How many of you AP® Human Geography students are starting to stress out over the massive amounts of information you’ve covered for the exam? Are you scared your teacher isn’t reviewing enough? Have you reviewed linguistic diversity? If not, that’s okay! We’re here to review it with you and help you remember it for the exam.

What is Linguistic Diversity?

Linguistic diversity is not hard to figure out once you breakdown the word. Start with “linguistic.” That means it has something to do with language. “Diversity” is about differences. Hence, linguistic diversity is about differences in language.

But it gets more complicated than that.

Linguistic diversity can operate on an individual scale, meaning the more languages a person knows the more linguistically diverse they are. It can also operate on a societal or global scale, meaning the linguistic diversity depends on how many languages a society or the world as a whole speaks.

We know what you’re probably thinking. What does language have to do with geography? Particularly human geography, since that’s what your exam is on. The linguistic diversity of a specific place actually relies a lot on that place’s geography.

For example, New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse place in the world. As in this place has more different languages spoken in it than any other place on earth. Neat, huh? This is because the terrain there makes traveling hard, so instead of spreading one language around, each place is able to focus on developing its own language.

Here’s the kicker though, linguistically diverse places are becoming fewer in number. The world is rapidly becoming less linguistically diverse. Right now, thousands of languages are spoken on our planet, but soon that could drop to only several hundred. That may still seem like a lot, but when you think of how big the world is, it’s really not.

Why Are Languages Disappearing?

When thinking about linguistic diversity in terms of the AP® Human Geography exam, it’s important to keep in mind another term: language extinction or when a language dies and has no native speakers left.

You may be wondering why languages are dying or dying so fast.

Well, in our world we have things like mega  languages. These are languages like English and Mandarin that are spoken by a large number of people and are quickly being learned by more and more people. Younger generations especially see the economic advantages to learning mega languages. As time goes on, more people are moving to cities to find good jobs, but these jobs require people to speak mega languages.

This decreases linguistic diversity because these young people eventually forget their native tongues, leaving dying off elders back home to preserve the language. After a while, no one is left speaking these less popular languages. Instead, everyone is speaking English or another mega language.

Do you see how this can tie into human geography? Linguistic diversity has a lot to do with how a society’s geographic location makes language preservation easy or difficult. It also has to do with where new generations are moving to and what languages these new locations encourage.

Now, linguistic diversity can be bad in the sense that too many different languages can take away a sense of unity in a country, but that is not the common problem we are seeing today. Instead, linguistic diversity is in danger.

Past APHG students have noted the need to memorize high amounts of vocab for the multiple-choice portion of the exam. In case you’re worried about how you will remember all the terms you learned this year, we’ll help you at least remember one of the important ones, linguistic diversity.

Remembering Linguistic Diversity for APGH Multiple-Choice

Most often, you will be able to get a multiple-choice question right by simply taking the time to remember the meanings for words and concepts featured in the question. For many of your vocab words, looking at the different parts of the word can give you hints to its meaning.

We already covered the different parts of linguistic diversity, but while many people are familiar with the term diversity, some people forget what linguistic means. What can you do when you forget what part of vocab word means? Try thinking of similar words. A similar word to linguistic is bilingual. With the massive amounts of Spanish-speaking immigrants coming to the U.S., many Americans are familiar with what it means to be bilingual –the ability to speak two languages. The first part of that word tells you the number, but the second part, “lingual,” refers to language. This can help remind you that linguistic refers to language.

We know on test day you may feel like you don’t have enough time on each question to pick apart words. This process of decoding words actually doesn’t take that long, and you have over half a minute for each multiple-choice question. That’s plenty of time to read the question, understand the keywords, and make your guess. Since you’re not punished for wrong answers, why not take the time to make a good educated guess when the definitions of the words don’t immediately come to you?

Will you give yourself time to remember your vocabulary words in May?

By the way, you should check out Albert.io for your AP® Human Geography review. We have hundreds of AP® Human Geography practice questions written just for you!