AP Human Geography: Language, Dialects, and Language Families Listen

African American Vernacular English

A dialect used by some African Americans

Centrifugal Force

A cultural value that tends to pull people apart.

Centripetal Force

A cultural value that tends to unify people.

Creole

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 (German) and English.

Developing Language

A language in daily use with a literary tradition that is not widely distributed.

Dialect

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

Dying Language

A language used by older people, but is not being transmitted to children.

Endangered Language

A language that children are no longer learning, and its remaining speakers use it less frequently.

Extinct Language

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

Franglais

A combination of français (French) and anglais (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.

Lingua Franca

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

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 United Kingdom.

Spanglish

A combination of Spanish and English spoken by Hispanic Americans.

Standard Language

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

Subdialect

A subdivision of a dialect.

Threatened Language

A language used for face-to-face communication, but is losing users.

Vigorous Language

A language that is in daily use but that lacks a literary tradition.

Vulgar Latin

A form of Latin used in daily conversation by ancient Romans, as opposed to the standard dialect, which was used for official documents.

Working Language

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