GLOSSARY
Arbitrariness: the relationship between a symbol and its referent (meaning), in which there is no obvious connection between them.
Closed communication system: a form of communication that cannot create new meanings or messages; it can only convey pre-programmed (innate) messages.
Code-switching: using two or more language varieties in a particular interaction.
Creole: a language that develops from a pidgin when the pidgin becomes so widely used that children acquire it as one of their first languages.
Critical Age Range Hypothesis: research suggesting that a child will gradually lose the ability to acquire language naturally and without effort if he or she is not exposed to other people speaking a language until past the age of puberty. This applies to the acquisition of a second language as well.
Cultural transmission: the need for some aspects of the system to be learned; a feature of some species’communication systems.
Descriptive linguistics: the study of the structure of language.
Dialect: a variety of speech. The term is often applied to a subordinate variety of a language. Speakers of two dialects of the same language do not necessarily always understand each other.
Discreteness: a feature of human speech that they can be isolated from others.
Displacement: the ability to communicate about things that are outside of the here and now.
Gesture-call system: a system of non-verbal communication using varying combinations of sound, body language, scent, facial expression, and touch, typical of great apes and other primates, as well as humans.
Historical linguistics: the study of how languages change.
Interchangeability: the ability of all individuals of the species to both send and receive messages; a feature of some species’ communication systems.
Kinesics: the study of all forms of human body language.
Language: an idealized form of speech, usually referred to as the standard variety.
Language death: the total extinction of a language.
Language shift: when a community stops using their old language and adopts a new one.
Language universals: characteristics shared by all languages.
Lexicon: the vocabulary of a language.
Linguistic relativity: the idea that the structures and words of a language influence how its speakers think, how they behave, and ultimately the culture itself (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).
Morphemes: the basic meaningful units in a language.
Open communication system: a form of communication that can create an infinite number of new messages; a feature of human language only.
Oralist approach: an approach to the education of deaf children that emphasizes lip-reading and speaking orally while discouraging the use of signed language.
Paralanguage: those characteristics of speech beyond the actual words spoken, such as pitch, loudness, tempo.
Phonemes: the basic meaningless sounds of a language.
Pidgin: a simplified language that springs up out of a situation in which people who do not share a language must spend extended amounts of time together.
Pragmatic Function: all signs serve a useful purpose in the life of the users, from survival functions to influencing others’ behavior.
Pragmatics: how social context contributes to meaning in an interaction.
Productivity/creativity: the ability to produce and understand messages that have never been expressed before.
Proxemics: the study of the social use of space, including the amount of space an individual tries to maintain around himself in his interactions with others.
Register: a style of speech that varies depending on who is speaking to whom and in what context.
Semanticity: signs carry meaning for users
Semantics: how meaning is conveyed at the word and phrase level.
Standard language: the variant of any language that has been given special prestige in the community.
Syntax: the rules by which a language combines morphemes into larger units.
Taxonomies: a system of classification.
Universal grammar (UG): a theory developed by linguist Noam Chomsky suggesting that a basic template for all human languages is embedded in our genes.
Vernaculars: non-standard varieties of a language, which are usually distinguished from the standard by their inclusion of stigmatized forms.