,

the Zulu of Africa, and other groups, men have words that women through custom or

taboo are not permitted to use, and women have words and phrases that the men never

use “or they would be laughed to scorn,” an informant reports. The greater and more

inflexible the difference in the social roles of men and women in a particular culture, the

greater and more rigid are the observed linguistic differences between the sexes.

J. Toponymy

Toponyms—place names—are language on the landscape, the record of past

inhabitants whose naming practices endure, perhaps corrupted and disguised, as

reminders of their existence. Toponymy is the study of place names, a special interest of

cultural geography. It is also a powerful tool of historical geography, for place names

remain a part of the cultural landscape long after the name givers have passed from the

scene. In England, for example, place names ending in chester (as in Winchester and

Manchester) evolved from the Latin castra, meaning “camp.” Common Anglo-Saxon

suffixes for tribal and family settlements were ing (people or family) and ham (hamlet or,

perhaps, meadow), as in Birmingham or Gillingham. Norse and Danish settlers

contributed place names ending in thwaite (“meadow”) and others denoting such

landscape features as fell (an uncultivated hill) and beck (a small brook). The Celts,

present in Europe for more than 1,000 years before Roman times, left their tribal names

in corrupted form on territories and settlements taken over by their successors. The

Arabs, sweeping out from Arabia across North Africa and into Iberia, left their imprint in

place names to mark their conquest and control. Cairo means “victorious,” Sudan is “the

land of the blacks,” and Sahara is “wasteland” or “wilderness.” In Spain, a corrupted

version of the Arabic wadi, “watercourse,” is found in Guadalajara and Guadalquivir.

In the New World, many groups placed names on landscape features and new

settlements. In doing so, they remembered their homes and homelands, honored their

monarchs and heroes, borrowed and mispronounced from rivals, followed fads, recalled

the Bible and Classical Greek and Roman places, and adopted and distorted Amerindian

names. Homelands were recalled in New England, New France, or New Holland; settlers’

hometown memories brought Boston, New Bern, New Rochelle, and Cardiff from

England, Switzerland, France, and Wales. Monarchs were remembered in Virginia for the

Virgin Queen Elizabeth, Carolina for one English king, Georgia for another, and

Louisiana for a king of France. Washington, D.C.; Jackson, cities in Mississippi and

Michigan; Austin, Texas; and Lincoln, Illinois memorialized heroes and leaders. Names

given by the Dutch in New York were often distorted by the English; Breukelyn,

Vlissingen, and Haarlem became Brooklyn, Flushing, and Harlem. French names

underwent similar twisting or translation, and Spanish names were adopted, altered, or,

later, put into such bilingual combinations as Hermosa Beach. Amerindian tribal names

—Yenrish, Maha, and Kansa— were modified, first by French and later by English

speakers—to Erie, Omaha, and Kansas. A faddish “Classical Revival” after the

Revolution gave us Troy, Athens, Rome, Sparta, and other ancient town names and later

spread them across the country. Bethlehem, Ephrata, Nazareth, and Salem came from the

Bible. Popular place names diffused westward across the United States frontier.

Place names, whatever their language of origin, frequently consist of two parts:

generic (classifying) and specific (modifying or particular). Big River in English is

translated into Rio Grande in Spanish, Mississippi in Algonquin, and Ta Ho in Chinese.

The order of generic and specific, however, may alter among languages and give a clue to

the group originally bestowing the place name. In English, the specific usually comes

first: Hudson River, Bunker Hill, Long Island, and so on. When, in the United States, we

find River Rouge or Isle Royale, we also find evidence of French settlement— the French

reverse the naming order. Some generic names can be used to trace the migration paths

across the United States of the three Eastern dialect groups (see Figure 5.10). Northern

dialect settlers tended to carry with them their habit of naming a community and calling

its later neighbors by the same name modified by direction—Lansing and East Lansing,

for example. Brook is found in the New England settlement area, run is from the Midland

dialect, and bayou and branch are from the Southern area.

In northern Canada, Indian and Inuit (Eskimo) place names are returning. The

town of Frobisher Bay has reverted to its Eskimo name Iqaluit (“place of the fish”);

Resolute Bay has become Kaujuitok (“place where the sun never rises”) in Inuktitut, the

lingua franca of the Canadian Eskimos; the Jean Marie River has returned to

Tthedzehk’edeli (“river that flows over clay”), its earlier Slavey name. These and other

official name changes reflect a decision that community preference will be the standard

for all place names, no matter how entrenched European versions might be. Decisions to

rename places recognize the importance of language as a powerful unifying thread in

peoples’ culture complexes (see the feature “Changing Toponyms.”). Language may

serve as a key marker of ethnicity and a fiercely defended symbol of the history and

individuality of a distinctive social group. Hispanic Americans demand the right of

instruction in their own language, and Basques wage civil war to achieve a linguistically

based separatism. Indian states were adjusted to coincide with language boundaries, and

the Polish National Catholic Church was created in America, not Poland, to preserve

Polish language and culture in an alien environment.

