| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Culture | A group of belief systems, norms, and values practiced by a people. |
| Local culture | a group of people in a particular place who see themselves as a collective or a community, who share experiences, customs, and traits, and who work to preserve those traits and customs in order to claim uniqueness and to distinguish themselves from others. |
| Popular culture | Large, incorporates heterogeneous populations, is typically urban, and experiences quickly changing cultural traits. |
| Material culture | Type of culture which things that are constructed, such as art, houses, and foods. |
| Nonmaterial culture | Type of culture which includes beliefs, practices, and values |
| hearth | point of origin or the cases of first diffusion |
| assimilation | Process through which people lose originally differentiating traits, such as dress, speech particularities, or mannerisms, when they come into contact with another society or culture. |
| custom | practice that a group of people routinely follows |
| cultural appropriation | the process by which other cultures adopt customs and knowledge and use them for their own benefit. |
| neolocalism | seeking out the regional culture and reinvigorating it in response to the uncertainty of the modern world |
| ethnic neighborhoods | Neighborhood, typically situated in a larger metropolitan city and constructed by or comprised of a local culture, in which a local culture can practice its customs |
| commodification | the process through which something is given monetary value. |
| authenticity | the accuracy with which a signle stereotypical or typecast image or experience conveys an otherwise dynamic and complex local culture or its customs |
| time-space compression | how quickly innovations diffuse and how interlinked two places are through transportation and communication technologies, as defined by David Harvey |
| reterritorialization | when people within a place start to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves, doing so in the context of their local culture and making it their own |
| cultural landscape | the visible imprint of human activity on the landscape |
| placelessness | Coined by Edward Ralph, the loss of uniqueness of place in the cultural landscape |
| global-local continuum | The notion of what happens of one scale is not independent of what happens at other scales. |
| glocalization | The process by which people in a local place mediate and alter regional, national, and global processes |
| gender | Defined by Mona Domosh and Joni Seager as "a culture's assumptions about the differences between mean and women: their 'characters', the roles they play in society, what they represent" |
| identity | defined by Gillian Rose as "how we make sense of ourselves" |
| identifying against | One of the most powerful ways of constructing ourselves, labeling them "the other" and us "not the other" |
| Race | constructed identity and is a perfect example of how identities are built. |
| racism | Feeling of superiority attached to race through differences in socioeconomic classes of people |
| residential segregation | Defined by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton as "the degree to which two or more groups live separately from one another, in different parts of the urban environment." |
| invasion and succession | a process in which new immigrants to a city often move to areas occupied by older immigrant groups, often "invading" the neighborhood |
| sense of place | The process of infusing a place "with meaning and feeling" |
| ethnicity | affiliation or identity within a group of people bound by common ancestry and culture |
| space | Defined by Doreen Massey and Pat Jess as "social relations stretched out" |
| place | Defined by Doreen Massey and Pat Jess as "particular articulations of those social relations as they have come together, over time, in that particular location." |
| gendered | places designed for women or for men |
| queer theory | Theory defined by geographers Glen Elder and Lawrence Knopp, and Heidi Nast that highlights the contextual nature of opposition to the heteronormative and focuses on the poitical engagement of "queers" with the heteronormative |
| dowry deaths | In the context of arranged marriages in India, disputes over the price to be paid by the family of the bride to the father of the groom have, in some extreme cases, led to the death of a bride. |
| barrioization | Defined by geographer James Curtis as the dramatic increase in Hispanic population in a given neighborhood |
| Language | a set of mutually intelligible sounds and symbols that are used for communication |
| culture | In the context of language, culture is constantly reflected and shaped off of language |
| standard language | A language that is published, widely distributed, and purposefully taught. |
| dialects | Variants of a standard language along regional or ethnic lines |
| isogloss | geographic boundary within which a particular linguistic feature occurs |
| mutual intelligibility | two people who can 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 language where the commonalities are more definite and the origin more recent |
| sound shift | a slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin |
| Proto-Indo-European | The ancestral Indo-European language |
| backward reconstruction | the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants "backward" toward the original language |
| extinct language | a language without any native speakers |
| deep reconstruction | Technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to recreate the language that proceeded the extinct language |
| nostratic | Language to be not only of the Proto-Indo-European but of Kartvelian and Uralic-Altaic Languages |
| language divergence | a process in which a lack of spatial interaction among speakers of a language breaks the language into dialects and then continued isolation divides the language into discrete languages |
| language convergence | The process of two different languages continuing or increasing spatial interaction collapsing two languages into one. |
| Renfrew hypothesis | Claims that from Anatolia was where Europe's Indo-European language was from. |
| conquest theory | theory which holds that early speakers of Proto-Indo-European spread west on horseback and conquered early inhabitants in Europe |
| dispersal hypothesis | holds that Indo-European language arose from Proto-Indo-European and spread east through Southwest Asia. |
| Romance languages | Lies in the areas once controlled by the Roman Empire, but were not subsequently overwhelmed. Language families include Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian. |
| germanic languages | language that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to west and south. Languages include English, German, danish, and Swedish. |
| Slavic languages | Deeloped as Slavic people migrated from a base in present-day Ukraine. Languages include Czech, Slovak, Russian, and Polish. |
| lingua franca | a language used among speakers of different languages for the purposes of trade and commerce. |
| pidgin language | A simplified structure and vocabulary trade language from two different languages |
| Creole language | A more complex pidgin language with complex structure and vocab. |
| monolingual states | Countries in which only one language is spoken |
| multilingual states | countries where more than one language is in use |
| official language | In multilingual countries, a language is selected to promote internal cohesion. |
| global language | A common language used for trade and commerce around the world |
| place | Uniqueness of a location |
| toponym | place names |
Combine with other sets
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