6.10 Glossary

Accent: variations in pronunciations

Bilingual: Being able to use two languages with varying degrees of fluency.

Cajun: A blended language stemming from Canadian French speakers (they came from Acadia north of Maine)  mixed with English

Creole: A blended language differentiated from a pidgin language by its more complex grammar and its status as a first language.

Cultural schemata: A system of standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating and acting.

Dialects: are mutually intelligible variants of the same language used by people in certain areas of a country.

Cultural scripts: The “scripts” that guide social behavior and language use in everyday speaking situations.

Language branch: A group of languages which share common linguistic and have evolved from a common ancestor.

Language family: A collection of languages within a family with a common ancestral language.

Proto-language: An historic language from which known languages are believed to have descended by differentiation of the proto-language into the languages that form a language family.

Pidgin: A composite language with a simplified grammatical system and a limited vocabulary.

Language death: a language becomes extinct because there are no more speakers

 Language shift: the collective decisions of its speakers abandon their language in favor of the new one.

Intergenerational language shift: A linguistic pattern of acculturation found in US immigrant groups in which a group shifts from being non-English monolingual to English monolingual.

Language universal: all languages share a number of characteristics, such as they experience change over time or they all follow grammatical rules.

Lingua franca: A language used to make communication possible between people who do not share a native language.

Native speaker: a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest childhood

Official language: A language that is given a special legal status over other languages in a country.

Toponymy: The study of place names.

Text: The use and arrangement of specific language forms.

Typological classification: Classification based on the comparison of the formal similarities in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary which exist among languages.