Describe the world distribution of major language families and religions, and distinguish ethnicity from nationality.
Culture -- the shared beliefs, customs, language, and practices of a group -- is one of the most powerful forces shaping how humans divide up the map. Linguists group the world's thousands of languages into families that share a common ancestor language. The Indo-European family, which includes the Romance branch (Spanish, French, Italian), the Germanic branch (English, German, Dutch), and the Slavic branch (Russian, Polish, Czech), is the most widely spoken family on Earth today. Other major families include Sino-Tibetan (Chinese languages), Afro-Asiatic (Arabic, Hebrew), Niger-Congo (hundreds of languages across Sub-Saharan Africa), and Austronesian (Indonesian, Filipino, and many Pacific Island languages). Where speakers of different native languages need to communicate, a lingua franca -- a shared common language -- often emerges, such as English or Swahili in international or regional trade.
This course studies religion the way a geographer studies anything else in human geography -- as a set of beliefs and practices with a place of origin, a history, and a present-day distribution across the map -- without judging which beliefs are true. Several major world religions trace to specific origin points: Hinduism developed over thousands of years in South Asia with no single founder; Judaism traces to the ancient Israelites of the Middle East; Buddhism began with the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama in South Asia around the 5th century BCE; Christianity began in the 1st century CE in Roman-ruled Judea and spread from Jerusalem outward; Islam began in 7th-century CE Arabia with the teachings of Muhammad, spreading from Mecca and Medina. Today these and many other traditions -- along with a growing share of people worldwide who identify with no religion -- are distributed unevenly across the map, a pattern this course returns to in nearly every region we study.
Ethnicity refers to a group sharing common ancestry, language, or customs; it is different from nationality, which is simply legal citizenship in a state, and different from race, a category based on physical characteristics that societies define in varying and often inconsistent ways. Many countries are multiethnic, containing several distinct ethnic groups within one set of borders, while some ethnic groups -- such as the Kurds or the Jewish diaspora -- have historically spanned many states without a matching nation-state of their own for much or all of their history.
Mastery looks like: They can name major language families and the geographic origin of several major world religions, and correctly distinguish ethnicity, nationality, and race.
Common stumbles: Treating one religion or language as the world default instead of one data point among many; confusing ethnicity with nationality.