Terms : Hide Images
| 5289487606 | language | A set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication | 0 | |
| 5289487607 | mutual intelligibility | The ability of two people to understand each other when speaking. | 1 | |
| 5289487608 | standard language | The variant of a language that a countries political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm for all public life. | 2 | |
| 5289487609 | dialects | Local or regional characteristics of a language, has distinct grammar and vocabulary | 3 | |
| 5289487610 | dialect chain | A set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related. | 4 | |
| 5289487611 | isogloss | A geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs. | 5 | |
| 5289487612 | language families | Group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin | 6 | |
| 5289487613 | subfamilies | Divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and its origin is more recent. | 7 | |
| 5289487614 | sound shift | Slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from present towards origin. | 8 | |
| 5289487615 | Proto-Indo-European | Linguistics hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestoral Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages which the hearth would link modern languages from Scandinavia to North Africa through parts of Asia to Australia. | 9 | |
| 5289487616 | backward reconstruction | The tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants "backward" toward their original language. | 10 | |
| 5289487617 | extinct language | Language without any native speakers | 11 | |
| 5289487618 | deep reconstruction | Technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that preceded the extinct language | 12 | |
| 5289487619 | Nostratic | Language believed to be the ancestral language not only of P-I-E but also of the Kartvelian language, Uralic-Altaic languages, Dravidian languages and the Afro-Asiatic languages. | 13 | |
| 5289487620 | language convergance | The collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of people with different languages; the opposite of language divergence. | 14 | |
| 5289487621 | language divergence | The opposite of language convergence; a process suggested by August Schleicher whereby new languages are formed when language breaks into dialects due to a lack of spatial interaction among speakers of the language and continued isolation eventually causes the division of language into new languages. | 15 | |
| 5289487622 | conquest theory | One major theory on how P-I-E diffused into Europe. Holds that early speakers of P-I-E spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues. | 16 | |
| 5289487623 | dispersal hypothesis | Hypothesis which holds that Indo-European languages that arose from P-I-E were first carried eastward into SW Asia, next around the Caspian sea, and then across the Russian-Ukraine plains and into the Balkans. | 17 | |
| 5289487624 | Romance languages | (French, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Romanian) that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but were not subsequently overwhelmed. | 18 | |
| 5289487625 | Germanic languages | (English, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the West and South. | 19 | |
| 5289487626 | Slavic languages | (Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukranian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian) languages that developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in Ukraine about 2000 years ago. | 20 | |
| 5289487627 | lingua franca | Today refers to "common language" , a language used by different speakers for trade or commerce. Originated as "language of the Franks" and was used for trade in the Mediterranean sea area. | 21 | |
| 5289487628 | pidgin language | when parts of two or more languages are combined into a simplified structure and vocabulary | 22 | |
| 5289487629 | Creole language | A language that began as a pidgin language but was later adopted as the mother tongue by people in place of the mother tongue. | 23 | |
| 5289487630 | monolingual state | Countries in which only one language is spoken | 24 | |
| 5289487631 | multilingual state | Countries in which more than one language is spoken | 25 | |
| 5289487632 | official language | In multilingual countries, the language selected to promote internal cohesion; usually the language of courts and government. | 26 | |
| 5289487633 | global language | the language used most commonly around the world; defined by either number of speakers or prevalence of use in commerce and trade. | 27 | |
| 5289487634 | place | the uniqueness of a location | 28 | |
| 5289487635 | toponym | a place name | 29 |
