Terms : Hide Images
| a set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication | ||
| the sum total of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society | ||
| local or regional characteristics of a language | ||
| a geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs | ||
| the ability of two people to understand each other when speaking | ||
| a set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related | ||
| group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin | ||
| divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent | ||
| slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin | ||
| linguisitc hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancienct Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages wich hearth would link modern languagaes from Scandinavia to North Africa and from North America through parts of Asia to Australia | ||
| the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants "backward" toward the original language | ||
| language without any native speakers | ||
| technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that proceeded the extinct language | ||
| language believed to be the ancestral language not only of Proto-Indo-European, but also the Kartvelian languages of the southern Caucasus region, the Uralic-Altaic languages (e.g. Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian), the Dravadian languages of India, and the AFro-Asiatic language family | ||
| 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 | ||
| the collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages | ||
| hypothesis that three areas in and near the first agricultural hearth, the Fertile Crescent, gave rise to three language families: Europe's Indo-European languages (Anatolia), North African and Arabian languages (western arc) and the languages in present-day Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India (eastern arc) | ||
| 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 | ||
| hypothesis: I-E languages that arose from P-I-E were first carried eastward into Southwest Asia, next around the Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian Ukrainian plains and on into the Balkans | ||
| languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian and Portugese) that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but were not subsequently overwhelmed | ||
| languages (English, German, Danish, norwegian, and Swedish) that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south | ||
| 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 | ||
| applying to a tongue spoken in ancient Mediterranean ports that consisted of a mixture of Ialian, French, Greek, Spanish and even some Arabic; "common language": trade language | ||
| when parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary | ||
| 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 | ||
| countries in whcih only one language is spoken | ||
| countries in which more than one language is spoken | ||
| in mulitlingual countries, the language selected, often by the edudcated and politically powerful elit, to promote internal cohesion; usually the language of the courts and governments | ||
| 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 | ||
| uniqueness of a location | ||
| place name |
