a set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication
Culture
the sum total of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society
Standard language
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
Dialects
local or regional characteristics of a language
Isogloss
a geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs
Mutual intelligibility
the ability of two people to understand each other when speaking
Dialect chains
a set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related
Language families
group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin
Subfamilies
divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent
Sound shift
slight change in a word across languages within a sub-family or through a language family form the present backward toward its origin
Proto-Indo-European
linguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages which hearth would link modern languages form Scandinavia to North Africa and from North America th
Backward reconstruction
the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants toward the original language
Extinct language
language without any native speakers
Deep reconstruction
technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that proceeded the extinct language
Nostratic
language believed to be the ancestral language not only of the proto-indo-European but also of the Kartvelian languages of the Sothern Caucasus region, the Uralic-Altaic languages, the Dravidian languages of India, and the Afro-Asiatic language family
Language divergence
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 convergence
the collapsing of two languages into one resolution from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages
Renfrew hypothesis
hypothesis that proposed that three areas in and near the first agricultural hearth, the Fertile Crescent, gave rise to three language families
Conquest theory
one major theory of how proto-indo-European diffused into Europe which holds that the early speakers of blank spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of blank
Romance languages
languages that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but where not subsequently overwhelmed
Germanic languages
languages that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south
Slavic languages
developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in present-day Ukraine close to 2000 years ago
Lingua franca
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 even some Arabic
Pidgin language
when parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary
Creole language
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
Monolingual states
countries in which only one language is spoken
Multilingual states
countries in which more than one language is spoken
Official language
in multilingual countries the language selected, of en by the educated and politically powerful elite, to promote internal cohesion
Ch.18 LTI-MA 509
