Language Apetizer Project
By PaJah Vang and Ella Pederson
Language
Language is a system of communication through speech, a collection of sounds that a group of people understand to have the same meaning. There are roughly 6,500 languages spoken in the world although 2,000 of them only have about 1,000 speakers. (Ex: French).
Official Language
The official language is the language used by the government for laws, reports and, public objects (ex: road signs, money, and stamps). Not to be confused with the standard language which is the dialect that is most acceptable for mass communication.
Ideogram
An ideograms is a character which represents concepts or ideas, not specific pronounciations.
Isolated Language
An isolated language is a language not related to any other therefore not attached to any language family. (Ex: Basque. Spoken in the Pyrenees Mts. of Spain and France).
Lingua Franca
A language of international communication (Ex: English).
Creole Language
A creole or creolized language is defined as a language that results from the mixing of the colonizer's language with the indigenous language of the people being dominated. (Ex: Haitian Creole--which is largely based off of 18th century French).
Pidgin Language
A form of speech that adopts a simplified grammar and unit vocabulary of a Lingua Franca. Often used for communication among speakers of two different languages. (Ex: Spanglish)
Language Branch
A collection of languages related through a common ancestor that existed several thousand years ago.
Language Family
A collection of languages through a common ancestor before recorded history.
Language Group
A collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in he relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary.