heartland n : the central region of a country or continent; especially a region that is important to a country or to a culture

English

Noun

1. The centre, or most populous part of a region defined by geographical or non-geographical criteria.

   It was in the heartland of the French wine growing areas.

   The home counties are the Conservative heartland.

Translations

• Finnish: sydänmaa, rintamaa, ydinalue
• Spanish: núcleo, corazón

Heartland is used in geography to refer to the central areas of a country. This occurs in many nations and areas, such as Eurasia and the United States.

• In Eurasia, the Heartland is remote and inaccessible from the periphery. The term Heartland has a particular importance in the works of Sir Halford Mackinder. He believed that the Heartland was the strategic region of the foremost importance in the world. See Heartland (geopolitics).

• The term Heartland is also frequently used to describe the Midwestern region of the United States. It is also used for other areas of the US which are culturally similar to the Heartland; for example, the Stater Bros. supermarket chain, which is concentrated in the Inland Empire counties of southern and central California, ran TV commercials for many years using the slogan "in the Heartland" to refer to inland counties such as San Bernardino County, Kern County and Riverside County being culturally more similar to the central United States than to coastal California. In the state of Florida is a region called the Florida Heartland, a six county region that is rural and in the south central part of the state.

• The term "Hindi heartland" is used to refer to the Hindi-speaking states of Northern India, namely Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.

• In Canada, the Heartland area stretches from Québec on the St. Lawrence River to Windsor at the south-western tip of Ontario. The Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, as it is usually referred as, contains over half of the country's population and is where the bulk of early European colonists settled when emigrating to Canada.
• In Singapore, "Heartlanders" (as opposed to "Cosmopolitans") was a term popularised in 1999 by then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, to characterise the majority of the Singapore population that is generally poorer, less educated, either working class or lower-middle class, speaks a distinct variety of English (Singlish), lives in HDB housing estates, and has a local (rather than global) perspective on political, economic and cultural issues.

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