K. Religion and Culture

Unlike language, which is an attribute of all people, religion varies in its cultural

role—dominating some societies, unimportant or denied totally in others. All societies

have belief systems—common understandings, expectations, and objects held in high

regard—that unite their members and set them off from other culture groups. Such a

value system is termed a religion when it involves practices of formal or informal

worship and addresses questions of meaning and ultimate significance. In a more

inclusive sense, religion may be viewed as a unified system of beliefs and practices that

join all those who adhere to them into a single moral community. Religion can intimately

affect all facets of a culture. Religious belief is by definition an element of the ideological

subsystem; formalized and organized religion is an institutional expression of the

sociological subsystem. And religious beliefs strongly influence attitudes toward the use

and development of the technological subsystem.

Nonreligious belief and value systems exist—humanism or Marxism, for example

—that are just as binding on the societies that espouse them as are more traditional

religious beliefs. Even societies that largely reject religion—that are officially atheistic or

secular—may be strongly influenced by traditional values and customs set by predecessor

religions, in days of work and rest, for example, or in legal principles. Because religions

are formalized views about the relation of the individual to this world and to the sacred,

each carries a distinct conception of the meaning and value of this life, and most contain

rules for living. These rules for living become interwoven with the traditions of a culture.

For example, the Muslim observance of daily prayers led to a defining visual feature of

Muslim countries—minaret towers on mosques from which the call to prayer is issued

five times each day.

In many countries, there is a state religion—that is, religious and political

structures are intertwined. Islam is the most common official state religion. By their

official names, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan

proclaim their close links between religion and government. Despite declining support,

many European countries still have an official state Christian church. Buddhism has been

the state religion in Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand. Despite Indonesia’s overwhelming

Muslim majority, that country sought and formerly found domestic harmony by

recognizing five official religions and a state ideology—pancasila—whose first tenet is

belief in one god.

The landscape imprint of religion is sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle (see

feature “Religious Attire in Secular Spaces”). The structures of religious worship—

temples, churches, mosques, stupas, or cathedrals—landscape symbols such as shrines or

statues, and such associated land uses as monasteries may lend a regionally distinctive

cultural character to an area. “Landscapes of death” may also be visible regional

variables, for different religions and cultures dispose of their dead in different manners.

Cemeteries are significant and reserved land uses among Christians, Jews, and Muslims

who typically bury their deceased with headstones or other markers and monuments to

mark graves. Egyptian pyramids or elaborate mausoleums like the Taj Mahal are more

grandiose structures of entombment and remembrance. On the other hand, Hindus and

Buddhists have traditionally cremated their dead and scattered their ashes, leaving no

landscape evidence or imprint.

Religions are cultural innovations. They may be unique to a single culture group,

closely related to the faiths professed in nearby areas, or derived from belief systems in a

distant location. Although interconnections among religions can often be discerned—as

Christianity and Islam both trace descent from Judaism—family groupings are not as

useful to us in classifying religions as they were in studying languages. A distinction

between monotheism, belief in a single deity, and polytheism, belief in many gods, is

frequent, but less important to understanding the geography of religion. Simple territorial

categories have been offered recognizing origin areas of religions: Western versus

Eastern, for example, or African, Far Eastern, or Indian. With proper detail such

distinctions may inform us where particular religions had their roots but do not reveal

their courses of development, paths of diffusion, or current distributions.

Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are the major universalizing religions, faiths

that claim applicability to all humans and proselytize; that is, they seek to transmit their

beliefs through missionary work and conversion. Membership in universalizing religions

is open to anyone who chooses to make some sort of symbolic commitment, such as the

initiation ritual of baptism for Christians. No one is excluded because of nationality,

ethnicity, or previous religious belief. Ethnic religions have strong territorial and cultural

group identification. One usually becomes a member of an ethnic religion by birth or by

adoption of a complex lifestyle and cultural identity, not by simple declaration of faith.

These religions do not usually proselytize, and their members form distinctive closed

communities identified with a particular ethnic group or political unit. An ethnic religion

—for example, Judaism, Indian Hinduism, or Japanese Shinto—is an integral element of

a specific culture; to be part of the religion is to be immersed in the totality of the culture.

Tribal, or traditional religions, are special forms of ethnic religions distinguished

by their small size, their unique identity with localized culture groups not yet fully

absorbed into modern society, and their close ties to nature. Animism is the name given

to their belief that life exists in all objects, from rocks and trees to lakes and mountains,

or that such inanimate objects are the abode of the dead, spirits, or gods. Shamanism is a

form of tribal religion that involves community acceptance of a shaman, a religious

leader, healer, and worker of magic who, through special powers, can intercede with and

interpret the spirit world.

