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PENGUIN REFERENCE BOOKS

The Penguin Dictionary of

LANGUAGE

David Crystal was born in 1941 and spent the early years of his life in
Holyhead, North Wales. He went to St Mary’s College, Liverpool, and
University College London, where he read English and obtained his
Ph.D. in 1966. He became lecturer in linguistics at University College,
Bangor, and from 1965 to 1985 was at the University of Reading, where
he was Professor of Linguistic Science for several years. He is currently
Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor.
His research interests are mainly in English language studies, and he
has been much involved with the clinical and remedial applications
of linguistics in the study of language handicap.
David Crystal has published numerous articles and reviews, and his
books include Linguistics (Penguin 1971, second edition 1985), Child
Language Learning and Linguistics, Introduction to Language Pathology,
A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, Clinical Linguistics, Profiling
Linguistic Disability, Who Cares About English Usage? (Penguin 1984),
Listen To Your Child (Penguin 1986), Rediscover Grammar, The English
Language (Penguin 1988), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Pil-
grimage, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, English as
a Global Language and Language Play (Penguin 1998). He is also the
editor of the Cambridge family of general encyclopedias.
David Crystal now lives in Holyhead, where he works as a writer,
lecturer and consultant on language and linguistics, and a reference
books editor. He is also a frequent radio broadcaster. In June 1995 he
was awarded the OBE. ;
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~ OFF Gals a ABORT eseaast) wll ougesd bas sg hugten indinket
stiingqeiqare foo fo yc? 9b ete om) to enh
“gate. pve 2 Hay ai Sotkw sbxar! So ssi eed word rao, biveG
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The Penguin Dictionary of
LANGUAGE
David Crystal

SECOND EDITION

PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 STZ, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published as An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages by Blackwell 1992

Published in Penguin Books 1994
Second edition published under the present title 1999
4

Copyright © David Crystal, 1992, 1999

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Set in 7.5/10.5 pt ITC Stone Serif

Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives ple

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
te-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
PREFACE

The motivation for this book came from my sense of an increasing gap between
the questions about language which people routinely ask and the availability of
information in existing reference books on the subject. Typical of these questions
are ‘How many people speak Spanish?’, ‘What language do they speak in Ukraine?’,
and ‘How do you pronounce Xhosa?’. In preparing the first edition, in 1991-2, I
recall being asked about the meaning of such terms as Nostratic, LINC, dyslexia,
glossolalia, and creole. Looking for a convenient one-stop source which would
quickly give a basic answer to such questions, I was surprised to find nothing. A
good dictionary might provide a basic definition, but usually in a highly compressed
manner, and without the amplification which many of these terms need if one is
to be sure of their use. An encyclopedia, on the other hand, tends to exclude
terminology.
My own previous writing in this domain was not much help. My Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Language covered the right domain, but its thematic structure meant
that information on a particular topic (such as Polish) was spread in various places,
and pronunciations were not given. My Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics was
alphabetical, but focused exclusively on the more specialized vocabulary found in
those subjects. It explicitly excluded the linguistic terminology of such areas as
language teaching and learning, speech therapy, stylistics, desk-top publishing,
philology, traditional grammar, writing systems, language names, and the many
everyday notions which relate to the use of language.
The present book tries to combine the convenience of the alphabetical dictionary
with the general range of the thematic encyclopedia. It focuses on the more popular
and relevant concepts to do with language, but I have taken into account the
more systematic kinds of enquiry which are likely to accompany the contemporary
increased focus on language, in such areas as the British National Curriculum. I have
also introduced an ‘interface’ with linguistics, including several basic theoretical
notions, the names of a number of linguistic branches, models, and theories, and
the essential descriptive terms in phonetics.
For the second edition, I have completely revised the geolinguistic data in the
book, updating the population statistics on individual countries to the mid-1990s,
and taking into account the results of the latest surveys about numbers of speakers.
Several entries have had to be fundamentally revised, in the light of the political
changes of the early 1990s - notably the countries and languages which were
previously grouped under Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, and those countries which
have adopted new constitutions affecting language (as in South Africa) or new
Preface

names (such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire). Several new
entries deal with issues which have come to prominence in the 1990s, such as
Ebonics, Estuary English, and New Englishes, and I have included a number of entries
to do with the critical issues of ecolinguistics, endangered languages, and human
linguistic rights. I have also increased the number of cross-references between entries,
and added an index of all language names included in the book.
Iam most grateful to the many readers who have written to me, over the past few
years, drawing my attention to various infelicities and gaps in the first edition — and
also, 1 am glad to say, confirming my original intuition that this kind of hybrid
reference book has a useful role to play. I hope that if readers find anything in this
new edition which is not as it should be, they will continue to let me know, in the
interests of improving coverage and treatment for future editions.

David Crystal
Holyhead, Anglesey LL65 1PB
March 1998

vi
CONVENTIONS

The alphabetical arrangement of the entries is letter-by-letter, as in a dictionary.

Many entries are followed by cross-reference (>) to other entries, separated by
semicolons and listed in alphabetical order. If several cross-references have a word
in common, they are grouped together in the following way:

language delay/pathology; (= language delay; language pathology;)

clinical/educational linguistics; (= clinical linguistics; educational
linguistics;)
I had two criteria in mind when choosing cross-references: to refer to notions on
which the sense of an entry depends (the clarification factor), and to provide an
opportunity to follow up notions of related interest (the browsing factor). It is
important to appreciate that other terms used in an entry may still have their own
entries in the book, even though they are not listed in the cross-references.
A phonemic transcription (Received Pronunciation) is given for those headwords
which might present an uncertainty of pronunciation to the general reader. When
boldface items appear in the body of an entry, in most cases the pronunciation of
those items is given, if necessary, after the headword in its alphabetical place in the
book. Foreign pronunciations are also given, in a few entries, using the symbols of
the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Pronunciation key

i see u put av out k coo RY?) arate

1 him u: do 1a here g go Z Zoo rt row
yas 3: bird €3 care t{ chew f shoe w way
a_ sat a about Ua poor d& jaw 3 beige j you
A sun el ape p_ pie Tonetce, h hi
a: calm al time b by v_ view m my
vd dog a1 boy t fe 6 thin n no
3: saw dU SO d die 6 the Q sing

Vii
 eae aucBe ait secant begermane Eewratiol wh
gheeiswtning sams
ate: sredam sere seniorhar sve Pildoteatindet’ iegi cotSeBtel 4
ie ii ae ren st vachsayrs gen oni ost
st bs ons.
eat“xe
ERT vy
zi Til isitoliasube
GG!
oo
spe

id aan sy (ese <8P. Pastel Gatsior 39-20% iors ge meted a cesieAE

rileyHeel {Hive yarn qrice we fi Deeg atnied rorhio Ind} steerageGb OFtn
ier: 2epEIeEaTZRO ry seks aaj Leva on sieywoRraiguor? HON8 ,dood aeit.
spaoniianae SdSSi 0! habenmm dEpitel spams osviol} ee nesa with
_ ede#4, esi leery eat Sb nousiae
oe) fottaiminning sift 22g) em ith Weide Ths iveneed aa isi.prety arrest +
he ni scsi igbituddeyiqie Ot.nl Dowbssd anti ofle aceon Uirowdy alnetsh
ene amt griiass zotttne wal 6. wenscate:Pera need os

thie t=
avaGE
oe es
 A
A An abbreviation of adjective, adverb, or adverbial.

AAVE »>African-American Vernacular English.

abbreviation A reduced version of a word, phrase, or sentence. There are many

types of word abbreviation, such as acronyms (EEC), blends (brunch), and shortened
forms (ad). Sentence abbreviation is usually studied under the heading of ellipsis:
I phoned Fred and asked him to dinner (where there has been ellipsis of I before asked).
»>acronym; blending; clipping; ellipsis.

Abkhaz /‘abkaz/ A member of the Abkhazo-Adyghian group of Caucasian languages,

spoken by c.100,000 people in the north-west Caucasus, mainly in the Abkhaz region
of Georgia (where it has official status) and in parts of Turkey. It is written in the
Cyrillic alphabet. »Abkhazo-Adyghian.
Abkhazo-Adyghian /ab'kazav a'didzian/ A group of Caucasian languages found
in the north-west of the Caucasus region; also known as Northwest Caucasian.
The languages are noted for their large number of consonants (over 80, in the case
of Ubykh) and small number of vowels (as few as two, according to some analyses).
»> Abkhaz; Adygey; Caucasian; Kabardian.
ablative case /‘ablativ/ One of the ways in which some inflected languages make
a word change its form, in order to show a grammatical relationship with other parts
of the sentence. The ablative mainly affects nouns, along with any related words
(such as adjectives or pronouns). It signals a range of locational or instrumental
meanings which in English would be expressed by certain prepositions — for instance,
the ablative of Latin amicus ‘friend’ is amico, which would usually be translated as
‘by’, ‘with’, or ‘from a friend’. »>case; inflection 1.

ablaut /‘ablaut/ A change of vowel which causes a word to take on a different

grammatical function. For example, in the forms of the verb drink, one change of
vowel produces a past tense, drank, and another produces the past participle, drunk.
This kind of relationship between vowels is also called vowel gradation. It is very
common in Indo-European languages. »>Indo-European; vowel.
aboriginal languages »>Australian.
absolute construction A constituent of a sentence which is separate or discon-
‘nected from the rest of the sentence. A famous example is the Latin ablative
absolute construction, such as hoc facto (‘this having been done’), which can be
absolute universal

used without influencing the grammatical form of the other words in the sentence.
In English, adjectives and adverbs can often be used within a sentence in an absolute
way, as in Angry, he left the room or Nevertheless, the meal was cold. »>ablative case;
sentence.

absolute universal >universal.

abstract 1. A summary of a piece of writing, often placed at the beginning or end

of a printed text, such as an article or report. The term is also used in the study of
narrative, for an optional element which summarizes the whole of a story. >>narr-
ative. 2. >concrete 1.

abuse »>vocal abuse.

