Terms : Hide Images
| 5521414117 | language | A set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communicate (important part of culture) | 0 | |
| 5521420062 | mutual intelligibility | The ability of 2 people to understand each other when speaking | 1 | |
| 5522249280 | standard language | The variant of a language that a country's political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm for use in schools, government, the media, and other aspects of public life | 2 | |
| 5522251085 | dialect | Local or regional characteristics of a language. Refers to accent (pronunciation differences of a standard language) and distinctive vocab./grammar (e.g. syntax, cadence, and pace of speech) | 3 | |
| 5522261987 | 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 | 4 | |
| 5522282976 | isogloss | A geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs | 5 | |
| 5522284176 | language families | Group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin | 6 | |
| 5522286139 | subfamilies | Divisions within a language family where to commonalities are more definitie and the origin is more recent | 7 | |
| 5522298803 | cognate | A word that has a the same linguistic derivation as another word (i.e. the word comes from the same root as another word) | 8 | |
| 5522302795 | William Jones | Found connection b/t Sanskrit and ancient Greek/Latin | 9 | |
| 5522306625 | Proto-Indo-European | Linguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages which hearth would link modern languages from Scandinavia to North Africa and from North America through parts of Asia to Australia | 10 | |
| 5522329795 | Proto-Eurasiatic | Linguistic hypothesis proposing the language or group of languages that predated and gave the rise to Proto-Indo-European and other language families with Eurasian origins | 11 | |
| 5522337344 | language divergence | The opposite of language convergence; a process suggested by German linguist August Schleicher 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 | 12 | |
| 5522340691 | backward reconstruction | The tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants "backward" toward the original language | 13 | |
| 5522342893 | language convergence | The collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages; the opposite of language divergence | 14 | |
| 5522344991 | conquest theory | One major theory of how Proto-Indo-European diffused into Europe which holds that the early speakers of Proto-Indo-European spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues | 15 | |
| 5522347913 | agricultural theory(?) | Cavali-Sforza and Ammerman: Every generation (~25 years), agricultural frontier moved 11 miles... mixed farming and non-famring peoples | 16 | |
| 5522355784 | Romance languages | Languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese) that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but were not subsequently overwhelmed (local languages mixed w/Latin) | 17 | |
| 5522357937 | Germanic languages | Languages (English, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south | 18 | |
| 5522418523 | Slavic languages | Languages (Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian) that developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in present-day Ukraine close to 2000 years ago | 19 | |
| 5522422707 | lingua franca | A term deriving from "Frankish language" and applying to a tongue spoken in ancient Mediterranean ports that consisted of a mixture of Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and even some Arabic. Today it refers to a "common language," a language used among speakers of different languages for the purposes of trade and commerce | 20 | |
| 5522425282 | pidgin language | When parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary | 21 | |
| 5522426684 | Creole language | A language that began as a pidgin language but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the mother tongue | 22 | |
| 5522431525 | multilingualism | Use of more than 1 language by sectors of population | 23 | |
| 5522433919 | monolingual state | Countries in which only 1 language is spoken (no true monolingual states) | 24 | |
| 5522435964 | multilingual states | Countries in which more than one language is spoken | 25 | |
| 5522438149 | official language | in multilingual countries the language selected to promote internal cohesion; usually the language of the courts and government | 26 | |
| 5522439658 | global language | The language used most commonly around the world; defined on the basis of either the number of speakers of the language, or prevalence of use in commerce and trade | 27 | |
| 5522440669 | place | 4th theme of geography as defined by GENIP: uniqueness of a location | 28 | |
| 5522458106 | toponym | place name | 29 |
