| Word |
Definition |
| British Received Pronunciation (BRP) |
The dialect of English associated with upper-class Britons living in the London area and now considered standard in the United Kingdom |
| Creole/creolized landuage |
A language that results from the mixing of a colonizer's language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated |
| Dialect |
A regional variety of a language distinguished by vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation |
| Ebonics |
Dialect spoken by some African Americans |
| Extinct Language |
A language that was once used by people in daily activities but is no longer used |
| Franglais |
A term used by the French for English words that have entered the french language |
| Ideograms |
The system of writing used in China and other East Asian countries in which each symbol represents an idea or a concept rather than a specific sound, as is the case with letters in English |
| Isogloss |
A boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate |
| Isolated language |
A language that is unrelated to any other languages and therefore not attached to any language family |
| Language |
A system of communication through the use of speech, a collection of sounds understood by a group of people to have the same meaning |
| Language branch |
A collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed several years ago. Differences are not as extensive or as old as with Language families, and archaeological evidence can confirm that the branches derived from the same family |
| Language family |
A collection of languages related to each other through a common ancestor long before recorded history |
| Language group |
A collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary |
| Lingua franca |
A language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages |
| Literary tradition |
A language that is written as well as spoken |
| Official language |
The language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents |
| Pidgin language |
A form of speech that adopts a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of a lingua franca, used for communication among speakers of two different languages |
| Spanglish |
Combination of Spanish and English, spoken by Hispanic Americans |
| Standard language |
The form of a language used for official government business, education, and mass communications |
| Vulgar Latin |
A form of Latin used in daily conversation by ancient Romans, as opposed to the standard dialect, which was used for official documents |
| Indo-European Family |
The world's most extensively spoken language family by a wide margin. Nearly 3 billion people speak an Indo-European language as their first language |
| Linguistic diversity |
The differences in how a language is spoken |
| Toponym |
The name given to a portion of Earth's surface |
| Trade language |
An example being a lingua franca; used to connect groups of multiple languages for the purpose of trading |
| Acculturation |
the adoption of cultural traits such as language by one group
|
| Endangered languages |
those languages that are in fear of extinction |
| Oral Tradition |
A language that is spoken
|
| Sino-Tibetan Family |
Second largest language family |
Biology Lab Midterm