Académie frangaise /akada'mi: fra'se:z/ The French Academy, instituted in France

in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, which set the pattern for many subsequent bodies
in other countries. Its statutes define as its principal function ‘to labour with all
possible care and diligence to give definite rules to our language, and to render it
pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences’. The 40 academicians
were drawn from the ranks of the church, nobility, and military. The Academy
continues to speak out against what it sees as regrettable change in the language
(such as the widespread use of English loan words), has produced many notable
publications (its first dictionary appeared in 1694), and has considerable influence
in French society; but it has had little real effect in altering the way the French
language has developed. »»academy; French.

academy In the context of language, an institution which tries to protect a language

from what it considers to be undesirable influences, to maintain excellence in its
use, and to define its rules through the writing of grammars, dictionaries, and other
manuals. Academies date from the 16th century, the most influential being the
French Academy. Spain, Sweden, Hungary, and several other countries have aca-
demies, but the concept has never attracted much enthusiasm in the main English-
speaking nations (though there is a body with such a name in South Africa), largely
on the grounds that any attempt to control the development of a language by
putting it in the charge of a small number of people is futile. » Académie francaise;
codification; prescriptivism; purism.

Accadian »>Akkadian.

accent 1. In phonetics, those features of pronunciation which signal a person’s

regional or social identity (e.g. an ‘educated accent’, a ‘northern accent’). The term
is often contrasted with dialect, which includes features of grammar and vocabulary.
»> dialect; phonetics; received pronunciation. 2. In phonology, a type of perceived
prominence heard on a spoken word or syllable; the word dictionary, for example,
has its first syllable strongly accented. Syllables which lack this prominence are said
to be umaccented. The pattern of relative prominence in a sequence of syllables is
 accusative case

called accentuation, and the study of accentuation is sometimes called accentol-

ogy. »>phonology; stress. 3. In graphology, a mark placed above a letter, showing
how that letter is to be pronounced. French accents, for example, include a grave é,
similar to the sound of e in English set, and an acute é, similar to the ay of English
say. Consonants too may have an accent, as in Serbo-Croatian ¢. »»acute accent;
circumflex; diacritic; grave accent.

accentuation »>accent 2.

acceptable Descriptive of any usage which native speakers feel is possible or normal
in a language. Acceptable utterances are contrasted with unacceptable ones (such
as, in standard English, *It may shall go or *I should of done it) and with such
marginally acceptable cases as ?That baby’s cross and crying. Asterisks and question
marks are used to identify the problem cases. »»grammatical; semi-sentence; usage.

accidence One of the main divisions within the field of grammar, according to
older approaches to language study. It refers to the ways in which a word changes
its form in order to carry out different grammatical functions in a sentence. Examples
include the contrast between singular and plural (horse/horses) or that between
present and past tense (walk/walked). In linguistics, the subject-matter of accidence
is subsumed under morphology. »>inflection 1; morphology. ;

accommodation Adjustments which people make unconsciously to their speech,

influenced by the speech of those they are talking to. It is quite a common experience
to hear people accommodating to the speech of those around them, and some find
themselves especially prone to it. Both convergence (moving closer together) and
divergence (moving further apart) are found, reflecting respectively the rapport or
lack of rapport between the speakers. In the case of convergence, an accent may
change quite noticeably, and cause the listener to enquire about the speaker’s origins.
The situation can be embarrassing, if the listener discovers that the accent is not a
‘genuine one! »>accent 1; convergence 1.

accusative case One of the ways in which inflected languages make a word change
its form, in order to show a grammatical relationship with other parts of the sentence.
The accusative usually marks a word (typically a noun or pronoun) as being the
object of a verb. In German, for example, when the phrase ‘the good lad’ is the
subject of a sentence, it is der gute Junge; when it is object (as in ‘I see the good lad’),
it is (Ich sehe) den guten Jungen. When the noun changes, the associated words change
with it — in this instance, both ‘the’ and ‘good’ are also marked with an accusative
ending. In English there is no accusative case ending for nouns. The difference
between subj ect and object of a clause can be seen only from the word order: compare
the headlines Cat eats mouse and Mouse eats cat. Only with certain pronouns is there
any sign of an accusative case, as in the change from he to him or she to her. The
term objective is often used instead of accusative, therefore, to describe such
instances. »>case; inflection 1; object; word order.
Achehnese

Achehnese »>Achinese.

achievement test In language studies, a test which measures how much of a

language someone has learned after following a particular course of instruction.
Such tests are commonly used at the end of school terms, and enable teachers to
evaluate the success of their teaching as well as to identify weaknesses in their
students. A distinction is often drawn between this kind of test and a proficiency
test, which measures how much of a language someone knows, regardless of how
this knowledge has been acquired. » language learning. '

Achinese /at{i'ni:z/ A Malayic (Austronesian) language spoken by c.3 million people

in the northern part of Sumatra, Indonesia; also called Achehnese, and earlier
spelled Atjehnese. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Austronesian.

Acholi /a'tfauli:/ A Nilotic language spoken by over 750,000 speakers in north

Uganda and south Sudan, closely related to Lango; also spelled Akoli. It is written
in the Roman alphabet. >Lango; Nilotic.

acoustic cues Features of the acoustic signal which enable listeners to distinguish
speech sounds. For example, the first two formants prove crucial to the identification
of vowels, and voice onset time is crucial to the discrimination of voiced and voiceless
consonants. »>formant; voice onset time; voicing.

acoustic nerve The eighth (VIII) cranial nerve, running from the cochlea to the
brain; also called the auditory nerve. It is used for the transmission of (speech)
sound, »>see auditory phonetics.

acoustic phonetics The branch of phonetics which studies the physical properties
of speech sounds. It uses instrumental techniques of investigation to provide an
objective account of speech patterns, which can then be related to the way sounds
are produced and heard. »>burst; experimental phonetics; filtered speech; formant;
phonetics.

acquired language disorder A language disorder which results from injury or

disease, and not from an abnormal course of early child development; contrasts
with a developmental language problem. Examples include the various disorders
which can arise from damage to the language centres of the brain, such as aphasia. An
example of a developmental problem would be language delay. »>aphasia; dysarthria;
dyspraxia; language delay/pathology.

acquisition The process or result of learning a particular aspect of language, or the

language as a whole. The term is used with reference both to the learning of a first
language by children (child language acquisition) and to the learning of further
languages or varieties (second language or foreign language acquisition). It
may also be used in more restricted senses, within particular theories of language
learning and use. »CHILDES; critical period; generalization; innateness hypothesis;
 address, forms of

internalization; language learning; mean length of utterance; monitor model;

motherese; open 3; overextension; proto- 2; psycholinguistics.

acrolect »>creole.

acronym /‘akronim/ A word made up out of the initial letters of other words. Some
are pronounced letter by letter (BBC, EEC); some are pronounced as whole words
(NATO, UNESCO). Lower-case letters may also be used (e.g., i.e.). In some cases, the
letters may represent different parts of the same word (JD). Some acronyms have
become so well known as words that what their constituent letters stand for may be
forgotten (AIDS, laser). In some approaches, the term is restricted to only those items
which can be pronounced as whole words; items which have to be spelled out as a
sequence of letters are then given a separate classification as initialisms. »»abbrev-
iation.

acrostic /a'krostik/ A poem or other text in which certain letters in each line make
up a name or message. In Old English, for example, there are texts in which the
author has put the letters of his name into the lines, and poetic riddles in which the
lines contain the letters which make up the answer to the question. An acrostic
based on the last letters of words or lines is a telestich /ta'lestik/. »>riddle.

active knowledge The knowledge of a language which a user actively employs in

speaking or writing; usually contrasted with passive knowledge, which is what a
person understands in the speech or writing of others. Native speakers’ passive
knowledge of vocabulary is invariably much greater than their active knowledge:
people know far more words than they ever use. »competence; vocabulary.

active voice >voice 1.

actor-action-goal The usual order of elements in an English clause. The actor

(the grammatical subject) is followed by the action (the verb), which is followed by
the goal of the action (the object), as in Mary left the house. Many languages use this
order, but other orders are to be found, such as action—actor—goal in Welsh. »>clause;
goal; word order.

acute accent The accent ’, used to distinguish the sound values of letters in several
languages, such as French, Spanish, and Polish. It may be used both on vowels (e.g.
é, 4) and on consonants (e.g. §, fi). In English it may be seen on such words as cliché
or résumé. »>accent 3.

Adamawa-Ubangi /ada'ma:wa/ A group of c.175 languages found in the northern

part of central Africa, from eastern Nigeria into southwestern Sudan, belonging to
the Niger-Congo family; formerly known as Adamawa-Eastern. Its main members
(in the Ubangi group) are Banda, Gbaya, Ngbaka, and Zande. Several pidgin lan-
guages, notably Sango, are used throughout the area. >»Niger-Congo; pidgin; Sango.

address, forms of The linguistic means by which people express their personal
adjacency pair

and social orientation towards those with whom they are communicating. Examples
include the use of familiar and polite pronouns (such as tu vs. vous in French), terms
of endearment (darling, mate), and the choice between first names, surnaines, titles,
nicknames, and other forms. »»endearment, terms of; T/V forms.

adjacency pair In the analysis of conversation, a single sequence of utterances by

different speakers, in which the first utterance constrains the second in some way.
For example, a question generally elicits an answer, and a suggestion leads to an
acceptance or rejection. »>conversation analysis; turn.

adjective (adj., A) A type of word whose main function is to modify a noun,

expressing a characteristic quality or attribute. Adjectives typically occur within
noun phrases, when they are referred to as attributive adjectives (a happy
occasion), but they may occur in other parts of a sentence, such as after a verb (It’s
red), when they are referred to as predicative adjectives. They may also function
as the head of an adjective (or adjectival) phrase (very sad). In many languages,
adjectives show contrasts of degree (happier, happiest). »degree; epithet; gradability;
modification 1; noun; predicate; word class; cartoon below.

adjunct A less important or optional element in a grammatical construction, whose

removal does not affect the structural identity of the construction. For example, in
the sentence John, it’s time we left, the removal of the vocative element John has no
effect on the identity of the following construction. Adjectives and adverbs are also
typically used as adjuncts. »»>adjective; adverb; vocative case.

