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Chapter 6
Human Geography
Term | Definition |
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Language | a set of sounds and symbols that is used for communication |
Mutual intelligibility | Ability of two people to understand each other when speaking. |
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. |
Dialect | Variants of a standard language along regional or ethnic lines |
Dialect chain | A group of contiguous dialects where the dialects nearest to each other geographically are the most similar and the dialects farther apart are least similar. |
Isogloss | a geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs. |
Language family | Group of languages with a shared but distant origin. |
Language subfamilies | Divisions within a language family where commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent. |
Cognate | A word in one language that shares its origin with a word in another language. Cognates have similar meanings and spellings and show shared origins and connections among languages. |
Language divergence | Process where discrete, new languages are eventually formed from one language. Happens when people speaking two dialects of a language are relatively isolated from each other and have little spatial interaction; the opposite of language convergence. |
Backward reconstruction | Tracking sound shifts and hardening consonants backward to uncover an original language. |
Language convergence | Process where two languages collapse into one language. Happens when people speaking two languages have frequent and consistent spatial interaction with each other; the opposite of language divergence. |
Extinct language | Language without any native speakers. |
Conquest theory | Idea that early speakers of Proto-Indo-European left the hearth area and moved westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues. |
Agriculture theory | The theory that the Proto-Indo-European language spread with the diffusion of agriculture. |
Vernacular | A language used in everyday interaction among a group of people in a local area. |
Lingua franca | a language used among speakers of different languages for the purposes of trade and commerce. |
Pidgin language | When people speaking two or more languages are in contact and they combine parts of their languages in a simplified structure and vocabulary |
Creole language | pidgin language that has developed a more complex structure and vocabulary, and has become the native language of a group of people |
Toponym | allows us to see a location as a place and imparts a certain character to a place |