Key Concepts in Language and Dialects

Official language

The language adopted for use by a government for the conduct of business and publication of documents.

Received Pronunciation (RP)

The dialect of English commonly used by politicians, broadcasters, and actors in the United Kingdom.

Standard language

The form of a language used for official government, business, education, and mass communication.

Working language

A language designated by an international organization or corporation as its primary means of communication for daily correspondence and conversation.

Centrifugal force

A cultural value that tends to pull people apart.

Dialect

A regional variety of a language distinguished by vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation.

Isoglass

A boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate.

Language branch

A collection of languages related through a common ancestor.

Language family

A collection of languages related to each other through a common ancestor long before recorded 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.

Lingua franca

A language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages.

Linguist

A specialist in the study of human language.

Literary tradition

A language that is written as well as spoken.

Logogram

A symbol that represents a word rather than a sound.

Mutual intelligibility

The ability of people communicating in two ways to readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort.

Spanglish

A combination of Spanish and English spoken by some Hispanic Americans.

Stable language

A language in daily use by people of all ages, from children to elderly individuals.

Subdialect

A subdivision of a dialect.

African American Vernacular English (AAVE)

A dialect used by some Black Americans.

Centripetal force

A cultural value that tends to unify people.

Creole (or creolized) language

A language that results from the mixing of a colonizer's language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated.

Denglish

A combination of Deutsch (the German word for German) and English.

Endangered language

A language that is threatened or dying because it is losing users and may not be retained by the younger generation.

Extinct language

A language that was once used by people in daily activities but is no longer used.

Franglais

A combination of français and anglais (the French words for French and English, respectively).

Institutional language

A language used in education, work, mass media, and government.

Isolated language

A language that is unrelated to any other languages and therefore not attached to any language family.

Language

A system of communication through speech, movement, sounds, or symbols that a group of people understands to have the same meaning.