‘Goodness! How satisfying it must be to form one’s own adjectives.’

 affix

adverb (adv., A) A type of word whose chief function is to specify the mode of
action of a verb, such as quickly in They walked quickly. However, several other kinds
of word have been grouped under the heading of adverb by grammarians, and the
result is a word class which is heterogeneous. Among these items are intensifying
words (very, quite), negative particles (not), and sentence connectors (however, more-
over). A phrase with an adverb as its head is an adverb phrase (very quickly), but
this term is also sometimes used to include any phrases which are like adverbs in
function (in the garden). A clause which functions like an adverb is an adverb clause
(also called an adverbial clause). »>adverbial; clause; phrase; word class.

adverbial (A) An element of clause structure which functions like an adverb. It

may be a single adverb (soon), an adverbial phrase (very soon, in the morning), or
an adverbial clause (when it was dark .. . ). Adverbials are often classified on the
basis of the kind of meaning they express, such as time (answering the question
‘When?’), place (‘Where?’), and manner (‘How’). »>adverb; clause.

adversative A grammatical ending, word, or construction which expresses the

notion of contrast. Examples in English include but, however, and although (as in She
wore a coat, although it was quite warm). »»conjunction.
Adygey, also Adyge or Adyghe /‘adagei/ A member of the Abkhazo-Adyghian
group of Caucasian languages, spoken by c.300,000 people in the north-west Cau-
casus, mainly in the Adygey region of Russia (where it has official status) and in
Turkey, by other groups in Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, and by small numbers of immi-
grants in Israel, Europe, and the USA; also called Circassian. It is written in the
Cyrillic alphabet. »Abkhazo-Adyghian.
aerometry /¢s'romatri:/ The measurement of air flow during speech; also called
electroaerometry. Several instruments, such as the electroaerometer, have been
designed to provide air-flow data, using a special face mask which allows separate
measures of air flow to be made from mouth and nose. >»>experimental phonetics;
pneumotachograph.
affected »>recipient.
affective meaning The emotional meaning of an utterance; often referred to
simply as affect. It includes the expression of moods, attitudes, dispositions, and
other feelings, and is encountered especially in the use of tones of voice and emotive
vocabulary. Other terms for this dimension of meaning include expressive, emot-
ive, and attitudinal meaning. »connotation; meaning.
affirmative Descriptive of a sentence or verb which has no marker of negation,
as in The paint is on the shelf, also called positive. The primary function of affirmative
sentences is to express an assertion. >»>negation.

affix A meaningful element which is attached to a word root, in order to make a

more complex word. Examples of affixation may be found before the root (a
affricate

prefix), in the middle of a root (an imfix), and after a root (a suffix). English has
many prefixes (de-, un-, pre-) and suffixes (-ed, -tion, -ly), and infixes (inserted within
the root) can be found in Latin, Arabic, and many other languages. Languages which
express grammatical relationships primarily through the use of affixes are known as
affixing languages (e.g. Bantu languages). »morphology; root 1.

affricate /‘afrikat/ A type of consonant consisting of a stop released as a fricative,

at the same place of articulation. Examples in English include the first and last
sounds in church and judge. »>fricative; stop.

Afghan >Pashto.

Afghanistan (population in 1995 estimated at 21,017,000) About SO languages

are spoken in the country, over half the population using Pashto, which is an official
language along with Dari (the local name for Persian). Dari in particular is important
as a lingua franca, and English is increasingly being used for international trade.
Other languages include Tadzhik, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baluchi, Brahui, and Pashayi.
>» Pashto; Persian.

Africa A vast and complex linguistic area, containing more languages than any
other continent. No one knows just how many languages there are: low estimates
suggest c.1000; high estimates suggest c.3000. It is often difficult to tell where one
language ends and the next begins, or to decide whether varieties are dialects of the
same language or are different languages. Many of the languages have never been
recorded or written down. Sometimes, only their name is known. Very few of the
languages are spoken by large numbers of people. As a consequence, Africa is a
continent of lingua francas, both within and between nations. English and French are
most commonly used, and certain African languages have an important international
role — Swahili, for example, is used throughout much of East Africa (in an area
comparable in size to most of Europe). In an important classification proposed in
the 1960s, four main families of African languages were recognized. However, it
must be appreciated that such classifications are extremely tentative, based on the
comparison of a small number of features from those languages which have so far
been analysed. It is a massive step to move from here to hypotheses about the
historical relationship of these languages to each other. Noris it easy to find character-
istics which unite all African languages — though certain features are typical of certain
areas (such as click and implosive consonants, not commonly encountered outside
Africa). »»Afro-Asiatic; family of languages; Khoisan; Niger-Congo; Nilo-Saharan.

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) The nonstandard English

spoken by lower-class black people in American urban communities; also known as
Black English Vernacular (BEV), Afro-American English, Black English,
and a variety of other labels with varying degrees of acceptability. Among its distinc-
tive features are the lack of a final -s in the 3rd person singular present tense (e.g.
she walk), no use of forms of be when used as a linking verb (e.g. They real fine), and
 agrammatism

the use of be to mark habitual meaning (e.g. Sometime they be walking round here).
The linguistic origins of AAVE are controversial. According to one view, AAVE
originates in the creole English used by the first blacks in America, now much
influenced by contact with standard English. An alternative view argues that AAVE
features can also be found in white dialects (especially those in the south), suggesting
an origin in white English; the variety then became distinctive when blacks moved
north to the cities, and found their southern features perceived as a marker of ethnic
identity. »creole; dialect; Ebonics; standard.

Afrikaans A West Germanic language, a derivative of Dutch, spoken by c.6.4

million people in the Republic of South Africa (c.6 million), Namibia, Malawi,
Zambia, and Zimbabwe, with some through immigration in a few other countries
(e.g. Australia, Canada); also sometimes called Cape Dutch. It is a derivative of the
language which was brought by settlers in the 17th century, and now shows many
differences from European Dutch, especially as a result of its contact with local African
languages. Afrikaans is now the first language of c.60% of the White population and
c.90% of the Coloured (mixed race) population. It has been an official language in
South Africa, along with English, since 1925, and there is a developing Afrikaans
literature. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Dutch; Germanic; South Africa.

Afro-American English »>African-American Vernacular English.

Afro-Asiatic The major language family to be found in northern Africa, the eastern
horn of Africa, and south-western Asia, containing over 200 languages spoken by
over 200 million people. There are six major divisions which are thought to have
derived from a parent language that existed around the 7th millennium sc. By far
the largest and most widespread subgroup is Semitic. »»Berber; Chadic; Cushitic;
Egyptian; Omotic; Semitic.

agent An element of a clause which typically expresses the person (or animate
being) responsible for a particular action. For example, cat is the agent in such
sentences as The cat chased the mouse or The mouse was chased by the cat. Parts of a
word may also have an agentive function, as with the -er suffix of farmer (‘one who
farms’). »>affix; clause; impersonal.

agglutinative language >typology of language.

agnosia /ag'noauzie/ The lack of ability to interpret sensory information. In the case
of auditory agnosia (or, more specifically, auditory verbal agnosia),
the disability affects the recognition of speech sounds. Visual verbal agnosia is
the corresponding problem for the written language. »>language pathology.

agrammatism /er'gramatizm/ A language disorder characterized by the omission of

the elements which express grammatical relationships (such as inflectional endings,
articles, and prepositions); also called agrammatic speech. It is especially found
in people suffering from expressive aphasia (as seen in this extract: go ambulance. . .

3)
agraphia

hospital . . go hospital tomorrow . . .). The term is used only in clinical description.
»>aphasia; paragrammatism, telegrammatic speech.

agraphia >dyslexia.

agreement >concord.

Ainu /'amu:/ An isolated language spoken by an uncertain number of people

(thought to be as few as 15 in 1996) in Hokkaido, Japan, and in the Sakhalin and
Kuril Islands. The language and culture lost much ground to Japanese during the
first half of the 20th century. The ethnic group numbers over 30,000. >>isolate;
Japanese.

airstream The source of energy for speech sound production; also called an
airstream mechanism. Most speech is produced using air from the lungs (pul-
monic air), but other types of airstream can be found. »»glottalic; phonetics; pul-
monic; velaric.

Akan /‘akan/ A Kwa language spoken by c.7 million people, mainly in Ghana, also
in the Céte d’Ivoire, with some speakers in Togo. The name is commonly used for
a closely related group of languages, such as Ashante, Fante, and Twi, which are
often mutually intelligible but considered as separate languages because of their
different cultural and literary traditions. Akan is a major lingua franca in Ghana. It
is written in the Roman alphabet. »>Kwa; lingua franca.

Akkadian /2'keidian/ A Semitic language spoken in Mesopotamia from c.2300 Bc

to c.500 Bc; also spelled Accadiam and sometimes called Assyro-Babylonian,
from the names of its two major dialects (Assyrian and Babylonian). It replaced
Sumerian as the everyday language of the region. The Babylonian dialect was being
widely used as a lingua franca by the beginning of the 1st millennium Bc, but within
a few centuries it was supplanted by Aramaic — though Babylonian continued in use
as a language of scholarship until the 1st century ap. Akkadian was written in
cuneiform script, and was deciphered in the 19th century. »»Aramaic; cuneiform;
Semitic; Sumerian.

