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mutual intelligibility
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ch 6 vocab
| 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 | variants of a standard language along regional or ethic lines |
| dialect chain | a group of contiguous dialects where the dialects nearest to each other geographically are the most similar and the 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 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 hearth 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 pidgin language and was later adopted as the mother tongue of a people |
| toponym | place name |
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