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Chapter 6
Question | Answer |
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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 among 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. Cognates have similar meanings and spellings and show shared origin 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 are 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. |