Akoli »>Acholi.

Albania (population in 1995 estimated at 3,549,000) The officia! language is

Albanian; in addition there are minorities speaking Greek, Macedonian, Romanian,
and Romani. There is growing use of English for international trade. »»Albanian.

Albanian An Indo-European language, the official language of Albania, spoken by

about 5 million people in the following areas: Albania (over 3.2 million), the Kosovo
area of Yugoslavia (c.1.5 million), and parts of Greece, Italy, and Bulgaria. Its chief
linguistic interest is that it is the only member of a separate branch of the Indo-
European family. It is divided into two main dialect areas, known as Gheg (in the
north) and Tosk (in the south), each consisting of many further dialect divisions,

10
 allo-

and not always mutually intelligible. The language has been much influenced by its
contacts with nearby languages, especially in vocabulary. There are few early written
remains, dating only from the 15th century. A Latin alphabet was introduced in
1909, and since 1950 the standard language has been based on the Tosk dialect.
>> Albania; Indo-European.

Aleut >Eskimo-Aleut.

alexandrine /alig'za:ndrin/ A poetic line of twelve syllables, the standard metre

of French poetry since the 16th century. Its length makes it unpopular in English —
a feature captured in the Essay on Criticism by Pope: A needless Alexandrine ends the
song, | That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along. >»>metrics.

alexia >dyslexia.

Algeria (population in 1995 estimated at 28,513,000) The official language is

Arabic, spoken by over 80% of the population. Other languages include Kabyle,
spoken by over 2.5 million, Tamashek, and about a dozen other languages. French
is important for international trade and tourism; but in 1996 English replaced French
as the chief foreign language taught in schools. »»Arabic; Kabyle.

Algonkian or Algonquian /al'gpnkion/ A family of over 30 Amerindian languages,

covering a broad area across central and eastern Canada, and down through central
and southern USA. Many well-known tribes are represented, such as Arapaho,
Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Cree, Fox, Micmac, Mohican, Ojibwa, and Shawnee, though
only Cree (c.60,000) and Ojibwa (c.45,000) have large numbers of speakers. The
spelling Algonkin refers to a dialect of Ojibwa. Several other languages spoken
mainly in south-eastern USA have now been grouped along with Algonkian into a
Macro-Algonkian family, notably the Muskogean group, which includes Choctaw
and Muskogee. All these languages use the Roman alphabet when written down.
>> Amerindian.

alias A name adopted by people who wish their real identity to be unknown. The
context is frequently a criminal one, but there are several innocent circumstances
where an alias might be used, such as an immigrant who uses an alias to avoid
people having to pronounce an exotic original name. »onomastics.

allegro >lento.
alliteration A sequence of words (or of stressed syllables within words) beginning
with the same sound. The effect is particularly evident in poetry, but may be found
in any genre or style, such as advertising or newspaper headlines. A well-known
literary example is the repeated p and w sounds in Gray’s The ploughman homeward
plods his weary way (‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’). »>assonance; rhyme.

allo- A prefix referring to a variant form of a linguistic unit, where the variation
does not alter the unit’s basic identity in the language. The notion is most commonly

11
allomorph, allophone

encountered with reference to variants of phonemes (allophones) and morphemes

(allomorphs), but is also used with reference to other areas of linguistics and
semiotics, such as the variant forms of a grapheme (allographs). For example, a,
A, and A are allographs of the grapheme {a}; despite the variations, they are all
recognizably forms of the same basic unit. »>free variation; grapheme; morpheme;
phoneme.

allomorph, allophone »allot-.

allonym /‘alanim/ A name assumed by an author which belongs to someone else.

It is not a common practice, because of legal sanctions. The reasons for adopting a
false name range from literary playfulness to outright deception. »pseudonym.

allophonic transcription »>transcription.

alphabet A type of writing system in which a set of symbols (letters) represents
the important sounds (phonemes) of a language. Most Western languages derive
their alphabets from the Latin alphabet, which in turn derives from Greek, and
ultimately from the North Semitic alphabet which developed c.1700 Bc in Palestine
and Syria. This alphabet consisted of 22 consonant letters; letters representing vowels
were added much later, by the Greeks. Most modern alphabets contain between 20
and 30 symbols, but the exact size depends on the complexity of the sound system,
and alphabets are known with over 70 letters (e.g. Khmer). Languages also vary
greatly in the regularity with which they represent the relationship between sounds
and letters. Some alphabets are used in a very regular way (Spanish and Finnish are
examples); others are used in a highly irregular way (such as Gaelic and, to a lesser
extent, English). »Arabic; Brahmi; Cyrillic; Devanagari; graphology 1; International
Phonetic Alphabet; i.t.a; letter; majuscule; ogham; Roman alphabet; rune; writing.

alphabetism A word made up out of the initial letters of other words, each being
separately pronounced, such as VIP and EEC. These forms are often classed as a type
of acronym. »>acronym.
Alsatian »>France.

Altaic /al'tenk/ A family of about 60 languages spoken by c.115 million people over
a vast area from the Balkan peninsula to the north-east of Asia. They are classified
into Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus groups, though the hypothesis of
common ancestry is not universally agreed. There is little written evidence of early
development: some Turkic material dates from the 8th century, but there is nothing
known of Mongolian before the 13th century, and Manchu records are found only
from the 17th century. In the 20th, there was considerable effort to modernize
the languages. Several new literary varieties emerged, based on local languages

Opposite Alphabetic systems: the development of the early alphabet, and the
relationship between several modern alphabets.

12
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(e.g. Uzbek), and some of the older written languages were reformed (e.g. Turkish).
»>Manchu-Tungus; Mongolian; Turkic.

alternation The relationship between the different forms of a linguistic unit,

usually symbolized by the swung dash (~). For example, the relationship between
singular and plural forms of the noun house can be shown thus: house ~ houses.
>»>morpheme.

alternative communication system A type of replacement communication

system devised to help disabled people who cannot communicate in the normal
way. An example would be a board or screen of pictorial symbols, to which the
disabled person points by using a part of the body (e.g. arm, mouth, eyebrow) to
operate a signalling device. Other forms of communication system, designed to
supplement rather than replace normal language use, are called augmentative
systems. A common example is braille. »Blissymbolics; braille; communication
board/disorder; language pathology.

alveolar /alvi:'aula, al'viala/ Descriptive of a consonant sound made by the tongue

tip or blade against the bony prominence immediately behind the upper teeth (the
alveolar ridge). Examples include [t] as in two and [d] as in do. Sounds articulated
just behind the alveolar ridge are called postalveolar. »consonant.

alveo-palatal /‘alvi:ou'palotl/ Descriptive of a sound made by the front of the

tonguea little in advance of the palatal articulatory area; also called alveolo-palatal.
An example is Polish §. »>palate.

ambiguous Descriptive of a word or sentence which expresses more than one

meaning. Ambiguity within the word (lexical ambiguity) is seen in chip, which
can be the product of a computer or a potato. Ambiguity of sentence structure
(grammatical or structural ambiguity, also called constructional hom-
onymity) is seen in Visiting uncles can be boring - which can mean both ‘When we
visit uncles .. .’ and ‘When uncles visit us . . .. To show the alternative meanings in
a sentence is to disambiguate it. »>meaning.

ambilingualism The ability to speak two languages with equal facility. The notion
is usually included within the more general concept of bilingualism. »>bilingualism.

amelioration A change of meaning in which a word loses an earlier unpleasant

sense. An example is mischievous, which formerly had a strong sense of ‘disastrous’,
but now has the milder sense of ‘playfully annoying’. »>pejoration.

American Samoa (population in 1995 estimated at 43,000) The official language

is English. About 90% of the people speak Samoan. There are also some speakers of
Tongan and Tokelau. >>English.

American Sign Language (ASL) A sign language used as a first language by deaf
people in the USA; also called Ameslan. It makes use of a large number of signs (at

14
 Amerindian

least 4000), and has a structure and functional range of comparable complexity to
that encountered in spoken or written language. Several varieties of ASL exist, ranging
from those which show no influence of the spoken medium to those which have
been markedly shaped by properties of English (e.g. its word order). Many countries
have a natural sign language with comparable properties (though they are not
mutually intelligible), and labelled accordingly—British Sign Language (BSL), Danish
Sign Language, etc. »>deafness; sign language; Washoe.
Amer-Ind /'‘amarind/ A type of sign language devised for language-handicapped
people by an American speech pathologist, Madge Skelly (1903-). It is an adaptation
of the signing used by American Indian tribes. More a gestural code than a language,
it contains a limited number of signs which have been chosen on the grounds of
their immediate recognizability, regardless of the language background of the user.
>> Amerindian; sign language.

Amerindian /amo'rindien/ A group of nearly 1000 languages spoken by the indigen-

ous peoples of North, Central, and South America; also called American Indian.
The group comprises a wide range of language families whose origins and inter-
relationships are unclear. They are usually described with reference to the main
geographical areas involved, but certain families cut across the areal divisions, such
as Penutian and Hokan. North American languages comprise at least 50 families,
which are often classified into four main types: Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, Algonk-
ian, and Macro-Siouan. There are also c.30 isolated languages. Few of the indigen-
ous languages have been able to hold their own in the face of the arrival of English
and other European languages, and the total number of Amerindian first-language
speakers is only c.22 million. The Meso-American (or Middle American) area
contains languages belonging to both North and South American families, as well
as to the Oto-Manguean family, which is restricted to the Central region. South
American languages contain possibly over 100 families, often grouped at a very
general level into three main types: Macro-Chibchan, Gé-Pano-Carib, and
Andean-Equatorial. In former times as many as 2000 languages may have been
spoken in this continent, but fewer than 600 of these have been attested, and many
remain to be fully described. The arrival of Western civilization led to Spanish or
(in Brazil) Portuguese becoming the dominant languages throughout the area. South
America none the less remains one of the most linguistically diversified areas in the
world. In a new but controversial classification presented in 1985 by American
linguist Joseph Greenberg (1915-), all the New World languages are brought together,
and grouped into three main families: Na-Dene, Eskimo-Aleut, and Amerind. Eskimo-
Aleut is seen as part of a ‘Euroasiatic’ super-family, whose other members include
Indo-European, Altaic, Japanese, Korean, and several others. Amerind in particular
is conceived as a vast family, consisting of over 200 groups of languages covering
the whole of North, Central, and South America. »Algonkian; Andean-Equatorial;
Eskimo-Aleut; Gé-Pano-Carib; isolate; Macro-Chibchan; Macro-Siouan; Na-Dene;
Nostratic; Oto-Manguean; Penutian.

