Cultural Differences & Regional Patterns - AP Human Geography

The Gender Inequality Index measures the disparity between the experiences of men and women in different countries around the world. It was created in 2010 by the United Nations Development Program and continues to be overseen by the United Nations.

Generally men score higher than women in almost all areas of gender inequality around the world, although this is becoming less and less the case in the developed world. The only category in which women routinely score higher than men throughout the majority of the world is in life expectancy. Women, in almost all areas of the world, regardless of income levels and levels of education, outlive men.

Of these options South America scores by far the highest in relative gender empowerment. Europe, particularly Western Europe, tends to score the highest; closely followed by North America and Australasia. From there it is a rather precipitous drop off to South America and parts of East Asia. This is followed by another substantial drop to South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East where gender empowerment is at its lowest.

In the waning months of World War I and the immediate aftermath of the conflict women achieved notable cultural and economic liberation. This continued into the 1920s, but was disrupted by the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929. Unemployment rose dramatically in the early years of the depression and, in an attempt to ensure as much employment as possible for men, most states in America prohibited women from working outside the home.

In several of the world’s wealthiest countries in the world literacy rates are very close to one hundred percent for both men and women. But, this is the exception rather than the rule as far as the world is concerned. Most of the world suffers from a gender gap in literacy rates, this is generally most pronounced in countries that are extremely poor, although a few of the world’s poorest countries have less of a gender gap in literacy rates than some of the world’s wealthier countries. How can we explain this? Well, the answer is that some cultures have certain social standards and expectations for women. Or, more accurately, some cultures have more strict social standards and expectations for women. The Islamic world, particularly the Middle East and parts of North Africa, experiences some of the worst rates of female literacy in the world, particularly when compared to male literacy rates in the same region.

Africa, home to over a thousand languages, has the most languages out of any continent. Many Africans speak two or more languages.

The lingua franca is the language of trade, used for merchants to communicate with others who do not speak their native language. In modern times, the lingua franca is English. English is taught in schools worldwide, and while it is not the most widely spoken language, it has become the language of trade worldwide.

Someone who is “bilingual” can speak two languages. For example, it is common for American children born to Latin-American immigrants to speak Spanish and English with equal fluency. They are said to be “bilingual.” Although someone who is bilingual may possess dual citizenship and may be born to parents of different ethnicities, this is not the definition of the word.

All of these languages are part of the Sino-Tibet family of languages except Russian, which is a variety of Old Slavic, which is part of the Indo-European language family. The Sino-Tibet language family is concentrated in east and southeast Asia. If it helps you remember “Sino” means concerned with or related to China.

Welsh, Irish, and Gaelic are considered part of the Celtic branch of Indo-European languages. Welsh is spoken by a minority of people in Wales, where the majority language is English. Welsh is fundamentally different in structure and sound than English. Both English and Welsh are, however, both part of the Indo-European language family so the difference is not nearly as great as the difference between, for instance, English and Thai.

Swahili is the most widely spoken language in the Niger-Congo language family, if the total number of speakers, rather than total number of native speakers is used as the primary determinant. It is spoken in Tanzania, Kenya, Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, and several other east African countries. It is the Lingua Franca of southeastern Africa.

A “creole” language is a language that has arisen from an earlier pidgin language and become the primary language for a specific cultural group. Creole languages are distinct from pidgin languages in that they are less fluid, more widely understood, and more defined linguistic features and boundaries. Class and cultural oppression may be factors in the development of a creole language, but they are not central factors to the definition of such languages.

All of these languages are part of the Latin branch of the Indo-European languages except Czech which is part of the Balto-Slavic language family along with Polish, Russian, and Bulgarian.

Mandarin, even though not spoken by all of the Chinese population, is nonetheless the most widely spoken language in the world. It has roughly a billion native speakers, far more than the roughly three-hundred and seventy-five million native speakers of English.

Indo-European, the language family that includes all European languages (which are widely spoken in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australasia) and Indian and Iranian, is spoken by slightly over fifty percent of the world’s population. The next largest is Sino-Tibet which is spoken by close to a quarter of the world’s population.

The most linguistically diverse regions, with the notable exception of a few nations in Oceania, are found in Africa and Asia. More specifically they are generally found in Sub-Saharan Central Africa and South and Southeast Asia. It is worth noting that in recent years the rate of linguistic diversity is declining even in these regions, as languages like English, French, Hindi, and Chinese extend their influence and wipe out local languages.

The word “Nostratic” is used to describe a hypothesized proto-macrolanguage family that was spoken by people somewhere in Asia roughly fifteen thousand years ago. According to the theory, all Indo-European, Dravidian, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, and Kartvelian languages derive from this one macrolanguage. The theory is widely contested by many geographers, but is extremely influential in the field of linguistic geography.

Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world. It is a reasonably small country, in relative land size and population size, but has over eight hundred spoken languages and several dead languages that are not spoken but are still understood. Papua New Guinea’s unique linguistic makeup is primarily a by-product of social customs that limit interactions between various tribal groups, as well as the geographic isolation of many regions of the country.

Persian is part of the Iranian language branch of the Indo-European language family. Yiddish, a High German language, and Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, are the only other languages on this list that are part of the Indo-European language family. Hebrew is a Semitic language, part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, and Tibetan is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family.

Africa, Asia, and Oceania are the three most linguistically diverse continents in the world. The least linguistically diverse is South America where Spanish is spoken throughout the continent, with the notable exception of Brazil where Portuguese is spoken. Linguistic diversity is a by-product of a region's historical trends. South America, once home to thousands of indigenous languages, was conquered by the Spanish and Portuguese in the era of European colonialism and those languages have grown in influence and homogeneity in the centuries since.