Ask a hundred Americans to draw the Midwest and you will get a hundred different maps. Geographers take these feelings seriously. This level looks at how people divide the world into regions, how they attach meaning to places, and how languages and religions spread across space.

Three kinds of region

A region is an area that shares some characteristic setting it apart from the areas around it. A formal region is defined by a shared measurable trait, such as a common language, climate or main crop: the area where most people speak French, or the American Corn Belt. A functional region is organized around a central node and the flows that connect to it, such as the area served by a newspaper, a commuter rail network or an airport hub. Its edge lies where the pull of the center fades. A vernacular region is one that people perceive and name in everyday life, such as the American South, the Midwest or the Australian Outback. Vernacular regions have no official boundaries, and people disagree about their edges, but they matter because people build their identities around them.

Space and place

Geographers distinguish space from place. Space is abstract location, while place is space given meaning by human experience. The Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, whose books in the 1970s helped found humanistic geography, argued that a space becomes a place as we come to know it and attach feelings to it. He used the word topophilia, love of place, for the bond people form with their homes and landscapes.

In 1976 the Canadian geographer Edward Relph warned of placelessness, the spread of standardized landscapes, such as identical malls, highway strips and chain hotels, that could be anywhere at all. Others reply that people can turn even new suburbs and shopping centers into meaningful places over time. Both sides agree that place matters to human wellbeing. People forced off their land or out of their neighborhoods often grieve for the place itself, not just for the house.

How culture spreads

Ideas, inventions and customs move across space through diffusion, a process studied closely by the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand in the 1950s. Relocation diffusion happens when people carry a trait with them as they move to new places; the spread of English to North America and Australia with settlers is an example. Expansion diffusion happens when a trait spreads outward while staying strong at its source, and it comes in several forms. Hierarchical diffusion spreads from important people or places down to lesser ones, as a fashion jumps from one big city to another before reaching small towns. Contagious diffusion spreads from person to person in all directions, like a rumor or a disease. Stimulus diffusion occurs when an underlying idea spreads but its specific form changes. The Cherokee scholar Sequoyah, having seen English writing but unable to read it, invented an entirely new syllabary for the Cherokee language, completed around 1821.

Languages and religions on the map

Languages and religions are two of the clearest features of cultural maps. Around 7,000 languages are spoken today, but they are very unequal in size: a few dozen are spoken by most of humanity, while thousands have only a few thousand speakers or fewer, and many are endangered as children switch to dominant languages. The names on a map, called toponyms, are cultural evidence too. Renaming places, as when Bombay officially became Mumbai in 1995, is a way of claiming or reclaiming identity.

Geographers often divide religions into two broad kinds. Universalizing religions seek converts and aim to appeal to all people, as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism do, and they tend to spread widely through missionaries, trade and conquest. Ethnic religions, such as Hinduism and Judaism, are tied more closely to a particular people and homeland, and they spread mainly by relocation as their followers move.

Worked example: the journey of Buddhism

Buddhism began in northeastern India around the fifth century BCE. It spread by relocation as monks and merchants carried it along the trade routes of the previous level, reaching China by around the first century CE. It also spread hierarchically: in many places rulers adopted it first and their subjects followed, as with the emperor Ashoka in India in the third century BCE and the royal courts of Korea and Japan between the fourth and sixth centuries CE.

As it traveled, it changed, a sign of stimulus at work. In China, Buddhist ideas mingled with Daoism to form Chan Buddhism, known in Japan as Zen, which looks quite unlike the monastic traditions of Sri Lanka. Meanwhile Buddhism nearly vanished from most of India by about the thirteenth century, so the region where the religion began is no longer its core. Today its formal regions lie mainly in East, Southeast and parts of South Asia. Yet Bodh Gaya in India, where the Buddha is said to have reached enlightenment, still draws pilgrims from around the world, a vivid case of how a single spot of ground can become a place charged with meaning for millions of people who have never lived there.