15
Ameslan

Ameslan /‘ameslan/ »American Sign Language.

Amharic /am'hatik/ A Semitic language, spoken by c. 15 million as a first language

in Ethiopia (where it has official status), a further 5 million in nearby regions, and
by several million more as a second language throughout Ethiopia and in Sudan. Its
written records date from the 14th century. It is written in the Amharic alphabet,
which has 33 basic consonant characters each of which is in seven forms, depending
on the accompanying vowel. A revised system has been proposed, and there is a
movement towards standardizing the language. »>Ethiopia; Semitic; standard.

Amorite /‘amarait/ A Semitic language spoken in the area of modern north Syria
from c.2000 to c.1500 Bc. Little is known about it, because the evidence for its
existence comes only from lists of proper names and a few glosses in inscriptions.
»>Semitic.

anacoluthon /anaka'lu:@n/ An unexpected break in the syntax of a sentence. For

example, a speaker might leave a sentence incomplete, or suddenly change direction,
as in What I really — what I should have done was leave. »>syntax.

anacusis /ana'kjuisis/ >deafness.

anagram A word or phrase formed by changing the order of letters of another
word or phrase. They are commonplace as clues for crossword puzzles, and several
ingenious anagrams have been worked out: total abstainers, for example, is an ana-
gram of sit not at ale bars. »word game.

analects A selection of passages taken from an author. The word is from Latin
analecta, ‘things gathered, picked up’.

analogy 1. A parallel or similar instance, referred to because it helps the process of

explanation. For example, people often draw an analogy between the human brain
and a computer, or between the heart and a pump. 2. A change which affects a
language when regular forms begin to influence less regular forms. Young children,
for example, alter irregular nouns and verbs to make them conform to the regular
pattern, saying such things as mans and wented. Analogy can also be seen operating
over long periods of time, causing permanent change in a language. An example is
the verb helpan ‘help’ in Old English, which had healp as a past tense and holpen as
a past participle; by the 14th century, this verb had become regular, using the normal
-ed ending. »language change.

analytic language »>typology of language.

analytic sentence >tautology.

ananym /‘anoanim/ A name which has been written backwards. The concept is not
as pointless as it may seem at first sight: the word AMBULANCE, for example, may
sometimes be seen reversed on the vehicle, so that drivers can read the name more
efficiently in their rear-view mirror. »onomastics; p. 17.

16
 Anatolian

Ananymas.

anap(a)est /‘anapi:st/ >foot.

anaphora /s'nafera/ A grammatical relationship in which a linguistic unit takes its

interpretation from some other part of the sentence, typically from something
previously expressed. The third person pronoun she, for example, has an anaphoric
relationship to the noun phrase the lady in The lady came in. She sat down. Some
scholars restrict the notion to backwards reference, and distinguish cases of forwards
reference as cataphora, or cataphoric reference (as in Look at him, the tall waiter).
»> antecedent; endophora; reference 2.

anaptyxis /anap'tiksis/ >epenthesis.

anarthria /an‘a:Oria/ >dysarthria.

Anatolian /ana'tavlien/ A group of Indo-European languages, now extinct, spoken

from c.2000 Bc in parts of present-day Turkey and Syria. The main language is Hittite,
extant in tablets of cuneiform writing dating from the 17th century Bc. The earliest
forms (‘Old Hittite’) are the oldest Indo-European texts so far discovered. Other
languages of the group include Palaic, Lydian, Lycian, and Luwian. The term is also
used in a broader sense, to include all the languages spoken in the region of Anatolia
(Asia Minor), including several (such as Hurrian and Urartian) which are not members

17
Andamanese

of the Indo-European family, or (as in the case of Phrygian) whose relationship to

Indo-European is uncertain. »»Indo-European; p. 156.

Andamanese /‘andama'ni:z/ »>Indo-Pacific.

Andean-Equatorial A major group of c.250 Amerindian languages spoken in

many parts of South America, divided into Andean and Equatorial groups, each of
which contains several families. The most important languages include the Arawakan
family, which once extended into North America, and which is still widespread,
being spoken from Central America to southern Brazil. Goajiro (c.120,000) is its
main member. The Quechumaran group is pre-eminent in the Andes highlands
between Colombia and Argentina, with Quechua and Aymar4 important members.
In the south, in and around Paraguay, Guarani is the major member of the Tupian
family. These languages all use the Roman alphabet when written down. »»>Amerind-
ian; Aymara; Guarani; Quechua.

Andorra (population in 1995 estimated at 68,000) The official languages are

Catalan (spoken by c.60% of the population) and French. Castilian Spanish is also
widely used for international trade and in tourism. »>Catalan; French; Spanish.

angle brackets >brackets.

Anglo-Frisian >Germanic.

Anglo-Saxon >English.

Angola (population in 1995 estimated at 11,539,000) The official language is

Portuguese, but over 40 other languages are spoken, notably Umbunddu (c.4 million
— an important lingua franca), Mbundu (c.3 million), and Kongo (c.1.1 million).
English is also increasingly used for international trade and tourism. >»»Portuguese.

Anguilla (population in 1995 estimated at 7100) The official language is English.

Most of the population use an English-based creole which is widespread in the Lesser
Antilles. »>creole; English.

animal communication >zodsemiotics.

animate Descriptive of words which refer to living things, and not to objects or
concepts, which are inanimate. The notion is particularly used in the classification
of nouns. »>gender; noun.

Annamite /‘anomait/ >Vietnamese.

anomia /etnsumie/ A language disorder in which the primary symptom is a

word-finding difficulty, especially difficulty in remembering the names of people,
places, and things. It is common in all forms of aphasia, and may be the primary
form of language deficit (amomic or nominal aphasia), In less severe form, it is
sometimes called dysnomiia. »>aphasia; language pathology.

18
 aphasia

antecedent That part of a sentence to which some other part (typically a pronoun)
grammatically refers. The antecedent is usually a noun or noun phrase, and generally
appears earlier in the sentence or discourse than the item which refers to it. For
example, in The car in the garage has had its paint scratched, the antecedent of its is
the car. »anaphora.

anthropological linguistics A branch of linguistics which has focused on the

study of non-Western languages — especially those of the Americas — in relation to
social or cultural patterns and beliefs. It particularly looks at the classification of
these languages into types, at the way they are distributed in geographical areas,
and at what happens when they come into contact with each other. A contrast is
sometimes drawn with linguistic anthropology, a branch of anthropology which
explores the place of language in the life of human communities. »>areal linguistics;
ethnolinguistics; language contact; typology of language.

anthroponymy /anOrea'ponemi:/ >»onomastics.

anthropophonics /an8rapo'foniks/ The study of the potential which human beings

have to make vocal sound. It includes such matters as the physical dimensions of
the vocal tract, and how these change with age and between sexes and races. »>vocal
tract.

Antigua and Barbuda (population in 1995 estimated at 63,900) The official

language is English. Most of the population use an English-based creole which is
widespread in the Lesser Antilles. »>creole; English.

antonymy /an'tpnomi:/ A type of sense relation expressing the meaning of oppo-

siteness; for example, the contrast between hot and cold. A distinction is sometimes
drawn between gradable antonyms, where it is possible to express degrees of the
difference (as with hot and cold), and ungradable antonyms, where there is an
either/or contrast (as with single and married). This distinction can be illustrated by
the acceptable forms hotter and hottest, and the unacceptable forms *more single and
*most single. »>complementarity; gradability; sense; synonymy.

aorist /‘carist/ A form of the verb in some inflecting languages, referring especially
to an action which lacks any particular completion, duration, or repetition. The
form occurs in Classical Greek; modern examples include Turkish and some Slavic
languages. »>aspect; tense 1.

