Geographies of languages/Languages of geography

Abstract

This themed section is based on a session that took place at the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) annual conference, held in Brighton in January 2000, and draws together the work of a number of authors who explore the signiecance of languages within geography. The inversion of terms in the session title is important, in this respect, since it helps to highlight the broad range of interest of geographers in language. By focusing on ‘geographies of language’ we signal our interest in the manifold ways in which geographers have examined the spaces and places of various languages. The ‘languages of geographies’ refers to the constitutive role of languages in the construction of geographical knowledge. The ‘mapping’ of languages is a longstanding area of geographical research that has its roots in the large-scale political and cultural changes that affected Europe during the age of modernity. The emphasis within this arena of research is on themes such as cartography and languages; on exploring the links between language and (national) identity; and on the more practical questions of language planning. Signiecant work here includes Williams’s (1993) work on the relationship between language and national identity in Canada, and Aitchison and Carter’s (1994) series of language maps in Wales. Work in this eeld is important, we would argue, since it helps to demonstrate the constitutive role played by the geographies of language in the formation and contestation of key modernist projects such as the state and the nation. As such, a focus on the geographies of language can act as a springboard to help geographers engage in a novel and alternative manner in broader debates about the constitution of various key socio-spatial formations. A key research question, in this regard, would be the extent to which the much-touted decline

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