Sociolinguistics and Historical Linguistics Vocabulary

A comprehensive set of vocabulary flashcards for studying Sociolinguistics and Historical Linguistics, containing definitions of important terms.

Sociolingustistics

The study of how language varies and changes in social contexts, including factors like region, class, and gender.

Accommodation

A form of style-shifting whereby one adjusts one’s speech in order to socially or conversationally position oneself in relation to the interlocutors or audience at hand.

Adstrate

A language in a contact situation that is roughly socially equal to another language and has about the same amount of prestige.

Accent

The phonological and phonetic details of a dialect.

Bilingual mixed language

A language that results from the fusion of features from two other languages that are both spoken natively by a community.

Code-switching

The use of different languages in the same speech exchange, the same utterance, or even the same sentence.

Convergence

The use of speech similar to that of one’s interlocutor in order to increase rapport.

Covert prestige

The kind of prestige that a dialect might carry in a smaller community, where speaking it may signal the speaker’s in-group status.

Creole

A language that descends from a pidgin but that has full expressiveness and is spoken natively by some.

Dialect

The variety of speech used by a region or social group of speakers.

Dialect boundary

A collection of isoglosses that track along the same geographic boundary such that a whole dialect is distinguished, not merely a dialectal feature

Dialect continuum

A geographic band of dialects/languages in which neighboring dialects are mutually intelligible but more distant ones are not, which blurs the dinstinction between a dialect and language

Diglossia

A situation where two different languages are spoken within the same community in different social contexts.

Divergence

The use of a speech style that is dissimilar from one’s interlocutor in order to increase social distance between the speaker and the listener.

Hypercorrection

The overuse of a form not native to one’s own dialect in an attempt to affect a different dialect.

Idiolect

The variety of speech used by a single speaker.

Isogloss

A line drawn on a map to represent the geographic border between two dialectal features.

Language

A collection of mutually intelligible dialects that is itself not mutually intelligible with any other variety of speech.

Linguistic determinism

The almost universally rejected strong form of linguistic relativity, suggesting that language one speaks rigorously determines one’s perception of the world, restricting and limiting one’s mental categories

Linguistic relativity

The hypothesis that the language one speaks influences one’s cognition, thought processes, and perception and categorization of objects and ideas in the world.

Overt prestige

The kind of prestige that the standardized dialect of a language carries in the larger overall community.

Pidgin

A language used primarily for trade between two linguistic groups that lacks full expressiveness.

Style-shifting

The use of different linguistic styles to express one’s desired identity or to fit into or exclude oneself from a particular group or community.

Substrate

A language in a contact situation that is socially inferior and has less prestige.

Superstrate

A language in a contact situation that is socially dominant and has greater prestige.

Register

Speech that uses jargon and specialized vocabulary associated with a particular occupation or other social environment in order to demonstrate expertise or indicate trustworthiness.

Historical Lingustics

The study of how languages change over time, including aspects like phonetics, semantics, syntax, and vocabulary.

Bleaching

An extreme form of semantic broadening where most or all of the lexical meaning of a word is lost.

Semantic broadening

A kind of semantic change whereby a word’s meaning becomes wider and more generally applicable than it was previously.

Bleeding

The act whereby one sound change prevents another sound change from affecting a particular word by eliminating the conditioning environment

Centum languages

The group of Indo-European languages where velar *k and palatal ḱ merged into a simple velar stop but labiovelar *k^w remained distinct - e.g Latin for whose word for 100 the group is named

Cognate

A word which is descended from the same ancestral form as another.

Comparative method

A method of reconstruction that involves comparing words from multiple languages.

Family-tree model

A way of representing the genetic relationship between languages emphasizing their common ancestry.

Feeding

The act whereby one sound change enables another sound change to affect a particular word by creating the conditioning environment.

Grammaticalization

The process where a previously lexical element loses its semantic content and is repurposed as a grammatical element.

Great Vowel Shift

An important development in the transition from Middle English to Modern English that radically altered the qualities of English’s long vowels, depriving them of their continental values and restructuring the language’s vowel space.

Grimm’s law

A law of sound change that was proposed in order to explain the correspondence of certain stops and fricatives between apparent cognates in Germanic and Latin.

Internal reconstruction

A method of reconstruction that involves comparing forms within a single language.

Jespersen’s Cycle

The process according to which languages tend to shift from pre-verbal negation to post-verbal negation.

Pre-language

The result of successful internal reconstruction.

Proto-Indo-European

The common ancestor of most European and some Indian languages, including English, German, Russian, Welsh, Spanish, Albanian, Greek, Hindi, and Persian

Proto-language

The result of a successful application of the comparative method.

Satem languages

The group of Indo-European languages where *k and *kw merged but *ḱ remained distinct.

Semantic narrowing

A kind of semantic change whereby a word’s meaning becomes more precise and specific than it was previously.

Verner’s law

An extension to Grimm’s law that explains apparent exceptions by proposing that voiced fricatives, not voiceless ones, result from voiceless stops after unstressed syllables in Proto-Indo-European.

Wave model

A way of representing the relationship between languages that emphasizes degree of difference and is usually based on geography.