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Human Geography Chapter 6 Vocabulary
Human Geography (People, Place, and Culture - 8th Edition)
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10th Grade
11/15/2010

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Term
standard language
Definition
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
Term
language
Definition
a set of sounds, combinations of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication
Term

dialect

Definition
local or regional characteristics of a language
Term
mutual intelligibility
Definition
the ability of two people to understand each other when speaking
Term
dialect chains
Definition
a set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related
Term
language families
Definition
groups of languages with a shared but fairly distant origin
Term
subfamilies (language)
Definition
divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent
Term
sound shift
Definition
a slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin
Term
Proto-Indo-European (language)
Definition
linguistic hypothesis proposing the existence of an ancestral indo-european language that is the hearth of the ancient latin, greek, and sanskrit languages which hearth would link modern languages from scandinavia to north africa and from north america through parts of asia to australia
Term
backward reconstruction
Definition
the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants "backward" toward the original language
Term
extinct language
Definition
language without any native speakers
Term
deep reconstruction
Definition
technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that proceeded the extinct language
Term
Nostratic (language)
Definition
language believed to be the ancestral language not only of Proto-Indo-European, but also of the Kartvelian languafes of the southern Caucasus region, the Uralic-Altaic languages (including Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian), the Dravadian languages of India, and the Afro-Asiatic language family
Term
language divergence
Definition
the opposite of language convergence; a process suggested by German linguist August Schleicher whereby new languages are formed when a language breaks into dialects due to a lack of spacial interaction among speakers of the language and continued isolation of eventually causes the division of language into discrete new languages
Term
language convergence
Definition
the collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of peoples with different languages; the opposite of language divergence
Term
Renfrew hypothesis
Definition

three languages near the first agricultural heart, the FERTILE CRESCENT, give rise to three language families

-Europe's Indo-European Languages

-North African and Arabian languages

-the languages in present day Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India

Term
conquest theory
Definition
the early speakers of Proto-Indo-European speard westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues
Term
dispersal hypothesis
Definition
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 Russion-Ukrainian plains and on into the Balkans
Term
romance languages
Definition

languages that lie in the areas that were once controlled by the Roman Empire but were not subsequently overwhelmed

french

spanish

italian

romanian

portugese

Term
germanic languages
Definition

languages that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south

english

german

danish

norwegian

swedish

Term
slavic languages
Definition

languages that developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in present-day Ukraineclose to 2000 years ago

russian

polish

czech

slovak

ukranian

sloventian

serbo-croatian

bulgarian

Term
lingua franca
Definition
a COMMON LANGUAGE, or language used among speakers of different languages for the purposes of trade and commerce
Term
pidgin language
Definition
when parts of two or more languages are combined in a simplified structure and vocabulary
Term
Creole language
Definition
a language that began as a pidgin language but was later adopeed as he mother tongue by a people in place of the mother tongue
Term
multilingual states
Definition
countries in which more than one language is spoken
Term
official language
Definition
the language selected to promote internal cohesion, usually the language of the courts and government
Term
global language
Definition
a common language of trade and commerce used around the world
Term
place
Definition
the uniqueness of a location
Term
toponyms
Definition
place names
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