Key Concepts in Language and Dialects

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 (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.

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 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.

Isoglass

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.

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.

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.

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.