Unit 6: Vocabulary Flashcards
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 (generic term)
local or regional characteristics of a language. Like accent, _________ refers to pronunciation variation, but it also includes distinctive grammar and vocabulary.
Dialect
a geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs
Isogloss
group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin
Language family/group
a term deriving from “Frankish language” and applying to a tongue spoken in ancient Mediterranean ports that consisted of a mixture of Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and some Arabic. Today, it refers to a “common language,” a language used among speakers of different languages for the purposes of trade and commerce.
Lingua franca
speaking only one language
Monolingual
speaking two languages
Bilingual
speaking more than one language
Multilingual
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
when parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary
Pidgin (not to be confused with a Creole language)
linguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages which would link modern languages from Scandinavia to North Africa and from North America through parts of Asia to Australia.
Protolanguage (proto-Indo-European language)
place name
Toponym
the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants “backward” toward the original language
Backward reconstruction
one major theory of how Proto-Indo-European diffused into Europe which holds that the early speakers of PIE spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-Euro tongues
Conquest theory
technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to recreate the language that proceeded the extinct language
Deep reconstruction
a set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related
Dialect chain
hypothesis which holds that the Indo-Euro languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were first carried eastward into Southwest Asia, then around the Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and onto the Balkans
Dispersal hypothesis
language without any native speakers
Extinct language
languages such as English, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south
Germanic languages
the language used most commonly around the world, defined on the basis of either the number of speakers of the language, or the prevalence of use in commerce and trade
Global language
a set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication
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
the 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 dialects
Language divergence
the ability of two people to understand each other when speaking
Mutual intelligibility
language believed to be the ancestral language not only of Proto-Indo-Euro, but also of the Kartyelian languages of the Southern Caucasus region, the Uralic-Altaic languages (Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Mongolian), the Dravadian languages of India, and the Afro-Asiatic language family
Nostratic
Languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese) that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire
Romance languages
Languages (Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian) that developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in present0day Ukrained close to 2000 years ago
Slavic languages
slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin
Sound shift
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
divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent
Subfamilies
