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AP Human Geography: Language Flashcards

Language

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12199173112AccentA distinctive mode of pronunciation of a language, especially one associated with a particular nation, locality, or social class.0
12199173113DialectA particular form of a language that is particular to a specific region or social group.1
12199173114Extinct LanguageAn extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers, or that is no longer in current use.2
12199173115IdeogramA written character symbolizing the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used to say it. An Example: 6 (six)3
12199173116IsoglossA geographic boundary line delimiting the area in which a given linguistic feature occurs.4
12199173117Isolated Languagea natural language with no demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic") relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. i.e A language family with only one language.5
12199173118Language BranchA Subsection of a Language Family. i.e The Romance "-------" of the Indo-European language family.6
12199173119LanguageThe method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way.7
12199173120Language GroupA 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
12199173121Language FamilyA collection of languages related to each other through a common ancestor long before recorded history9
12199173122Indo European language familyLargest language family that includes English and most other languages in the Western Hemisphere. Also used in South and Southwest Asia.10
12199173123Sino-Tibetan Language Family2nd largest language family. Includes Madarin, Thai, Cantonese and Burmese11
12199173124Lingua FrancaA Language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages, 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.12
12199173125Literary TraditionA Language that is written as well as spoken13
12199173126Monolingual StateThe condition of being able to speak only a single language, Countries in which only one language is spoken.14
12199173127BilingualThe ability to speak two languages15
12199173128Multilingual StateThe ability to speak multiple languages, Countries in which more than one language is spoken.16
12199173129Official LanguageThe language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents, In multilingual countries the language selected, often by the educated and politically powerful elite, to promote internal cohesion; usually the language of the courts and government.17
12199173130OrthographyThe conventional spelling system of a language.18
12199173131Pidgin LanguageA Form of speech that adopts a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of a lingua franca, used for communications among speakers of two different languages, When parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary.19
12199173132Standard LanguageThe form of a language used for official government business, education, and mass communications.20
12199173133Toponyma place name or a word derived from the name of a place21
12199173134Trade LanguageA language, especially a pidgin, used by speakers of different native languages for communication in commercial trade.22
12199173135VernacularUsing a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language. It is usually the language of the common people.23
12199173136Creolea mother tongue formed from the contact of two languages through an earlier pidgin stage, 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.24
12199173137DenglishThe term is used in all German-speaking countries to refer to the increasingly strong influx of macaronic (slang) English or pseudo-English vocabulary into German.25
12199173138Franglaisa form of French using many words and idioms borrowed from English.26
12199173139EbonicsAmerican black English regarded as a language in its own right rather than as a dialect of standard English27
12199173140Spanglisha hybrid language combining words and idioms from both Spanish and English, especially Spanish speech that uses many English words and expressions.28
12199173141languageA set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication.29
12199173142Mutual intelligibilityThe ability of two people to understand each other when speaking.30
12199173143Standard languageThe 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.31
12199173144Dialect chainsA set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related.32
12199173145Language familiesGroup of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin.33
12199173146SubfamiliesDivisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent.34
12199173147CognateA word that has the same linguistic derivation as another word (i.e., the word comes from the same root as another word).35
12199173148Proto-Indo-EuropeanLinguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages; this hearth would link modern languages from Scandinavia to North Africa and from North America through parts of Asia to Australia.36
12199173149Proto-EurasiaticLinguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of a language or group of languages that predated, and gave rise to, Proto-Indo-European and other language families with Eurasian origins.37
12199173150Language divergenceThe 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.38
12199173151Backward reconstructionThe tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants "backward" toward the original language.39
12199173152Language convergenceThe collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages; the opposite of language divergence.40
12199173153Romance languagesLanguages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese) that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but were not subsequently overwhelmed.41
12199173154Slavic languagesLanguages (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.42
12199173155Global languageThe 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.43
12199173156PlaceThe fourth theme of geography as defined by the Geography Educational National Implementation Project: uniqueness of a location.44

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