Apache /2'patfi:/ >Na-Dene.

apex >apical; tongue.

aphasia /a'fe1za/_ A disorder caused by damage to one or more of the language
centres in the brain of a previously normal speaker. It is sometimes distinguished
from dysphasia, when this is conceived as a less severe or developmental condition
(as in the case of developmental dysphasia, often used for the study of language

19
aphasic children

learning difficulties in children); but many scholars and clinicians use the two terms
synonymously. The primary symptoms are disability in producing or understanding
grammatical and semantic structure. If the disability relates primarily to language
production, the aphasia is expressive; if it relates primarily to comprehension, it
is receptive; and if both domains are severely affected, it is global. The study of
aphasia is called aphasiology. »>agrammatism; Broca’s aphasia; clinical linguistics;
language areas/delay; neurolinguistics; Wernicke’s aphasia.

aphasic children »language delay.

aphonia /e'faunie/ >dysphonia.

aphorism A succinct statement expressing a general truth. Examples of aphoristic

utterances include many proverbs (Least said, soonest mended) as well as everyday
observations (So far, so good). They often have a distinctive rhythmical structure.
Books of quotations provide hundreds of examples of longer aphorisms, such as Dr
Johnson's Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. »>proverb.

apical /‘erpikl, ‘apikl/ Descriptive of a consonant sound made by the tongue tip
(apex) at or near the upper incisor teeth or teeth ridge. An example is the trilled [r]
often heard in Welsh and Scottish varieties of English. »>tongue.

apico- Descriptive of any sound made using the tip of the tongue. A consonant
made by the tongue tip against the top teeth is an example of one such sound — an
apico-dental consonant, as in the common Irish pronunciation of [t]. »>apical;
tongue.

apocope /a'ppkapi:/ The deletion of the final element in a word, as when oeis
reduced to a vowel in such phrases as cup of tea. The omission may involve a single
sound or letter, or a whole syllable. The process is common in historical sound
change; for example, unstressed final sounds were generally lost between Old English
and Middle English. »>elision; sound change; syncope.

apostrophe 1. A punctuation mark which signals the omission of letters or numbers

(shell, n't, o’clock, the ’80s) or expresses a grammatical contrast (chiefly, in English,
the genitive construction, as in the boy’s car vs. the boys’ car). There is considerable
uncertainty surrounding certain uses of the apostrophe, in modern English, with
forms such as the 1860s and the 1860’s or St Pauls and St Paul’s being used variously
by publishing houses and other institutions. The contemporary trend is towards
simplification, with the apostrophe tending to be omitted when it is optional. There
is some evidence to suggest that incorrect usage is increasing — both in errors of
omission (when it should be present, as in The girls hat) and in errors of addition
(when it should be absent, as in I saw the cat’s) - and expressions of popular concern
have increased correspondingly. However, it should be noted that the rules governing
the use of the apostrophe are of relatively recent origin, having been largely devised
by grammarians and printers only in the mid-19th century. The validity of some of

20
 aptronym

these rules was disputed not long after their formulation, and it is not too surprising,
therefore, that we should be left a century later with a legacy of unease, and that
many adults as well as children should find the use of the form difficult. »>genitive
case; punctuation. 2. A figurative expression in which an idea or inanimate object
is directly addressed, or an absent person is addressed as if present. Examples include
the literary (Come, civil night ..., from Romeo and Juliet) and the everyday (Where
are you, Tom?, said while waiting for (late) Tom’s arrival). »>figurative language.
appellative /a'pelativ/ >eponym.

applied linguistics The use of linguistic theories, methods, and findings in

elucidating and solving problems to do with language which have arisen in other
areas of experience. The domain of applied linguistics is extremely wide, and includes
foreign language learning and teaching, language disorders, translation and inter-
preting, lexicography, style, forensic speech analysis, and the teaching of reading.
»>clinical/educational/forensic linguistics; language learning/planning/teaching;
lexicography; linguistics; reading; stylistics; translatology.
applied pragmatics »>pragmatics.
apposition A sequence of adjacent nouns or noun phrases which have the same
reference and grammatical role in the sentence. An example is Mrs Smith, the optician,
was able to see me, where the noun phrases Mrs Smith and the optician are in apposition
(Mrs Smith is the optician). »noun.

approach >method.

appropriateness The suitability of a linguistic form or variety to a particular social

situation. For example, contracted forms of the verb (won't, I’m) are generally felt to
be more appropriate when used in informal conversational speech than in formal
writing. The notion is widely used in linguistics as an alternative to the prescriptive
approach to usage variation, in which alternatives are described as ‘correct’ vs.
‘incorrect’. »>correctness; prescriptivism.
approximant A class of consonant sounds, defined in terms of their manner of
articulation: the sounds are made with a minimum degree of constriction, similar
to that of vowels. Examples include [w] as in wet and [j] as in yes. >manner of
articulation; obstruent; semivowel.

apraxia /er'praksi2/ The loss of ability to carry out purposeful movements on

request, as a result of damage to specific areas of the brain, but in the absence of any
basic deficits of a motor or sensory kind; also called dyspraxia. In the linguistic
context, it is often referred to as articulatory or verbal apraxia, and is charac-
terized by laboured and distorted speech production. »>language pathology.

aptitude test >language aptitude.

aptronym /‘aptranim/ A name which derives from a person’s nature or occupation,

21
Arabic

such as the surnames Smith or Barber. The name may be used humorously or ironically,
as with Mr Clever. »onomastics.

Arabic The chief member of the Semitic family of languages, spoken by over
200 million people as a first language in many countries of northern Africa and
south-eastern Asia. An uncertain further number use it as a second language, chiefly
in Islamic countries, and it is also widely distributed through immigration, especially
in France. The largest numbers of speakers are in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Saudi
Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. An eastern and a western dialect grouping
can be recognized. Classical (or Literary) Arabic is the language of the Koran,
and the sacred language of Islam, and thus known to Muslims worldwide (c. 1,100
million in 1996). There is a standard spoken Arabic closely based on the Classical
form, and this is used in formal writing and as a lingua franca among the various
dialects, several of which are mutually unintelligible. The 28-letter Arabic alphabet,
written from right to left, is second only to the Roman alphabet in its use worldwide.
There is evidence of written Arabic from pre-3rd century apD inscriptions. A golden
age of literature followed the arival of Islam in the 7th century, and there was a
literary renaissance in the 19th century, much influenced by contact with Western
forms. Socio-linguistically, Arabic is noted for its diglossic situation, and phonetically
for the use of sounds which involve the pharynx (notably the pharyngeal conson-
ants). »>diglossia; pharyngeal; Semitic.

Aramaic /ara'menk/ A Semitic language spoken by c.200,000 people in Iran and

Iraq, with many more in other parts of the Middle East. Classical Aramaic (along
with its alphabet) was widely used as a lingua franca in the Middle East from around
the 6th century Bc, and later replaced Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jews.
A western dialect was the language used by Jesus Christ and his apostles, and a
descendant of this can still be heard in a few villages of Lebanon and Syria. Around
the 7th century aD Aramaic was supplanted by Arabic. A western dialect, Syriac, is
the language of the Syrian Catholic Church. The 22-letter alphabet, written from
right to left, is of linguistic importance as the ancestor of the Hebrew, Arabic, and
several other alphabets. »>alphabet; lingua franca; Semitic; Syriac.

Araucanian or Araukan /ara'keinion, o'ro:kn/ >Penutian.

Arawakan /ara'wakn/ >Andean-Equatorial.

arbitrariness The absence of any physical correspondence between linguistic

signals (such as words) and the entities in the world to which they refer. There is
nothing in the way the word table is pronounced or written which physically
resembles the thing ‘table’. The opposite view is sometimes maintained, with evi-
dence adduced from onomatopoeic and other symbolic uses of sound. »nominal-
ism; onomatopoeia; sound symbolism.

archaism An old word or phrase no longer in general spoken or written use, but
found for example in poetry, nursery rhymes, historical novels, biblical translations,

22
 Armenia

and place names. Archaic vocabulary in English includes damsel, hither, oft, and
yonder. Archaic grammar includes the verb endings -est and -eth (goest, goeth), and
such forms as ’tis and spake. Archaic spellings can be seen in Ye olde tea shoppe.
»>language change; obsolescence 1.

areal linguistics The study of geographical regions which are characterized by

shared linguistic properties. A linguistic area, also sometimes called a Sprach-
bund, contains languages belonging to more than one family, but displays common
traits that are not found in the other members of at least one of the families. Click
sounds, for example, are associated with several different language families in the
area of southern Africa. »click; geographical linguistics.

Argentina (population in 1995 estimated at 34,513,000) The official language is

Spanish. Over 20 other languages are spoken in the country, including several
Amerindian languages (e.g. Guarani, Araucanian, Mataco, Quechua) and a number
of immigrant languages (e.g. Italian, German). English is increasingly used for
international trade and tourism, alongside Spanish. »>Spanish.

argot /'a:gat, 'a:gau/ Special vocabulary used by a secretive social group, to

protect its members from outside interference; also known as cant or speech
disguise. Such groups include criminals, confidence tricksters, terrorists, ghetto
groups, and street gangs. A gun, for example, might be known as a typewriter, a
stick of rock, or a flute. An invented set of names might be used for numbers, days,
and dates. »>slang.

Armenia (population in 1995 estimated at 3,671,000) The official languages are

Areal linguistics. A
linguistic area — the
distribution of front-rounded
vowels in Europe. These
vowels (e.g. French soeur
‘sister’, German miide ‘tired’)
are found along a diagonal
axis across northern Europe,
and are heard in French,
Dutch, German, Danish,
Norwegian, Swedish and
Finnish. This feature cannot
be explained on historical
grounds.

23
Armenian

Armenian (spoken by c.90% of the population) and Russian. There are also speakers
of Azerbaijani and Kurdish. »Armenian; Russian.

Armenian An Indo-European language spoken by nearly 7 million people chiefly

in the Republic of Armenia (c.3.6 million) and Turkish Armenia, and through emi-
gration in many parts of Europe, the USA, and the Middle East. Classical Armenian
(Grabar) is the language of the older literature, which dates from the Sth century
AD, and is the liturgical language of the modern Armenian Church. It is written in
a 38-letter alphabet devised by St Mesrop. The modern language exists in two main
varieties: Eastern (based on the dialect of the Yerevan region, and used in the Republic
of Armenia) and Western (based on the dialect of the Istanbul area, and used in
Turkey). »»Armenia; Indo-European.

article A type of word which specifies whether a noun is definite or indefinite, as

illustrated by English the vs. a. Articles were considered a separate part of speech in
Greek, though current approaches are more likely to include them within the class
of determiners. »>definiteness; determiner.

articulation The use of the vocal organs above the larynx to produce the sounds
of speech. The chief articulators are the tongue and lips, which actively make
contact with such areas as the teeth and hard palate. The study of articulation is
carried on by articulatory phonetics, also called physiological phonetics.
»>manner of articulation; phonetics; place of articulation; rate of speech; secondary
articulation; vocal organs.

articulation disorder The omission or incorrect production of speech sounds,

due to interference with the normal processes of articulation by the vocal organs;
the extent of the problem can be assessed using an articulation test. In the case
of a functional articulation disorder, the errors appear in the absence of any
evident physical reason for the problem. This is particularly noticeable, with varying
levels of severity, in the immature speech of young schoolchildren. »>articulation;
phonology.
articulatory apraxia >apraxia.

articulatory phonetics »>articulation.

articulatory setting »>setting.

artificial language A language which has been invented to serve some particular
purpose. Several have been devised in an attempt to foster international communi-
cation, and thus solve the ‘problem of Babel’. These, such as Esperanto and Novial,
are often called auxiliary languages or universal languages. Artificial lan-
guages and systems of communication have also been devised in order to program
computers (e.g. BASIC), communicate with robots, and help people with learning
difficulties (e.g. Blissymbolics). »»alternative communication system; auxiliary lan-
guage; Esperanto; Glosa; Ido; Interglossa; Interlingua; Novial; Volapiik.

