Terms : Hide Images
| 11886849192 | Creole | A language that results from the mixing of a colonizer's language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated. | 0 | |
| 11886849193 | Dialect | A regional variety of a language distinguished by vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation. | 1 | |
| 11886849194 | Exctinct language | A language that was once use by people in daily activities but is no longer used. | 2 | |
| 11886849195 | Isogloss | A boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate. | 3 | |
| 11886849196 | Isolated language | A language that is unrelated to any other languages and therefore not attached to any language family. | 4 | |
| 11886849197 | Language | A system of communication through the use of speech, a collection of sounds understood by a group of people to have the same meaning. | 5 | |
| 11886849198 | Language branch | A collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed several thousand years ago. Differences are not as extensive or old as with language families, and archaeological evidence can confirm that these derived from the same family. | 6 | |
| 11886849199 | Language family | A collection of languages related to each other through a common ancestor long before recorded history. | 7 | |
| 11886849200 | Language group | A collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary. | 8 | |
| 11886849201 | Lingua franca | A language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages. | 9 | |
| 11886849202 | Literary tradition | A language that is written as well as spoken. | 10 | |
| 11886849203 | Official language | The language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents. | 11 | |
| 11886849204 | Pidgin language | A form of speech that adopts a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of a lingua franca, used for communications among speakers of two different languages. | 12 | |
| 11886849205 | Standard language | The form of a language used for official government business, education, and mass communications. | 13 | |
| 11886849207 | Developing language | A language spoken in daily use with a literary tradition that is not widely distributed. | 14 | |
| 11886849211 | Logogram | A symbol that represents a word rather than a sound. | 15 | |
| 11886849214 | Subdialect | A subdivision of a dialect. | 16 | |
| 11886849216 | Vulgar Latin | A form of Latin used in daily conversation by ancient Romans, as opposed to the standard dialect, which was used for official documents. | 17 | |
| 11887351647 | mutual intelligibility | The ability of two people to understand each other when speaking | 18 | |
| 11887351648 | sound shift | slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin | 19 | |
| 11887351649 | backward reconstruction | The tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants "backward" toward the original language | 20 | |
| 11887351650 | language divergence | A process whereby new languages are formed when a language breaks into dialects due to a lack of spatial interaction among speakers of the language and continued isolation eventually causes the division of the language into discrete new languages. | 21 | |
| 11887351651 | language convergence | the collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages :opposite of language divergence | 22 | |
| 11887351652 | monolingual states | countries in which only one language is spoken | 23 | |
| 11887351653 | multilingual states | countries in which more than one language is spoken | 24 |
