Chapter 5 Flashcards
Language
A system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds that a group of people understands to have the same meaning.
Institutional language
Used in education, work, mass media, and government.
Official language
Used by the government for laws, reports, and public objects such as road signs, money, and stamps.
Literary tradition
A property of an institutional language. Means that it is written as well as spoken.
Developing language
Spoken in daily use by people of all ages and also has a literary tradition, though the literature may not be widely distributed.
Vigorous language
Spoken in daily use by people of all ages, but it lacks a literary tradition.
Language family
A collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history.
Language branch
A collection of languages within a family related through a common ancestral language; differences are not as extensive or as old as between language families, and archaeological evidence confirms that each branch derives from the same family.
Language group
A collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display many similarities in grammar and vocabulary.
Vulgar Latin
The Latin that people in ancient Roman provinces learned, not the standard literary form but a vernacular form.
Lingua franca
A language of international communication, such as English.
Pidgin language
When two groups construct a pidgin language by learning a few of the grammar rules and words of a lingua franca and mixing in some elements of their own languages to create a simplified form that is still useful for communication.
Logograms
Symbols that represent words or meaningful parts of words. Ex: Chinese
Dialect
A regional variation of a language distinguished by distinctive vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation.
Subdialect
A subdivision of a dialect.
