| Question |
Answer |
| Language | 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 |
| Global language | the language used most commonly around the world |
| Toponym | place name |
mr. charles11
