Cultural Landscapes, Language, and Religious Geography

A cultural landscape is the visible imprint of human activity and culture on the natural environment, such as fields, villages, buildings, roads and religious sites, while the geography of language and religion studies how languages and faiths are distributed across the world, how they spread and how they shape places and identity. In brief: the geographer Carl Sauer summarized the idea in 1925: culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium and the cultural landscape is the result. About 7,000 languages are spoken in the world, grouped in families, and the main religions are classified as universalizing (such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, which seek converts) or ethnic (such as Hinduism and Judaism, which are linked to particular peoples and places).

Language and religion are two of the most important markers of cultural identity, and they leave visible and invisible marks on the land. This guide explains cultural landscapes, the geography of language, the geography of religion, compares the major world religions in a table, works through calculations, outlines the history and corrects common mistakes.

What are cultural landscapes?

Cultural landscapes reflect how people use land and what they value. Signs include the patterns of fields (the long narrow strips in medieval Europe, the square sections of the American Midwest), the type of settlement (clustered villages or scattered farms), architecture (building materials, roof shapes, styles), land use such as rice terraces and vineyards, transport routes, place names and religious buildings. In China, the layout of traditional cities follows ideas about harmony and orientation, and in the Islamic world, mosques and bazaars shape the centers of old towns. Landscapes also show the layers of history: Roman roads in Britain, Spanish colonial grids in Latin America and Soviet apartment blocks in Eastern Europe. UNESCO has recognized “cultural landscapes” as a category of World Heritage since 1992.

How is language distributed?

Ethnologue lists around 7,100 living languages, but the distribution is very uneven: a few languages are spoken by billions, and thousands are spoken by very small groups. Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers (about 900 million or more), followed by Spanish, English and Hindi, and English has the most speakers in total (roughly 1.5 billion) when second-language speakers are counted. Languages are grouped into families of related languages from a common ancestor. The Indo-European family, including English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian and German, has the most speakers, roughly 40% of the world’s population as native speakers. Other large families are Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Burmese), Niger-Congo (Swahili, Yoruba, Zulu), Afro-Asiatic (Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic), Austronesian (Indonesian, Tagalog, Malagasy), Dravidian (Tamil, Telugu) and Turkic.

Some places have great language diversity: Papua New Guinea has over 800 languages, and Indonesia and Nigeria have hundreds each. A lingua franca is used for communication between speakers of different languages, such as English, Swahili or Hindi. Around 40% of the world’s languages are thought to be endangered, usually because children no longer learn them, and a language disappears on average every few months. Language is also a political issue: countries choose official languages, and policies on education and the media affect which languages survive.

How is religion distributed?

Religions are classified as universalizing (they aim to appeal to all people and spread by conversion and missionary activity) or ethnic (linked to a particular group and place and spread mainly by migration and birth). They can also be monotheistic (belief in one god, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam), polytheistic (many gods, as in Hinduism) or non-theistic (such as most forms of Buddhism).

• Christianity: the largest, at about 2.3 billion followers (roughly 29–31% of the world), with Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox branches. It is dominant in Europe, the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Philippines.
• Islam: about 2 billion (around a quarter), mostly Sunni with a Shia minority. It is dominant in North Africa, the Middle East, Central and South Asia and Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population, and it is the fastest growing major religion.
• Hinduism: about 1.2 billion (around 15%), concentrated in India and Nepal.
• Buddhism: a few hundred million, in East, Southeast and parts of South Asia.
• Other groups: Judaism (about 15 million), Sikhism, Shinto, Taoism, indigenous and folk religions, and the religiously unaffiliated, which are a large and growing group, roughly a fifth to a quarter of the world, mostly in China, Europe and North America.

Religions have hearths, places of origin: Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Middle East, Hinduism and Buddhism in South Asia. They spread by relocation (migration), expansion (contact and conversion) and sometimes by conquest or trade. Sacred places, such as Mecca, Jerusalem, Varanasi, Bodh Gaya and Lourdes, attract pilgrims.

How do language and religion shape landscapes?

Religion shapes the landscape through places of worship (churches, mosques, temples, shrines), cemeteries, dietary rules that affect farming (such as the absence of pigs in many Muslim and Jewish areas, and of cattle slaughter in much of Hindu India), holidays, dress and the calendar. Language appears in place names, signs and the media, and in the borders and politics of regions such as Quebec, Catalonia and Belgium. Language and religion may reinforce each other and strengthen identity, but they can also be the basis of tension when groups compete for recognition and power, as in parts of South Asia and the Balkans.

The major religions compared

Worked example: shares and diversity

1. Share of speakers: a language has 330 million native speakers in a world of 8,000 million people. Its share is 330 ÷ 8,000 = 4.1%.
2. Concentration of languages: if the top 20 languages are spoken by 4,000 million people out of 8,000 million, they account for 4,000 ÷ 8,000 = 50% of the population, although they are only 20 ÷ 7,100 = 0.28% of all languages.
3. Endangered languages: if 40% of 7,100 languages are endangered, there are 0.40 × 7,100 = 2,840 endangered languages.
4. Religious composition: a country of 50 million people has 31.5 million Christians, 10 million Muslims, 3 million unaffiliated and 5.5 million followers of other religions. The total is 31.5 + 10 + 3 + 5.5 = 50 million. The shares are 31.5 ÷ 50 = 63%, 10 ÷ 50 = 20%, 3 ÷ 50 = 6% and 5.5 ÷ 50 = 11%, which add up to 100%.
5. Diversity index: using 1 − Σ(share²) with shares of 0.63, 0.20, 0.06 and 0.11: 1 − (0.3969 + 0.04 + 0.0036 + 0.0121) = 1 − 0.4526 = 0.547, a moderately diverse country.
6. Decline of a minority language: if the number of speakers falls from 120,000 to 90,000 in 20 years, the decline is 30,000, or 25%. The average annual change is 0.75^1/20 − 1 = 0.9857 − 1 = −1.4% a year.

How did the geography of culture develop?

Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School in the 1920s and 1930s made the cultural landscape a central idea of cultural geography. Later geographers studied the diffusion of languages and religions, and the “new cultural geography” from the 1980s paid more attention to meaning, power and identity. Historically, languages spread with farming, conquest, trade and empires: Indo-European languages spread over Eurasia, Latin in the Roman Empire, Arabic with Islam, and English, Spanish, French and Portuguese through colonization. Missionaries and trade routes spread Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, and migration carried religions to new areas, so Hindu temples and mosques now stand in many Western cities.

Which mistakes are common?

Mistake 1: Assuming that language, religion and nation always coincide

People speaking the same language may follow different religions, and followers of the same religion may speak many languages. Arabic is spoken by Muslims, Christians and others, and Islam is practiced in many languages.

Mistake 2: Confusing language families with single languages

Indo-European is a family of hundreds of related languages. It is not one language.

Mistake 3: Thinking that universalizing religions have no ties to place

They have sacred places and strong regional patterns, even though they spread widely.

Mistake 4: Treating cultural landscapes as fixed

Landscapes change as populations, technology and values change, and old and new features exist together.