24
 assimilation

artificial larynx A portable device which provides a source of vibration for speech,
used by many people whose larynx has been removed following an operation (usually
for throat cancer). The speaker places the device against the neck, near where the
larynx would normally be, presses a button to cause a buzzing noise, then mouths
the sounds of speech. The voice quality is often somewhat harsh, but users have
some degree of control over volume and tone, and their former accent is preserved.
>> laryngectomy; larynx.

artificial speech The speech which is produced by a speech synthesizer, or ‘artificial

talker’. Early devices produced speech of very poor, robotic quality. Modern devices
are capable of producing utterances indistinguishable from natural speech. »»speech
synthesis.

Aryan /‘arien/ >Indo-Aryan.

ascender That part of a letter which extends above the height of the lower-case
letter x, in the line of print (as seen in t, h, J). The part which descends below the
depth of the x (i.e. below the line) is called the descender (as seen in g, p, y). »>lower
case; typography.
ASL An abbreviation of American Sign Language.
aspect A grammatical category which marks the duration or type of temporal
activity denoted by the verb. A contrast might be drawn, for example, between the
completion of an action and its lack of completion. Slavic languages make great use
of aspectual contrasts. In English, these contrasts are less clear-cut, but are certainly
involved in the distinction between simple and progressive (I run vs. I am running)
and present vs. perfect (I see vs. I have seen) - features which would be placed under
the heading of ‘tense’ in traditional grammars. »>perfect; progressive; tense 1; verb.
aspiration Audible breath which accompanies the articulation of certain types of
sound. For example, when [p], [t], and other voiceless plosive sounds are released,
it is possible to feel the aspiration by placing the hand in front of the mouth.
Sounds which make prominent use of aspiration (especially [h]) are sometimes called
aspirates. >»>plosive; voicing.
Assamese /aso'mi:z/ A member of the eastern group of Indo-Aryan languages,
spoken by over 14.5 million people chiefly in the state of Assam, north-east India,
with some speakers in nearby Bhutan and Bangladesh. It is written in the Bengali
alphabet, and is closely related to Bengali. »»Indo-Aryan.
assimilation The influence exercised by one sound upon the articulation of
another, so that the sounds become more alike, or identical; the notion contrasts
with dissimilation, where the sounds become less alike. The process is especially
common in the study of sound change; for example, Latin noctem ‘night’ became
Italian notte, with the /k/ becoming /t/. In contemporary English usage, the /n/ in
the phrase ten mugs will in normal (i.e. reasonably fast) speech become /m/, because

25
assonance

of the influence of the following sound. Several types of assimilation can be recog- .
nized in the analysis of everyday conversation. Purists sometimes insist that people
should speak slowly and carefully, so as to avoid assimilations; but speech production
of this kind would sound highly unnatural, and no one (not even purist critics) can
avoid assimilating some of the time. »>coalescence; coarticulation; dissimilation;
elision; fusion; harmony; purism; sound change.

assonance The repeated use of vowels or vowel-like sounds to achieve a particular

effect. The notion is especially found in the analysis of poetry, heard to acclaimed
effect in such lines as the wailing warning from the approaching headland / Are all sea
voices, and the heaving groaner / Rounded homewards . . . (T.S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’).
»> alliteration; rhyme; vowel.

Assyrian /a'sirian/ >Akkadian.

Assyro-Babylonian /‘asiravu babrleuntan/ »>Akkadian.

asterisk A symbol used in linguistics in two main ways. 1. It shows that a usage
in a given language is unacceptable or ungrammatical; for example, *He are ready.
»> acceptable; grammatical. 2. In historical linguistics, it shows that a form has been
reconstructed by a process of philological reasoning, and has not been found in any
written records; for example, the word for ‘five’ in Indo-European would be written
*penk"e. An asterisked form is also sometimes called a starred form. »Indo-
European; philology.

asyndeton »>syndeton.

atelic verb /a'teltk/ >telic verb.

Athabaskan /aQa'baskn/ »>Na-Dene.

Atjehnese /atfa'ni:z/ >Achinese.

atlas, linguistic >dialect atlas.

attested form A linguistic form for which there is clear evidence of present or past
use. The notion contrasts with the reconstructed forms of historical linguistics, or
an analyst’s intuitive impressions about usage. >>asterisk; reconstruction.

attribute 1. In phonetics, an identifiable feature of sound sensation, such as pitch

or loudness. »»auditory phonetics. 2. In syntax, an item (typically an adjective or
noun) which is used to modify the head of a noun phrase (red car, garden chair).
The function of the item is then said to be attributive, contrasting with the
predicative function which some of these items also display (the car is red). »head;
noun phrase; predicate.

attributive >adjective; attribute 2.

26
 aural-oral

audiogram A graph used to record a person’s ability to hear pure tones, routinely
employed in the investigation of deafness. The audiogram can display the ability to
hear sound both through the air and through the bones of the skull, and different
symbols are used to distinguish the performance of left and right ears. »»audiology;
p. 28.

audiolingual method A language-teaching method based on the use of drills and

dialogues for speaking and listening; also called the aural-oral or mim-mem
method (the latter an abbreviation of ‘mimicry + memorization’). The method is
widely used commercially, in the provision of tapes and other materials for private
use. »>language laboratory/teaching; method.

audiology The study of hearing and hearing disorders, especially their diagnosis,
assessment, and treatment. Its practitioners are audiologists. The measurement of
hearing is the concern of audiometry, and the chief instrument used in this task
is an audiometer, which registers hearing loss in decibels. »audiogram; deafness;
decibel; p. 28.

audiometry >audiology.

auditory acuity The ability to detect and discriminate sound. The term is also
used to refer to the sharpness or clarity with which sounds can be distinguished.
»>auditory phonetics.

auditory agnosia >agnosia.

auditory discrimination The process of distinguishing between sounds. In the

context of language, an auditory discrimination test would present listeners with
contrasts between speech sounds (e.g. [p] vs. [b]) to see whether they can detect a
difference. The technique is widely used by speech therapists when working with
children who have language-learning problems. »»auditory phonetics; speech
therapy.

auditory nerve >acoustic nerve.

auditory phonetics A branch of phonetics which studies the way people perceive
sound, as mediated by the ear, auditory nerve, and brain. It includes such specific
areas as the perception of pitch and loudness, and the way in which individual
speech sounds are analysed and identified. It also includes issues to do with the
transcription of speech, and ways of training the ability to distinguish speech
sounds. »>auditory acuity/discrimination; dichotic listening; ear training; phonetics;
speech perception.

augmentative >diminutive.

augmentative communication >alternative communication system.

aural-oral >audiolingual method.

Pagi
 Audiometer:
frequency 125 250 500 1000 2000 4000 8000c.p.s.

Hearing
loss in

(a) decibels

Air conduction

Right © —_| Right @ —_

Le SOLS Ca

frequency 125

Hearing
(b) loss in
decibels

Right O __ Right [-----

Left

Audiograms of two types of hearing loss: (a) conductive deafness;

(b) sensorineural deafness.
 Austronesian

Australia (population in 1995 estimated at 19,089,000) English is the official

language, spoken by c.95% of the population. It is the home language of 82.6% of
the population, according to the 1991 census. There are now over 100 immigrant
language minorities (e.g. Italian, Chinese, Arabic, Greek, German, Vietnamese), with
numbers significantly increasing in recent years, especially from East Asian countries.
Less than 1% of the population speak any of the various aboriginal languages.
»> Australian; English.

Australian A group of c.230 aboriginal languages spoken in Australia by an uncer-

tain number of people, probably less than 30,000. The languages have been grouped
into 28 families, all of which are thought to be related. All but one of these families
are found in the northern parts of Western Australia, Northern Territory, and Queens-
land, in an area comprising no more than an eighth of the continent. By contrast,
a single family, Pama-Nyungan, covers the remainder of the continent, with c.50
living languages. The languages with the largest number of speakers are Tiwi,
Warlpiri, Aranda, Mabuyag, and Western Desert; most have speakers numbering in
the low hundreds or less. The number of living languages has halved since the 18th
century, and many of those remaining are nearly extinct. The future of aboriginal
languages is thus uncertain, but they have become a focus of attention since the
1960s, following the movement to improve the rights of the people. Several now
have a written form (using the Roman alphabet), and bilingual school programmes
have been devised. >»>Australia.

Austria (population in 1995 estimated at 8,097,000) The official language is

German, with many using Bavarian German dialects. Slovene is an official regional
language in the south-west, in southern Carinthia, spoken by c.30,000. Other lan-
guage minorities include Czech, Hungarian, Romani, varieties of Serbo-Croatian,
and Sorbian. English is increasingly used for international trade and tourism, along
with German. >»»>German; Slovene.

