Term
click below
click below
Term
Normal Size Small Size show me how
Chapter 6 Vocabulary
AP Human Geography
Term | Definition |
---|---|
Language | a set of sounds and symbols that are used for communication. |
Mutual Intelligibility | ability of two people to understand each other when speaking. |
Standard Language | the variant of a language that a country's political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm for use in schools, government, the media, and other aspects of public life. |
Dialect | variant of a standard language along regional or ethnic lines. |
Dialect Chain | a group of continuous dialects where the dialects nearest to each other geographically are the most similar and dialects farther apart are least similar. |
Isogloss | a geographic boundary where linguistic features occur. |
Language family | group of languages with a shared but distant origin. |
Language subfamilies | divisions within a language family where commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent. |
Cognate | a word in one language that shares its origin with a word in another language. Cognates have similar meanings and spellings and show shared origins and connections among languages. |
Language Divergence | process where discrete, new languages are eventually formed from one language. Happens when people speaking two dialects of a language are relatively isolated from each other and have little spatial interaction; the opposite of language convergence. |
Backward reconstruction | Tracking sound shifts and hardening consonants backward to uncover an original language. |
Language convergence | process where two languages collapse into one language. Happens when people speaking two languages have frequent and and consistent spatial interaction with each other; the opposite of language divergence. |
Extinct language | language without any native speakers. |
Conquest theory | idea that early speakers of Proto-Indo-European left the heart area and moved westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues. |
Agriculture theory | the theory that the Proto-Indo-European language spread with the diffusion of agriculture. |
Vernacular | a language used in everyday interaction among a group of people in a local area. |
Lingua franca | language used for trade or cultural interaction among people who speak different languages. |
Pidgin language | combination of two or more languages in a simplified structure and vocabulary. |
Creole language | a language that began as a pigdin language and was later adopted as the mother tongue of a people. |
Toponym | place name. |