Unit 3: Culture Vocabulary

Monotheistic

Religion based on the belief that there’s only one God

Polytheistic

Religions that believe in more than one supreme or deity

Assimilation 

Forcibly eliminating a nations customs and replacing them with customs of the dominant customs

Cultural Appropriation

Members of a dominant culture take elements from a minority country without consent or understanding

Neolocalism

Recreating a cultures “old place” in a “new place”… look for cultural landscapes… religious buildings, colors, language, etc.

Glocalization

The concept that merges globalization and localization, focusing on how global entries adapt to local cultures and markets

Animism

Belief that objects, such as plants and stores or natural events have discrete spirit and conscious life

Ethnic Religion

Religions relate closely to culture, ethnic heritage, and to the physical geography of a particular place

universalizing religions 

Belief systems that seek to be applicable to all people, regardless of culture or location and activity promote the idea of spreading their faith 

Cultural landscape 

The visible imprint of human activity on the natural environment showcasing the interplay between culture and nature 

Placelessness

the loss of unique character in a place due to the homogenization on cultural landscapes

Reterritorialization

When people within a folk culture start to produce an aspect of pop culture themselves, doing so in the context of their cultures and making it their own

Commodification 

The process of transforming goods, services, ideas, or cultural artifacts into commodities that can be bought and sold in a market 

Standard Language

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

Dialect

Regional or social variations of a language that differ in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar

Isogloss 

Fuzzy map line that marks the boundary between areas where different linguistic features are used (dialects)

Creolized language

A language that results from the missing of a colonizer’s language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated

Language Divergence

The process of a single language splitting into multiple languages over time

Fundamentalism 

Literal interpretation and a strict and intense adherence to basic principles of a religion 

Secularism

The principe of separating religion from political, social, and educational institutions, promoting a society where religious beliefs don’t influence public policy or governance

Pilgrimage

Journey undertaken by individuals to a farmers place or shrine, often for religious reasons

Conquest theory 

Major theory of how Proto-Indo-European diffused into Europe which holds that the early speakers of this culture spread westward on horseback 

Lingua Franca

A common second language used by people who don’t share a martini tongue

Agriculture theory 

Refers to the geography models and explanations that describe how and why agriculture began, spread, and developed across regions of the world. 

Mutual Intelligibility

ability of speakers of different but related languages or dialects to understand each other without prior study

Standard language 

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

cognate

word in different languages that has a common linguistic origin and often a similar meaning and sound

Backwards reconstruction

used to track a language’s origin by analyzing its modern words and working backwards to recreate features of the ancestral language 

Language convergence 

2 or more languages becoming more similar due to interaction, contact or blending 

Pidgin language

Blended language that develops when speakers of different languages need to communicate for various reasons

Language divergence

When a single language splits into multiple distinct languages over time