GabbyRoberts/Unit 3
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GabbyRoberts on November 5, 2009
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35 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 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. |
| Dialect | a regional variety of a language, with differences in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation; also a form of a language spoken by members of a particular social class or profession |
| Language family | A collection of many languages, all of which came from the same original tongue long ago, that have since evolved different characteristics. |
| Language subfamily | group of languages with more commonality than a language family (indicates they have branched off more recently in 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. |
| Isogloss | A geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs. |
| Preliterate society | People who speak their language but cannot write it |
| Standard language | The form of a language used for official government business, education, and mass communications. |
| Indo-European languages | A family of languages consisting of most of the languages of Europe as well as those of Iran, the Indian subcontinent, and other parts of Asia. It is the most widely dispersed language |
| Racism | discriminatory or abusive behavior towards members of another race |
| Ethnicity | an ethnic quality or affiliation resulting from racial or cultural ties |
| Plural society | a society in which different cultural groups keep their own identity, beliefs, and traditions |
| Ethnic islands | small rural area that has one settled ethnic group there |
| Cultural linkage | migrants who have moved away but renew or maintain their connections with their homeland (facilitated by modern technology - newspapers, newsletters, blogs,...). |
| Cultural revival | process that works against globalization, revitalizing cultural ties and promoting distinction. |
| toponymy | The study of place names |
| official language | The language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents. |
| monolingual states | countries in which only one language is spoken |
| multilingual states | countries in which more than one language is in use |
| lingual franca | a common language between two different language speakers |
| pidgin | an artificial language used for trade between speakers of different languages |
| creole | a mother tongue that originates from contact between two languages |
| Esperanto | An artificial language invented in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof (1859-1917), a Polish physician and philologist, and intended for international use. It is based on word roots common to the major European languages. |
| language convergence | when people with different languages have consistent spatial interaction and their languages collapse into one |
| language divergence | new languages are formed when a language breaks into dialects |
| language replacement | Languages of traditional, numerically smaller, and technologically less advanced people have been replaced, or greatly modified, by the languages of invaders. |
| sound shifts | diversification of languages by sound |
| deep reconstruction | process by which an extinct language is recreated |
| proto indo-european | A language found spoken before indo-european |
| nostractic | the core of a pre-Proto Indo-European language |
| na-dene | family of indigenous American languages. Second oldest & largest family. Less widely diffused. |
| amerind | any of the languages spoken by Amerindians |
| Eskimo-Aleut | Eskimo-Aleut is a language family native to Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, etc |
| agriculture theory | theory of the diffusion of the Proto-Indo-European language into Europe through the innovation of agriculture (being more efficient than hunting and gathering). Its hearth is around modern day Anatolia (in Turkey). |
| conquest theory | the theory that early Proto-Indo-European speakers spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tounges |
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