| Term | Definition |
|---|
| British Received Pronunciation (BRP) | dialect of English associated with UPPER-CLASS Britons living in the London area and now considered standard in the United Kingdom |
| Creole or creolized language | language that results from the mixing of the colonizer's language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated |
| dialect | regional variation of a language distinguished by distinctive vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation |
| ebonics | dialect spoken by some African Americans; combination of "ebony" and "phonics" |
| extinct languages | once in use--even in the recent past--but no longer spoken or read in DAILY ACTIVITIES by anyone in the world |
| Franglais | widespread use of English in the French language; combination of francais and anglais, the French words for French and English |
| ideograms | system of writing used in China and other East Asian countries in which each symbol represents an idea or a concept rather than a specific sound, as is the case with letters in English |
| isogloss | boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate |
| isolated language | language unrelated to any other and therefore not attached to any language family |
| language | system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds, that a group of people understands to have the same meaning |
| language branch | collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS AGO |
| language family | collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long BEFORE RECORDED HISTORY |
| language group | 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 |
| lingua franca | language of international communication (such as English) |
| literary tradition | system of written communication |
| official language | language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents |
| pidgin language | form of speech that adopts simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of lingua franca, used for communications among speakers of two different languages |
| Spanglish | English diffusing into the Spanish language spoken by 28 million Hispanics in the United States; combination of Spanish and English |
| standard language | a dialect that is well established and widely recognized as the most acceptable for government, business, education, and mass communication |
| Vulgar Latin | form of Latin used in daily conversation by ancient Romans, as opposed to the standard dialect, which was used for official documents |
| Denglish | diffusion of English words into German, with the "D" for "Deutsch", the German word for "German" |
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