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23 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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backward reconstruction |
the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants backward toward the original language |
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conquest theory |
one major theory of how Proto-Indo-European diffused into Europe which holds that the early speakers of Proto-Indo-European spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues |
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deep reconstruction |
technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that proceeded the extinct language |
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dialects |
local or regional characteristics of a language |
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dispersal hypothesis |
hypothesis which holds that the Indo-European languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were first carried eastward into SouthWest Asia, next around the Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and into the Balkans |
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Germanic languages |
languages (english, german, danish, norwegian, and swedish) that reflect the expansion of people out of Northern Europe to the west and south |
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Global language |
the language used more commonly around the world; defined on the basis of either than number of speakers of the language, or prevalence of use in commerce and trade |
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isogloss |
a geographic boundary within a particular linguistic feature occurs |
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language |
a set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication |
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language convergence |
collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of people with different languages |
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language divergence |
a process suggested by german linguist August Schliecher whereby new languages are formed when a language breaks into dialects due to a lack of spatial interaction among speakers of the language and continued isolation eventually causes the division of the language into discrete new languages |
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language families |
group of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin |
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lingua franca |
a language used among speakers of different languages for the purpose of trade and commerce |
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monolingual states |
countries in which only one language is spoken |
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multilingual states |
countries in which more than one language is spoken |
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mutual intelligibility |
the ability of two people to understand each other when speaking |
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nostratic |
the language believed to be the ancestral language not only of Proto-Indo-European, but also of the Kartvelian languages of the southern Cuacasus region, the Uralic-Altaic languages (including Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian), the Dravadian languages of Indian, and the Afro-Asiatic language family |
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official language |
in multilingual countries the language selected, often by the educated and politically powerful elite, to promote internal cohesion; usually the language of the courts and government |
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romance languages |
languages (french, spanish, italian, romanian, and portuguese) that lienin the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but were not subsequently overwhelmed |
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slavic languages |
languages (russian, polish, czech, slovak, ukrainian, slovenian, serbs-croatian, and bulgarian) that developed as slacks people migrated from a base in present day Ukraine close to 2000 years ago |
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sound shift |
slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin |
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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 |
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subfamilies |
divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the original is more recent |
