Human Geography (Language)

Language

A system of communication through the use of speech, a collection of sounds understood by a group of people to have the same meaning.

Literary Tradition

A system of written communication.

Official Language

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

Dialect

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

Isogloss

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

Standard Language

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

Language Family

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

Indo-European Language Family

A family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia.

Kurgan Theory

Nomadic Warrior Thesis: original Indo-Europeans were from the border between Russia and Kazakhstan, and used their horses as weapons to conquer much of Europe and South Asia.

Anatolian Theory

Sedentary Farmer Thesis: theory that the first speakers of the Indo-European language lived 2000 years before the Kurgans in eastern Anatolia; English spread through farming.

Sino-Tibetan Language Family

A family of languages that spread through most of Southeast Asia and China and is comprised of Chinese, Burmese, Tibetan, Japanese, and Korean.

Afro-Asiatic Language Family

Semitic language family that includes Arabic and Hebrew as well as many other languages spoken in Northern Africa and S.W. Asia.

Austronesian Language Family

Most of the indigenous peoples of the region speak this which is divided between the formosan and the Malaya Polynesian language subfamilies: Malay, Indonesia, Tagalog, Formosan languages, Malagasy, Javanese, Hawaiian, Maori, etc.

Niger-Congo Language Family

The dominant language family in Sub-Saharan Africa (Swahili mostly, but also Khoisan).

Language Branch

A collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed several thousand years ago. Differences are not as extensive or old as with language families, and archaeological evidence can confirm that these derived from the same family.

Germanic Branch Languages

Branch of Indo-European that developed into many different forms, including; High German, Low German, Scandinavian (Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish), Dutch, and English.

Romance Languages

Languages that developed from Latin, such as Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.

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.

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.

Creole

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

Ideogram

The system of writing used in China and other East Asian countries in which each symbol represents an idea or concept rather than a specific sound, as is the case with letters in English.

Lingua Franca

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

Pidgin Language

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

Ebonics

Dialect spoken by some African-Americans.

Franglais

A term used by the French for English words that have entered the French language, a combination of francais and anglais." the French words for "French" and "English," respectively.

Denglish

Combination of German and English.

Spanglish

Combination of Spanish and English, spoken by Hispanic-Americans.