CSS Geography Culture and Development Syllabus

Distinguish a pidgin from a creole.

A pidgin is a simplified contact language combining elements of two or more languages, with no native speakers. A creole is a pidgin that has become the native (first) language of a community, gaining full grammatical complexity.

What is an isolated language (language isolate)? Give an example.

A language unrelated to any other (not part of any known family). Example: Basque (Euskara), spoken in the Pyrenees of Spain and France.

What is a dialect, and what is an isogloss?

A dialect is a regional or social variety of a language differing in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. An isogloss is a boundary line on a map marking the geographic limit of a particular linguistic feature.

Which language family is dominant in Sub-Saharan Africa?

The Niger-Congo family (which includes the Bantu languages), the largest African family by number of distinct languages.

What major language families dominate East/Southeast Asia besides Sino-Tibetan?

Austronesian (Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog, Polynesian languages), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer), and Tai-Kadai (Thai, Lao).

From what proto-language are Indo-European languages believed to descend?

Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a reconstructed ancestral language spoken several thousand years ago.

What are the two main competing hypotheses for the Indo-European homeland?

1) The Kurgan/Steppe hypothesis (Marija Gimbutas) — origin among horse-riding pastoralists on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, spread by migration; 2) The Anatolian hypothesis (Colin Renfrew) — origin in Anatolia (modern Turkey), spread with the diffusion of agriculture.

Name the major branches of the Indo-European family.

Indo-Iranian (Indo-Aryan + Iranian), Romance/Italic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Hellenic (Greek), Albanian, Armenian, and the extinct Anatolian and Tocharian branches.

To which Indo-European branch does English belong, and what are its sister languages?

The Germanic branch — sister languages include German, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish), Frisian, and Afrikaans.

Which languages make up the Romance branch of Indo-European?

Languages descended from Latin: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, and Catalan.

To which Indo-European sub-branch do Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, and Persian belong?

The Indo-Iranian branch — Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and Punjabi are Indo-Aryan; Persian (Farsi), Pashto, and Kurdish are Iranian.

Distinguish a universalizing religion from an ethnic religion.

A universalizing religion seeks to appeal to all people everywhere and actively seeks converts (e.g. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism). An ethnic religion appeals primarily to one group in a particular place and generally does not seek converts (e.g. Hinduism, Judaism).

List the three major universalizing religions in order of number of adherents.

Christianity (largest, ~2.4 billion), Islam (~1.9 billion), and Buddhism (~500 million).

Where did each of the three universalizing religions originate (hearth)?

Christianity and Judaism in the eastern Mediterranean (the Levant/Palestine); Islam in the Arabian Peninsula (Mecca and Medina); Buddhism in northeastern India (near the India-Nepal border).

How did Christianity and Islam primarily diffuse?

Christianity spread through relocation diffusion (missionaries) and hierarchical diffusion (e.g. adoption by the Roman Empire under Constantine), plus colonialism. Islam diffused through military conquest, trade, and missionary activity outward from Arabia.

What are the two largest branches of Islam and their approximate proportions?

Sunni (about 85-90% of Muslims) and Shia (about 10-15%). Sunnis form the majority in most Muslim countries; Shias predominate in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain.

What are the three major branches of Christianity?

Roman Catholicism (largest), Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.

Which is the world's largest ethnic (non-universalizing) religion, and where is it concentrated?

Hinduism (about 1.2 billion adherents), overwhelmingly concentrated in India and Nepal.

Identify the dominant religion of each region: Latin America, the Middle East/North Africa, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia.

Latin America: Roman Catholic Christianity. Middle East/North Africa: Islam. South Asia: Hinduism/Islam (Buddhism in Sri Lanka/Myanmar). East Asia: a blend of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto, and large non-religious populations.

Which country has the largest Muslim population in the world?

Indonesia.

Distinguish ethnicity from nationality.

Ethnicity is identity based on shared cultural traits — ancestry, language, religion, customs — tied to a place of origin. Nationality is identity tied to a particular country/state through citizenship or affiliation. (Race, by contrast, refers to perceived biological/physical traits.)

What is a nation, a state, and a nation-state?

A nation is a group of people with a shared cultural identity who feel they belong together. A state is a politically organized territory with sovereignty (a country). A nation-state is a state whose territory corresponds to a single nation/ethnic group (e.g. Japan, Iceland).

What is a multinational/multiethnic state? Give an example.

A state that contains more than one nation or ethnic group within its borders. Examples: the former USSR, India, Nigeria, the United Kingdom (English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish).

What is a stateless nation? Give an example.

An ethnic group or nation that has no state of its own, often spread across several countries. Examples: the Kurds (across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria) and the Palestinians.

Define ethnic cleansing.

The forced removal, expulsion, or extermination of an ethnic or religious group from a territory by a more powerful group, in order to create an ethnically homogeneous (uniform) region.

How does ethnic cleansing differ from genocide?

Genocide is the deliberate, systematic killing of a group with intent to destroy it in whole or part. Ethnic cleansing aims primarily to remove a group from a territory (by expulsion, terror, or killing); the two overlap but ethnic cleansing's core goal is territorial homogeneity rather than total extermination.

Name two widely cited cases of ethnic cleansing/genocide in the 1990s.

1) The Balkans/former Yugoslavia — Bosnian Serbs against Bosniaks (Muslims), including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre; 2) Rwanda (1994) — the genocide of the Tutsi minority by Hutu extremists.

What underlying factors commonly drive ethnic conflict and ethnic cleansing?

Competition over territory and resources, religious/linguistic differences, historical grievances and nationalism, weak or partisan state institutions, political manipulation of identity by elites, and economic inequality between groups.

What is balkanization?

The process by which a state or region fragments into smaller, often hostile, ethnically based units — named after the repeated breakup of states in the Balkan Peninsula.

What are the most common economic indicators used to measure a country's level of development?

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and GDP per capita, Gross National Income (GNI) per capita, the Human Development Index (HDI), and structural measures like the share of employment in primary/secondary/tertiary sectors. GDP per capita = total GDP ÷ total population.