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30 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Language |
A set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication.
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Dialects |
Local or regional characteristics of a language. |
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Language Families
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Groups of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin.
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Mutual Intelligibility
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The ability of two people to understand each other while speaking.
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Dialect Chains |
A set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related.
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Subfamilies (Language)
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Divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent.
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Standard Language
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The variant of a language that a country's political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm.
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Isogloss
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A geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs.
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Sound Shift
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Slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backwards towards its origin.
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Proto-Indo-European
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Linguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral Indo-European language.
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Conquest Theory
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One major theory of how Proto-Indo-European diffused into Europe.
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Creole Language
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A language that began as a pidgin language but was later adopted as the mother tongue.
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Backward Reconstruction
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The tracking of sound shifts backwards toward the original language. |
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Dispersal Hypothesis
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Idea that European languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were first carried eastward into Southwest Asia, next around the Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and on into the Balkans.
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Monolingual States
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Countries in which only one language is spoken
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Extinct Language |
Language without any native speakers.
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Romance Languages
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French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese
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Multilingual States
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Countries in which more than one language is spoken. |
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Deep Reconstruction
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Technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that preceded the extinct language.
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Germanic Languages
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English, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish
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Official Language
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The language selected as the one to be above all others, usually to promote internal cohesion.
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Nostratic
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The believed ancestral language of Proto-Indo-European, Kartvelian, and Uraltic-Altaic Languages.
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Slavic Languages
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Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian
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Global Language |
The language used most commonly around the world.
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Language Divergence
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When a new language is formed when a language breaks into dialects due to a lack of spatial-interaction among speakers of the language.
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Lingua Franca |
A language used among speakers of different languages for the purposes of trade and commerce.
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Place
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Uniqueness of a location
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Language Convergence
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The collapsing of two language into one as a result of consistent spatial-interaction of people who speak two different languages.
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Pidgin Language
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When parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary.
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Toponym
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Place name.
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