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5.6: Key Terms Defined

  • Page ID
    38671
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    Speech community: People who share a similar cultural background and language knowledge.

    Langue: The internal mental capacity for language.

    Parole: The external manifestation of ideas through speech.

    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.

    Speech situations: Locations and occasions requiring the use of different styles of language.

    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.

    Dialect: Variants of the single language.

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

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

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

    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.

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

    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.


    This page titled 5.6: Key Terms Defined is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by David Dorrel & Joseph P. Henderson (University of North Georgia Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.