Terms : Hide Images
| 12849375265 | Language | Our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning | 0 | |
| 12849378185 | mutual intelligibility | the ability of speakers of different but related languages to understand one another | 1 | |
| 12849383424 | standard language | a dialect that is well established and widely recognized as the most acceptable for government, business, education, and mass communication | 2 | |
| 12849386727 | dialect | a particular form of a language that is peculiar to a specific region or social group. | 3 | |
| 12849389766 | syntax | The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language. | 4 | |
| 12849395848 | dialect chains | a set of contagious dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related | 5 | |
| 12849399541 | isogloss | a geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs | 6 | |
| 12849402829 | language families | group of related languages that have all developed from one earlier language | 7 | |
| 12849406356 | language subfamilies | a smaller group of related languages within a language family | 8 | |
| 12849408537 | sound shift | slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin | 9 | |
| 12849428438 | Proto-Indo-European | hypothesized ancestral Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages. | 10 | |
| 12849430898 | backward reconstruction | to track sound shifts and hardening of consonants "backward" toward original language | 11 | |
| 12849436719 | extinct language | A language that was once used by people in daily activities but is no longer used. | 12 | |
| 12849439275 | deep reconstruction | technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that proceeded the extinct language | 13 | |
| 12849447867 | nostratic | hypothesized ancestral language of Proto-Indo-European, as well as other ancestral language families. | 14 | |
| 12849452839 | language divergence | new languages are formed when a language breaks into dialects due to spatial separation of peoples with the same language | 15 | |
| 12849452862 | language convergence | the collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages | 16 | |
| 12849459529 | conquest theory | the theory that early Proto-Indo-European speakers spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tounges | 17 | |
| 12849464195 | dispersal hypothesis | the hypothesis that the Indo-European languages were carried around east then west | 18 | |
| 12849470451 | romance languages | any of the languages derived from Latin including Italian, Spanish, French, and Romanian. | 19 | |
| 12849493196 | Germanic languages | Languages (English, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south | 20 | |
| 12849495861 | 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 | 21 | |
| 12849499374 | lingua franca | A language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages | 22 | |
| 12849502637 | 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. | 23 | |
| 12849512909 | Creole language | a language that began as a pidgin language but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in a place of the mother tongue | 24 | |
| 12849517627 | monolingual states | countries in which only one language is spoken | 25 | |
| 12849517628 | multilingual states | countries in which more than one language is spoken | 26 | |
| 12849522446 | official language | The language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents. | 27 | |
| 12849524838 | 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 | 28 | |
| 12849528896 | toponym | the name given to a place on Earth | 29 |
