Chapter on language's role in human geography

Help

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