Chapter 5

African American Vernacular English (AAVE)

A dialect used by some Black Americans

Centrifugal force

A cultural value that tends to pull people apart

Centripetal force

A cultural value that tends to unify people

Creole (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

Dialect

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

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 daily activities but is no longer used

Franglais

A combination of Francais and Anglais (the French words for French and English)

Institutional language

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

Isogloss

A boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate

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

Language branch

A collection of languages related through a common ancestor that can be confirmed through archaeological evidence

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

On the tree diagram, it would be represented by a group of leaves all clumped together

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

Official language

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

Pidgin language

A form of language that adopts a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of a lingua franca; used for communications among speakers of two different languages

Received Pronunciation (RP)

The dialect of English commonly used by politicians, broadcasters, and actors in the UK

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

Standard language

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

Subdialect

A subdivision of a dialect

Working language

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