Unit 6: Vocabulary

Question 1

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

Answer 1

Creole (generic term)

Question 2

local or regional characteristics of a language. Like accent, _________ refers to pronunciation variation, but it also includes distinctive grammar and vocabulary.

Answer 2

Dialect

Question 3

a geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs

Answer 3

Isogloss

Question 4

group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin

Answer 4

Language family/group

Question 5

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.

Answer 5

Lingua franca

Question 6

speaking only one language

Answer 6

Monolingual

Question 7

speaking two languages

Answer 7

Bilingual

Question 8

speaking more than one language

Answer 8

Multilingual

Question 9

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.

Answer 9

Official language

Question 10

when parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary

Answer 10

Pidgin (not to be confused with a Creole language)

Question 11

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.

Answer 11

Protolanguage (proto-Indo-European language)

Question 12

place name

Answer 12

Toponym

Question 13

the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants “backward” toward the original language

Answer 13

Backward reconstruction

Question 14

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

Answer 14

Conquest theory

Question 15

technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to recreate the language that proceeded the extinct language

Answer 15

Deep reconstruction

Question 16

a set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related

Answer 16

Dialect chain

Question 17

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

Answer 17

Dispersal hypothesis

Question 18

language without any native speakers

Answer 18

Extinct language

Question 19

languages such as English, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south

Answer 19

Germanic languages

Question 20

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

Answer 20

Global language

Question 21

a set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication

Answer 21

Language

Question 22

the collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages; the opposite of language divergence

Answer 22

Language convergence

Question 23

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

Answer 23

Language divergence

Question 24

the ability of two people to understand each other when speaking

Answer 24

Mutual intelligibility

Question 25

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

Answer 25

Nostratic

Question 26

Languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese) that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire

Answer 26

Romance languages

Question 27

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

Answer 27

Slavic languages

Question 28

slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin

Answer 28

Sound shift

Question 29

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

Answer 29

Standard language

Question 30

divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent

Answer 30

Subfamilies