Languages and Geography

Languages have been expanded and contracting, moving from one area to another, coming into existence and dying, for thousands of years. It is a mistake to assume that this a recent phenomenon, and the association of a certain language with a certain geographic region is, ultimately, arbitrary, because such associations are never permanent. For example, the majority of people in the United States at present speak English. So, there is a tendency to think that our language "came from" England. But one of the ancestors of modern English, Anglo-Saxon, came to England from Germany in the fifth century AD, replacing the Celtic language which had been predominant for some time in the region which is now England. And Saxon, one of the many dialects of German, has itself moved from place to over the millennia, despite their being one clearly-defined geographical region in Germany today called Saxony. (And two more called Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.) The movement of Germanic languages in the 4th to 6th centuries AD was so extreme that Germans today often refer to that period of time as the Voelkerwanderung, the wandering of peoples.

Celtic languages are spoken today in Ireland, the Isle of Man, on the island of Great Britain in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, and also in the region of France called Amorica or Brittany. In each of those regions, a Celtic language is the first language of a minority of the population, although recently, after centuries of decline, they all have been making a considerable comeback, being officially protected under law and taught to schoolchildren. These efforts at restoration have been underway for well over a century in Ireland, and  soon, a majority of the Irish population may have at least some ability to understand, speak, read and write Irish. 

2100 years ago, the Celtic language family was one of five major Indo-European Language families, besides the Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Indo-Iranian families. Celtic languages have been predominant at one time or another not only in Great Britain and Ireland but also in present-day France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, northern Italy, southern Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and western Romania. 

The Romance language group at that time consisted mostly of Latin. 2500 years ago, Latin and related languages were confined to a rather tiny region around Rome, which then was more a village than a city. Rome expanded greatly, and the Latin language spread. In the 2nd and 1st centuries BC Rome conquered present-day France, Spain and Portugal, and in those regions Latin quickly replaced the Celtic languages. Then in the 1st century AD Rome conquered present-day England, but the majority of the people there continued to speak one Celtic language or another, until the above-mentioned change to Anglo-Saxon in the 5th century. The Anglo-Saxons conquered Cornwall in the 10th century, and Cornish declined sooner than the Celtic languages in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, which kept their political independence from the English-speakers longer. The Celtic speakers in Brittany in France emigrated from Great Britain in or around the late 5th century. 

To the east of the city of Rome, the Romans established Latin in various regions. In the region known then as Dacia and known now as Romania. Romanian and the closely related Moldovan are the only Romance languages in eastern Europe today. The Romans conquered vast territories to the east which had formerly been under Greek control, all the way to the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, to present-day Israel and Syria and Iraq and including present-day Turkey, but in these areas the Latin language did not take over the existing languages. As before the Romans came, the language of government and the upper classes was Greek, while the majority populations spoke a great variety of other languages. 

I can't begin to explain, yet, why political conquest sometimes means the complete linguistic transformation of a region, and sometimes not. At present the best I can do is point out some examples where the language of a region has completely changed under new political leadership, and some examples where it has not. For example: in the Western Hemisphere, in the United States, the languages of the of the inhabitants before the European invasions have been reduced to a much greater degree than the indigenous languages in Latin America. In the US, the most widely-spoken indigenous language is Navaho, with about 170,000 speakers presently. To the south of the US, by contrast, Nahuatl (Aztec) is spoken by nearly 2 million people presently, the Mayan languages by about 6 million, and the Quechan (Incan) languages by 8 to 10 million people.