Language Flashcards
Languages that developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in present day Ukraine close to 2000 years ago
Slavic Languages
A geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs
isogloss
A set of sound, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication.
language
Linguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral Indo-European- language that is the hearth of the antient latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages which hearth would link modern languages from scandinavia to north Africa and from North America through parts of Asia to Australia.
Proto-Indo-european
Technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language the proceeded the extinct language.
Deep Reconstruction
Group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin.
language family
A term derived from from “Frankish language” and applying to a tongue spoken in ancient Mediterranean ports that consisted o 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 purpose of trade and commerce.
lingua franca
The 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
standard language
Languages that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south
Germanic languages
The ability of two people to understand each other when speaking
Mutual intelligibility
When parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocab.
pidgin language
The collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial Interaction of peoples with different languages; the opposite of language divergence.
language convergence
Language believed to be the ancestral language not only of Proto-Indo-european, but also of the Kartvelian languages of the southern Caucasus region, the Uralic-Altaic languages, the Dravadian languages of India, and the Afro-Asiatic language family
nostratic
Place name
toponym
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.
global language
Hypothesis which holds that the Indo-European languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were first carried eastward into Southwest Asia, new around the Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and on into the Balkans.
dispersal hypothesis
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.
Official language
Divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent.
subfamilies
The tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants “backward” toward the original language
backward reconstruction
A set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are closely related.
dialect chain
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.
Language divergence
Language without any native speakers
extinct language
Local or regional characteristics of a language. While accent refers to the pronunciation differences of a standard language, a dialect, in addition to pronunciation variation, has distinctive grammar and vocab.
dialects
Languages that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but were not subsequently overwhelmed
Romance languages
Slight change in a word across languages within a sub-family or through a language family from the present backward toward its origins
Sound Shift
Countries in which only one language is spoken
Monolingual states
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
Creole Language
One major theory of how Proto-Indo-European diffused into Europe while 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.
Conquest theory
Countries in which more than one language is spoken
multilingual states
The fourth theme of geography as defined by the geography educational national implementation project; uniqueness of a location
Place
