Typology

Question 1

What is the term used for when speakers on average can understand each other?

Answer 1

Mutual intelligibility

Question 2

True or false: Mutual intelligibility is a useful rule-of-thumb with no complications in practice

Answer 2

False, there are numerous complications in practice

Question 3

Swedish vs Norwegian is an example of mutually intelligible varieties across political boundaries that would be labelled as?

Answer 3

Different languages

Question 4

Catalan vs Spanish is an example of mutually intelligible varieties within the same country that would be labelled as?

Answer 4

Different dialects

Question 5

Serbian vs Croatian is an example of mutual intelligibility varieties that use what kind of system?

Answer 5

Orthographic systems

Question 6

Which languages are an example of a mutually unintelligible variety that uses the same orthographic system?

Answer 6

Cantonese vs Mandarin

Question 7

What is the gradual transition between two non-mutually intelligible varieties?

Answer 7

Dialect continuum

Question 8

What is the issue with dialect continuum?

Answer 8

Some speakers in the continuum do not understand each other and nearby speakers understand each other

Question 9

What is the East Slavic dialect continuum?

Answer 9

Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian

Question 10

What is the Turkic dialect continuum?

Answer 10

Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz

Question 11

What is the term that refers to when the last native speaker of a language dies?

Answer 11

Language death

Question 12

True or false: Speakers are evenly distributed between languages

Answer 12

False

Question 13

Latin surviving as Romance languages and Sanskrit surviving as Indic languages are examples of?

Answer 13

Language change

Question 14

What are language universals used for?

Answer 14

Allow us to talk more generally about possible and impossible languages

Question 15

What is the term used for something that is true for all languages?

Answer 15

Absolute universal

Question 16

What is the term used for something that is usually but not always true?

Answer 16

Universal tendency

Question 17

What is the term used for when something has to be true something else is true?

Answer 17

Implicational universal

Question 18

True or false: The presence of a marked structure implies the presence of an unmarked structure

Answer 18

True

Question 19

What is the term used for linguistic structures or elements that are basic, easy to learn and cross-linguistically expected?

Answer 19

Unmarked

Question 20

What is the term used for linguistic structures or elements that complex, difficult to learn and cross-linguistically rare?

Answer 20

Marked

Question 21

All languages exhibit linguistic creativity, have stops, vowels, stress and morphology. This is an example of what language universal?

Answer 21

Absolute universal

Question 22

Syllable structure obeys the sonority principle, the most common stop phonemes are /p, t, k/ and most languages have labial consonants. What language universal are these related to?

Answer 22

Universal tendency

Question 23

The presence of front rounded vowels implies the presence of what vowels?

Answer 23

Unrounded

Question 24

The presence of nasal vowel phonemes implies the presence of which vowel phoneme?

Answer 24

Oral vowel phonemes

Question 25

The presence of inflectional affixes implies the presence of which affixes?

Answer 25

Derivational