I've been thinking a lot about the stories behind language creation, and how location can influence the sounds used by a language. I'd love to chat more about how land masses came together to form societies. Anyway, I'm going to use this forum to spitball ideas around languages.

Hi! I created my own language ages ago, and I also have a degree in linguistics. I'd be happy to help you as a sounding board or to give advice for your ideas.

It seems like you have a couple of different thoughts going on already. I'm not sure what you mean by how the land masses came together to form societies - from what I understand, the land started out as one big mass (Pangea) and then broke apart into separate continents over a slow period of time. My forte isn't sciency-science (as opposed to social science) so I can't really speak to the timeline of land mass and societies forming.

However, I can tell you that with my conlang, geography was very much a factor. This is an image of the land I created in tandem with the language. The Voyalinthian and Saculian languages were exactly the same, except that Voyalinthia's consonants were all voiced where Saculee's consonants were all voiceless (think d vs t, g vs k, etc.). This was because of the evil leader of Saculee that had cut it off from Voyalinthia so they had formed separate dialects. Loruit was more of mixture of the two since it did trade with both as well as other countries. And that little country on the east side, Marusles, I didn't create a language for specifically but they were basically cut off from everyone else by a tall unpassable mountain range so they definitely had different cultural norms, and that probably included language.

When you look at the languages in the real world, there were probably some geographic components in play. But not in the precursors to the modern languages, but in the precursors to the precursors to the precursors. If you look at an Indo-European family tree, you can see that there are languages grouped together by type. (Below is one of my favorites, although it is kinda fancy. You can find more straightforward ones.)

What the tree and the theory behind it tells us is that there was a bunch of people who spoke the same language (or roughly the same language) ages and ages ago. So long ago no one can say for sure it existed. This language is called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE. All of these other languages are considered descendants of it because of their similarities.

Then there are all the smaller families, like Slavic which includes Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish; Romantic which includes French, Spanish, and Italian, and Iranian which includes Pashto and Persian. All these languages are grouped together because their similarities point to an original language that they all spoke before they separated and started differentiating. So for Slavic that would be Proto-Slavic, for Germanic that would be Proto-Germanic, and so forth. Again, these languages no longer exist and no one can prove they exist except for the fact that these languages point to one origin.

Also, notice that this is the Indo-European family tree. That name is not accidental, and it doesn't include languages that have very few similarities to the ones in this tree, such as African, Asian, Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan, and many, many others. Indo-European has had the most scrutiny because it contains a lot of the more popularly spoken languages, but there are roughly 7000-8000 languages in the world and some of the ones that are spoken the least are also the most different from the popular ones. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families#Major_language_families

So to go back to your original question, I think you can definitely point to land mass as having some influence over language segregation and development. People traveled and settled in different parts of the world and isolated themselves from others and the languages evolved separately. We can point to similarities in the languages as proof that the people were once together - for example, don't quote me on this but I think there are some Inuit languages that are share some characteristics with East Asian languages. However, they're now very different because they developed separately for so long.

However, the bigger influences on language are politics and culture. Language is often a tool to tell different groups from each other or to exert influence over a certain group. For example, in 1066 the Norman (French) William the Conqueror did his job and conquered England and the English language has never quite recovered to being the Germanic language it once was. Another example would be the Huguenot (French again) influence on the middle of the United States/Canada. Although Britain more or less took over all of Canada a couple hundred years ago and the Louisiana Purchase happened in 1803, French still holds major sway over Quebec and certain parts of Louisiana. The people of those areas held onto the language as part of their culture, despite the change of government. Often religion plays a major part in it too, whether that means that the language of a religious text influence the everyday language of a people or that people use language to identify themselves as part of a religious group.

Sorry if I've rambled on too much and given you more information than you really wanted to know. The tl;dr of it is - land mass and how societies settled had some influence on language a very long time ago, but politics and culture have more of influence.

But you can do whatever you want with your own conlang - it doesn't have to be true to life. That's kind of the whole fun of creating your own language - you get to try out some what-ifs and see how they play out. :)

Okay so I haven't all your words yet because I am too excited someone responded, but I am going to say that

there's been studies done on how places with more wet, warm weather are more likely to use vowels (and I have extrapolated from that to include voiced consonants) and places with dry, cold environments are less likely to use vowels (which I have also extrapolated from that to include voiced consonants). So like it makes sense for voicing to be more common near the equator, where it takes less energy to project sounds, whereas closer to the poles of a world, it takes up valuable energy to project like that, so everyday speech is more likely to include more consonants, and maybe even unvoiced ones?

I find that cool beyond belief, but I haven't done as much research into that to say 100% if that is naturalistic or not.

Edit: I have read everything now.

This is so cool! Did you make the languages or the map first? This is so neat! I feel like I am stagnating with my conlang for Dwarves, because you know how Tolkien made it a triconsonental language based off Semitic languages? Considering the other stereotypes used, it's not unreasonable to say they are based off Jews, and as I am Jewish and can read biblical Hebrew fairly well (I understand it better than I can sound it out), so I was going to try to go about recreating Dwarvish based more directly off of biblical Hebrew's grammatical structure.

I mean, let's be honest, its because white people speak those languages. Colonists didn't find use in documenting the languages of the people whose land they were taking over, which made for a huge loss for understanding linguistics in present day.

This is SO COOL, it makes my brain light up! I am going to look this up, I would love to see those connections.

Hi! I am so stoked that someone on the forums brought up conlangs.I used to dabble in armchair linguistics. I have two in the works. I'm a little anxious/shy to describe them, lol. One of them is a Uralic/Slavic/Semetic/Iranian inspired language, and it plays a large role in the storylines of my pets of this account. I've called it "Ódrjéhr má" Má meaning tongue or language. Ódrjéhr an ethnonym. The people who natively speak it are located on a fictional landmass/peninsula in the Sea of Japan off the coast of Primorsky Krai called the Driyan Autonomous Republic. Culturally similar to the Ainu. The second conlang is a pidgin or creole I call Sjurasvoro pidžinjázýki / Syurasvoro pidzhinyazik (Bear Valley pidgin). It is about a 40%/60% mix of Russian and "Ódrjéhr má". I haven't been working on this one as much as my Russian is not up to snuff. If I'm allowed to link google drive links, I can share some samples.

I started a conlang and now I kind of hate it. I need to rework the grammar so that it actually sounds like a language and not, y'know, gibberish.