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Human Geo. U3: Ch6
This StudyStack covers Human Geography Unit 3: Ch. 6 vocabulary.
| Vocabulary word | Definition |
|---|---|
| Language | A set of sounds and symbols that are 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 where linguistic features occur. |
| 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. These 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 spacial 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 | Language used for trade or cultural interaction among people who speak different languages. |
| Pidgin language | Combination of two or more languages in a simplified structure and vocabulary. |
| Creole language | A language that began as a pidgin language and was later adopted as the mother tongue of a people. |
| Toponym | Place name. |
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PL214732
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