L. Patterns and Flows

The nature of the different classes of religions is reflected in their distributions

over the world and in their number of adherents. Universalizing religions tend to be

expansionary, carrying their message to new peoples and lands. Ethnic religions, unless

their adherents are dispersed, tend to be regionally confined or to expand only slowly and

over long periods. Tribal religions tend to contract spatially as their adherents are

incorporated into modern society and converted by proselytizing faiths. As we expect in

human geography, the map records only the latest stage of a constantly changing cultural

reality. While established religious institutions tend to be conservative and resistant to

change, religion is a dynamic culture trait. Personal and collective beliefs may alter in

response to developing individual and societal needs and challenges. Religions may be

imposed by conquest, adopted by conversion, and recede or persevere in the face of

surrounding pluralism, hostility or indifference.

The world map of religious affiliation offers a global view of the spatial

distribution of major religions (Figure 5.18). More than half of the world’s population

adheres to one of the major universalizing religions: Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism. Of

these three, Figure 5.18 indicates, Christianity and Islam are most widespread; Buddhism

is largely an Asian religion. Hinduism, the largest ethnic faith, is essentially confined to

the Indian subcontinent, showing the spatial restriction characteristic of most ethnic and

traditional religions even when found outside of their homeland area. Small Hindu

emigrant communities in Africa, southeastern Asia, Britain, or the United States, for

example, tend to remain isolated even in densely crowded urban areas. Although it is not

localized beyond Israel, Judaism is also included among the ethnic religions because of

its identification with a particular people and cultural tradition.

Extensive areas of the world are peopled by those who practice tribal or

traditional religions, often in concert with the universalizing religions to which they have

been outwardly converted. Tribal religions are found principally among peoples who

have not yet been fully absorbed into modern cultures and economies or who are on the

margins of more populous and advanced societies. Although the areas assigned to tribal

religions in Figure 5.18 are significant, the number of adherents is small and declining.

Table 5.2 presents a reasonable ranking of the major religions of the world by estimated

number of adherents. The list is not exhaustive; the World Christian Encyclopedia

tabulates 10,000 distinct religions, including nearly 12,000 Christian denominations.

The world map misses finer-scale detail and the reality of religious diversity in a

given location. For example, the map identifies western Canada as mainly Protestant

Christian, while a trip to the Vancouver suburb of Richmond, British Columbia, would

complicate that picture. Lined up next to one another on a short stretch of a single street,

one finds a Hindu temple, a Sikh temple, a Buddhist temple, a Buddhist monastery, an

Islamic mosque, several Protestant Christian Chinese churches, a Muslim high school,

and a Christian high school. Further research would reveal that a high percentage of

Vancouver residents claim no religious adherence at all. Religious diversity within

countries may reflect the degree of toleration that a majority culture affords minority

religions. In predominantly Muslim Indonesia (55 percent to 88 percent of the population,

depending on the definition), Christian Bataks, Hindu Balinese, and Muslim Javanese for

many years lived in peaceful coexistence. By contrast, the fundamentalist Islamic regime

in Iran has persecuted and executed those of the Baha’i faith. The world map of religion

has other limitations. Data on religious affiliation are imprecise because most nations do

not have religious censuses, and religious groups report their membership differently.

When communism was supreme in the former Soviet Union and Eastern European

countries, official atheism dissuaded many from openly professing or practicing any

religion; in nominally Christian Europe and North America, many who are counted as

Christians are not active church members and may have renounced religion altogether.

M. The Principal Religions

Each of the major religions has its own mix of cultural values and expressions, its

own pattern of innovation and spatial diffusion (Figure 5.19), and its unique impact on

the cultural landscape. Together, they contribute importantly to the worldwide pattern of

cultural diversity. We begin our review of world religions with Judaism, whose belief in a

single God laid the foundation for both Christianity and Islam. Unlike its universalizing

offspring, Judaism is closely identified with a single ethnic group. It emerged some 3,000

to 4,000 years ago in the Near East, one of the ancient culture hearth regions (see Figure

2.15). Early Near Eastern civilizations, including those of Sumeria, Babylonia, and

Assyria, developed writing, codified laws, and formalized polytheistic religions featuring

rituals of sacrifice and celebrations of the cycle of seasons.

