APHUG 4 & 5

Acculturation

The process of adjustment to the dominant culture.

Assimilation

The process of giving up cultural traditions and adopting the social customs of the dominant culture of a place.

Custom

The frequent repetition of an act, to the extent that it becomes characteristic of the group of people performing the act.

Folk culture

Culture traditionally practiced by a small, homogeneous, rural group living in relative isolation from other groups.

Habit

A repetitive act performed by a particular individual.

Popular culture

Culture found in a large, heterogeneous society that shares certain habits despite differences in other personal characteristics.

Taboo

A restriction on behavior imposed by social custom.

Terroir

The contribution of a location's distinctive physical features to the way food tastes

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).

Developing language

A language spoken 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.

Ebonics

A dialect spoken by some African Americans.

Extinct language

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

Franglais

A combination of francais and anglais (the French words for French and English respectively).

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 the use of speech, a collection of sounds understood by a group of people 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.

Official language

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

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.

Received Pronunciation (RP)

The dialect of English associated with upper-class Britons living in London and now considered standard 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 communications.

Subdialect

A subdivision of a dialect.

Toponym

Place names given to certain features on the land such as settlements, terrain features, and streams.

Vigorous language

A language spoken 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.