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Chapter Six Vocab
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| 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 | Variant of a standard language along regional or ethic 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; 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 | 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. |