Christianity had its origin in the life and teachings of Jesus, a Jewish preacher of

the 1st century of the Common Era, whom his followers believed was the Christ, the

savior promised in the Jewish Scriptures. Christians understand their religion as fulfilling

the promises of Judaism and extending them to all humankind rather than to just a chosen

people. As a universal religion, Christianity spread quickly in both the eastern and

western parts of the Roman Empire, carried by missionaries to major cities and ports

along the excellent system of Roman roads and sea lanes (Figure 5.21). Expansion

diffusion followed the establishment of missions and colonies of converts in locations

distant from the hearth region. Important among them were the urban areas that became

administrative seats of the new religion. For the Western Church, Rome was the principal

center for dispersal, through hierarchical diffusion, to provincial capitals and smaller

Roman settlements of Europe. From those nodes and from monasteries established in

pagan rural areas, contagious diffusion disseminated Christianity throughout the

continent. The acceptance of Christianity as the state religion of the empire by the

Emperor Constantine in 313 ce was also an expression of hierarchical diffusion of great

importance in establishing the faith throughout the Roman world. Finally, and much later,

relocation diffusion, missionary efforts, and in Spanish colonies, forced conversion of

Native Americans brought the faith to the New World with European settlers.

All of the principal world religions have experienced theological, doctrinal, or

political divisions; frequently these have spatial expression. In Christianity, the early split

between the Western and Eastern Churches was initially unrelated to dogma but

nonetheless resulted in a territorial separation still evident on the world map. The later

subdivision of the Western Church into Roman Catholic and Protestant branches gave a

more intricate spatial patterning in Western Europe that can be only generally suggested

at the scale shown in Figure 5.18. Still more intermixed are the areal segregations and

concentrations that have resulted from the denominational subdivisions of Protestantism.

Islam—the word means “submission” (to the will of God)— springs from the

same Judaic roots as Christianity and embodies similar monotheistic beliefs. Muhammed

is revered as the prophet of Allah (God), succeeding and completing the work of earlier

prophets of Judaism and Christianity, including Moses, David, and Jesus. The Koran, the

holy book of the Muslims, contains not only rules of worship and doctrine, but also

instructions on the conduct of human affairs. All Muslims are expected to observe the

five pillars of the faith: (1) repeated saying of the basic creed; (2) prayers five times daily

at appointed times; (3) a month of daytime fasting during Ramadan; (4) almsgiving; and,

(5) if possible, a pilgrimage to Mecca. Two of the five pillars of Islam are explicitly

geographical: prayers are done facing Mecca and the pilgrimage to the sacred city of

Mecca is among the world’s greatest gatherings (Figure 5.25). To pray facing Mecca, the

direction known as Qiblah, has traditionally required Muslim scholars to calculate a great

circle route. Thus, for example, most North American Muslims pray facing northeast

because that is the shortest route to Mecca (try it by stretching a string from North

America to Saudi Arabia on a globe).

Hinduism is the world’s oldest major religion. Though it has no datable founding

event or initial prophet, some evidence traces its origin back 4,000 or more years.

Hinduism is a polytheistic religion woven into an intricate web of philosophical, social,

economic, and artistic elements that comprise a distinctive Indian civilization. Its

estimated 800 million adherents are largely confined to India, where it claims 80 percent

of the population.

The largest and most influential of the dissident movements within Hinduism has

been Buddhism, a universalizing faith founded in the 6th century bce in northern India by

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha (Enlightened One). The Buddha’s teachings were more

a moral philosophy that offered an explanation for evil and human suffering than a formal

religion. He viewed the road to enlightenment and salvation to lie in understanding the

“four noble truths”: existence involves suffering; suffering is the result of desire; pain

ceases when desire is destroyed; the destruction of desire comes through knowledge of

correct behavior and correct thoughts. The Buddha’s message was open to all castes,

raising Buddhism from a philosophy to a universalizing religion.

When Buddhism reached China from the south some 1,500 to 2,000 years ago and

was carried to Japan from Korea in the 7th century, it encountered and later amalgamated

with already wellestablished belief systems. The Far Eastern ethnic religions are

syncretisms (combinations of different beliefs and practices). In China, the union was

with Confucianism and Taoism, themselves becoming intermingled by the time of

Buddhism’s arrival. In Japan, it was with Shinto, a polytheistic animism and shamanism.

One cannot assume that all people within a mapped religious region are adherents of the

designated faith, or that membership in a religious community means active participation

in its belief system. Secularism, a weakening of the influence of religion and an

indifference to or rejection of religious belief, is an increasing part of many modern

societies. The population of nonreligious persons is most pronounced in the industrialized

nations and those now or formerly under communist regimes. In Britain, for example,

about half the population attended church regularly in 1851 but that figure is now about 8

percent. While the Church of England’s parish churches are an enduring feature of the

rural landscape, vacant churches are also a common landscape feature, especially in

urban areas. It is not uncommon to see once-grand churches converted to arts facilities,

stores, or restaurants, or simply boarded up.

Module 3_Week 3_Population, Languages, and World Religion_Human Geography

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