APHUG Chapter 6 Vocab

Language

A set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication

Culture

The sum total of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society

Mutual intelligibility

The ability of two people to understand each other when speaking

Standard language

The variant of a language that a county's political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm for use in schools, government, the media, and other aspects of public life

Dialects

Local or regional characteristics of a language

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

Isogloss

A geographic boundary within a particular linguistic feature occurs

Language families

Group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin

Subfamilies

Divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent

Sound shift

Slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward it's origin

Proto-Indo-European

Linguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient latin, greek, and sanskrit languages which hearth would link modern languages from scandinavia to north africa and from north america through parts of asia to australia

Backward reconstruction

the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants backward toward the original language

Extinct language

Language without any native speakers

Deep reconstruction

Technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that proceeded the extinct language

Nostratic

The language believed to be the ancestral language not only of Proto-Indo-European, but also of the Kartvelian languages of the southern Caucasus region, the Uralic-Altaic languages (including Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian), the Dravadian languages of India, and the Afro-Asiatic language family

Language divergence

A process suggested by German linguist August Schleicher whereby new languages are formed when a language breaks into dialects due to a lack of spatial interaction among speakers of the language and continued isolation eventually causes the division of the language into discrete new languages

Language convergence

collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages

Renfrew hypothesis

hypothesis developed by British scholar Colin Renfrew where in he proposed that three areas in and near the first agricultural hearth, the Fertile Crescent, gave rise to 3 language families:Europe's indo-European lang. North African and Arabian languages and the languages in present-day Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India

Conquest theory

one major theory of how Proto-Indo-European diffused into Europe which holds that the early speakers of Proto-Indo-European spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues

Dispersal hypothesis

Hypothesis which holds that the Indo-European languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were first carried eastward into Southwest Asia, next around the Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and onto the Balkans

Romance languages

Languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese) that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but were not subsequently overwhelmed

Germanic languages

Languages (English, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south

Slavic languages

languages (Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian) that developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in present-day Ukraine close to 2000 years ago

Lingua franca

A language used among speakers of different languages for the purpose of trade and commerce

Pidgin languages

When parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary

Creole language

A language that began as a pidgin language but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the mother tongue

Monolingual states

countries in which only one language is spoken

Multilingual states

countries in which more than one language is spoken

Official language

In multilingual countries the language selected, often by the educated and politically powerful elite, to promote internal cohesion; usually the language of the courts and government

Global language

The language used most commonly around the world; defined on the basis of either the number of speakers of the language, or prevalence of use in commerce and trade

Place

Uniqueness of a location

Toponym

Place name