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language |
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a system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds that a group of people understands to have the same meaning |
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literary tradition |
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a system of written communication |
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official language |
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the language adopted for use by the government for the conduct of business and publication of documents |
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dialect |
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a regional variation of a language distinguished by distinctive vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation |
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standard language |
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a dialect that is well established and widely recognized as the most acceptable for government, business, education, and mass communication |
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British Received Pronunciation (BRP) |
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the dialect of English associated with upper-class Britons living in the London area and now considered standard in the United Kingdom |
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isogloss |
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a boundary that separates regions in which different language uses predominate |
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language family |
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a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history |
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language branch |
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a collection of languages within a language family that are related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago |
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language group |
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a collection of languages within a language branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary |
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Vulgar Latin |
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a form of Latin used in daily conversation by ancient Romans, as opposed to the standard dialect, which was used for official documents |
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creole or creolized language |
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a language that results from the mixing of teh colonizer's language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated |
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ideograms |
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written characters which represent ideas or concepts, not specific pronunciations |
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extinct languages |
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languages that are no longer spoken or read in daily activities by anyone in the world |
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isolated language |
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a language unrelated to any other and therefore not attached to any lanaguage family |
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lingua franca |
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a language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages |
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pidgin language |
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a form of speech that adopts a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary of a lingua franca, used for communications among speakers of two different languages |
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ebonics |
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dialect spoken by some African Americans |
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franglais |
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the widespread use of English in the French language |
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Spanglish |
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a combination of Spanish and English, spoken by Hispanic Americans |
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Esperanto |
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an artificial international language with a vocabulary based on word roots common to many European languages and a regularized system |
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orthography |
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the aspect of language concerned with letters and their sequences in words |
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trade language |
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a language, especially a pidgin, used by speakers of different native languages for communication in commercial trade |
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vernacular |
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the standard native language of a country or locality |
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