Barriers Build Languages

Roughly 7,000 languages are spoken on Earth today, and geography explains much of that variety. When a group gets cut off by a physical barrier — a mountain range, a desert, an ocean, a wall of forest — its speech slowly drifts. Each generation tweaks a few words and sounds. Given enough time apart, neighbors who once understood each other can no longer follow a word.

The Caucasus Mountains, on the land bridge between Europe and Asia, pack over 40 languages into an area smaller than California. Steep valleys kept villages apart for thousands of years, and each one held onto its own tongue. The Alps did something similar to the Latin that Rome left behind: isolated mountain pockets grew their own Romance varieties, such as Romansh in Switzerland and Ladin in the Italian Dolomites. Rough terrain rarely unites people who speak the same way.