Term

Definition

Language Family

a group of languages that share a common ancestral language from a particular hearth, or region of origin (page 201)

Isolate

a language that is unrelated to any other known language (page 202)

language branch

a collection of languages within a language family that share a common origin and separated from other branches in the same family several thousand years ago (page 202)

language groups

languages within a language branch that share a common ancestor in the relatively recent past and have vocabularies with a high degree of overlap (page 203)

Universalizing religions

a religion that tries to appeal to all humans and is open to membership by everyone (page 219)

Christianity

. a universalizing religion based on the teachings of Jesus Christ that began in what is now the West Bank and Israel around the beginning of the common era and has spread to all continents (page 219)

Islam

a universalizing religion based on the teachings of Muhammad that originated in the hearth of Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century (page 220)

Buddhism

the oldest universalizing religion, which arose from a hearth in northeastern India sometime between the mid-sixth and mid-fourth centuries b.c.e. and is based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, called the Buddha (page 221)

Sikhism

the newest universalizing religion; founded by Guru Nanak, who lived from 1469 to 1539, in the Punjab region of northwestern India (page 222)

Ethnic religions

a religion that is closely tied with a particular ethnic group often living in a particular place (page 223)

Hinduism

an ethnic religion that arose a few thousand years ago in South Asia and is closely tied to India (page 223)

Judaism

the world’s first monotheistic religion, which developed among the Hebrew people of Southwest Asia about 4,000 years ago (page 224)

Secularized

focused on worldly rather than spiritual concerns (page 225)