Austro-Asiatic A family of over 170 languages spoken throughout south-east Asia

by c.75 million people, chiefly in countries between China and Indonesia, with a
few further west in northern India and the Nicobar Islands. The three main branches
of the family are Mon-Khmer, which contains by far the largest group of languages,
and Munda and Nicobarese, which are spoken well to the west of the Mon-Khmer
area. Linguistic classification is difficult, however, as few of the languages have
written records, and the relationship of the family as a whole to other families is
uncertain. »Mon-Khmer; Munda; Nicobarese.

Austronesian A family of c.1200 languages, spoken by c.270 million people in a

large geographical area from Madagascar to Easter Island, and from Taiwan and
Hawaii to New Zealand; also called Malayo-Polynesian. It is one of the largest
families, the uncertainty in the number of languages resulting from difficulties in
deciding whether two varieties are different languages or dialects of the same lan-
guage, and from the existence of many ‘mixed’ languages which have grown up as

29
automatic speech recognition

a result of trade contacts. The family is usually divided into three groups. The.
Western Austronesian group contains c.500 languages spoken in Madagascar,
Malaysia, the Indonesian Islands, the Philippines, Taiwan, parts of Vietnam and
Cambodia, and the western end of New Guinea. Two languages of Micronesia
(Chamorro and Palauan) are also included. The Eastern Austronesian group,
usually referred to as Oceanic, contains c.500 languages spoken over most of New
Guinea, and throughout the 10,000 or so islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and
Polynesia, but with only c.2.5 million speakers. The Central Austronesian group
contains c.150 languages spoken by c.4.5 million people in the central islands of
Indonesia. »>Achinese; Balinese; Batak; Buginese; Cebuano; Fijian; Ilocano; Javanese;
Madurese; Malagasy; Malay; Maori; Motu; Pilipino; Samoan; Sundanese; Tahitian;
Tongan.

automatic speech recognition »speech recognition.

automatic translation »>machine translation.

autonomous speech >idioglossia.

aux. An abbreviation of auxiliary verb.

auxiliary language A language which has been adopted by a speech community

for such purposes as international communication, trade, or education, though only
a minority of the community may use it as a mother tongue. English is the most
widely used auxiliary language; others include French, Spanish, Portuguese, German,
Swahili, and Arabic. »>artificial language; lingua franca; pidgin.

auxiliary verb A verb which is subordinate to the chief lexical verb in a verb
phrase, helping to express such grammatical distinctions as tense, mood, and aspect.
English auxiliary verbs include the various forms of be, do, and have, as well as the
modal auxiliaries — may, might, will, can, and several others — used singly or in
certain combinations, e.g. was running, may go, and has been hurt. Some approaches
recognize semi-auxiliaries, which display only some of the properties of the
auxiliary class (e.g. dare). »>aspect; lexical verb; mood; tense 1; verb.

Avar /'ava:/ A member of the Dagestanian group of Caucasian languages, spoken

by c.600,000 people in the north-east Caucasus, mainly in the Dagestan region of
Russia and in Azerbaijan. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and is used as a lingua
franca by several ethnic groups in the area, including the Andi and Dido. »lingua
franca; Nakho-Dagestanian.

Avestan /a'vestn/ »>Iranian.

avoidance languages Languages which permit communication between a person

and others with whom there is a social taboo; sometimes loosely called mother-in-
law languages. The concept specifically relates to Australian aboriginal languages,
where there may be strict taboos between certain relatives, such as a man and his

30
 Aztec-Tanoan

wife’s mother and maternal uncles. In Dyirbal, for example, the everyday language
is known as Guwal, and the avoidance language as Dyalnguy, which would be used
whenever a taboo relative was within earshot. »»Australian; taboo language.

Aymara /aimo'ra:/ A member of the Quechumaran group of Andean-Equatorial

languages, spoken by over 2.2 million people chiefly in Bolivia (c.1.8 million) and
Peru, and part of nearby Argentina. It is written in the Roman alphabet. It was once
a major language throughout the central Andes, forming part of the Inca Empire.
» Amerindian; Andean-Equatorial.
Azerbaijan (population in 1995 estimated at 7,500,000) The official languages
are Azerbaijani (spoken by c.75% of the population) and Russian (c.6%). There are
c.12 other languages, including Armenian and Avar. »»Azerbaijani; Russian.

Azerbaijani /azaba'd&a:ni:/ A member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic family of

languages, spoken by c.14 million people in Azerbaijan (where it is an official
language) and Iran, and in Turkey, Syria, and Afghanistan; also called Azeri. It
generally uses the Cyrillic alphabet in Azerbaijan and the Arabic alphabet in Iran.
It is usually distinguished on linguistic grounds, as Southern Azerbaijani, from
Northern Azerbaijani, spoken by c.7 million people. »»Azerbaijan; Turkic.
Azeri /3'zeri:/ >Azerbaijani.
Azores (population in 1995 estimated at 240,000) The official language is Portu-
guese. English is increasingly used as a language of tourism. »»Portuguese.

Aztec /'aztek/ »Nahuatl.

Aztec-Tanoan /‘aztek ta'naven/ A group of c.30 languages spoken in parts of western

and south-western USA and western Mexico, most with very few speakers. The group
includes Comanche, Paiute, Shoshone, and Hopi. Three Mexican languages are still
widely spoken: Nahuatl (also called Aztec, many varieties c.1.4 million), Tarahumar
(c.40,000), and Papago-Pima (c.12,000). All these languages use the Roman alphabet
when written down. »>Amerindian; Nahuatl.

a4
B
Baba Malay /'ba:ba mea'lei/ >Malay.

babbling A type of infant sound production characteristic of the period immedi-

ately before the onset of language — typically, in the second half of the first year. It
often involves repeated syllable patterns of the [bababa] type, which the term reflects.
Babbling patterns are not random, but relate to features of the linguistic environment
in which the child is learning. »>acquisition; cooing.

Babylonian /baba'leunien/ »>Akkadian.

baby talk 1. A simplified speech style used by adults to young children, typically
involving special words or word endings (doggie, choo-choo), short sentences, repeated
utterances, and exaggerated speech melody, loudness, and rhythm. This kind of
language is also heard when people talk to animals and (to a lesser extent) when
people who are on intimate terms tease each other. »motherese. 2. An immature
form of speech, used by children. At around age 18 months, for example, English
children can be heard to say such things as Man go or Kick ball, usually with immature
pronunciation. This is often loosely referred to as ‘baby talk’, but this term has no
precise meaning when used in studies of child language acquisition. »>telegrammatic
speech.

back formation An abnormal type of word formation where a shorter word is

derived by removing an affix from a longer word. Burglar was in the language first,
then people derived burgle from it; similarly, televise was derived from television. This
process is abnormal because usually people make up new words by adding affixes
to them. »>affix; word formation.

back slang A secret language in which words are said backwards, usually based on
the reversed spelling. Examples from English include [tekram] for market, [ekilop]
for police, and [tenip] for pint. Back slang is quite common among children, but has
been observed in adult use, too — such as by soldiers, barrow boys, shopkeepers, and
thieves. It is probably used in a jocular way by most people, from time to time.
»>slang; word game.

back sound >front sound.

back translation A means of testing the quality of a translation. One translator

turns language A into language B. A second translator turns B back into A, and the
resulting A text is then compared with the original A text. If the texts are virtually

32
 Bamileke

identical, it is strong evidence that the original translation was of high quality.
>> translation.

Bahamas (population in 1995 estimated at 274,000) The official language is

English, with over 85% of the population using an English-based creole (Bahamas
Creole). »>creole; English.

Bahasa Indonesia /ba‘haisa/ »>Malay.

Bahrain (population in 1995 estimated at 555,000) The official language is Arabic.

There are minority populations speaking Farsi (c.48,000), Urdu (c.20,000), and vari-
ous languages of the Philippines (c. 20,000). English is increasingly used for inter-
national trade and tourism. »»Arabic.

Balinese A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken by c.3.8 million

people on the island of Bali, Indonesia. It is written in both the Balinese and Roman
alphabets. >»»>Austronesian.

Balochi »>Baluchi.

Baltic A branch of the Balto-Slavic family of languages, spoken by c.5 million people
along the Baltic coast, with a further million abroad (mainly through emigration to
the USA). The chief languages are Latvian and Lithuanian. There are also a few
written remains of Old Prussian. Other languages of the family are now extinct.
»>Balto-Slavic; Latvian; Lithuanian.

Balto-Slavic A grouping of Baltic and Slavic languages, placed together as a single

branch of Indo-European, spoken by c.300 million people, over half of whom speak
Russian. There is some dispute as to whether the evident similarities are the result
of a common origin or a consequence of more recent mutual linguistic influence.
»> Baltic; Slavic.

Baluchi or Balochi /balu:t/i:/ A member of the Iranian group of languages, spoken

by c.5 million people chiefly in Pakistan (in Baluchistan, the country’s westernmost
province, c.4 million) and Iran, with some in Afghanistan, Bahrain, and India. It is
written in the Arabic alphabet. There is a Baluchi Academy. »>Iranian.

Bamana /bo'ma:no/ »>Bambara.

Bambara /bam'ba:ra/ A Mande language spoken by c.3 million people, mainly in.
Mali, with some speakers in adjoining areas to the south and west; also called
Bamana (Bambara is also the name of the people). It is written in the Roman ~
alphabet. »Mande.
Bamileke /ba'mileke/ A group of Benue-Congo languages, spoken by c.1.2 million
people in Cameroon; sometimes considered varieties of one language. They are
non-Bantu languages, spoken by many tribes in the region, and written in the Roman
alphabet. »>Benue-Congo.

33
Bangladesh

Bangladesh (population in 1995 census, 117,372,000) The official language is

Bengali, spoken by over 98% of the population. Over 30 other languages are spoken,
the largest numbers using Arakan, Burmese, Chakma, and Santali. Assamese and
Sylhet are sometimes distinguished as separate languages. English is increasingly
used for international trade and tourism. »>Bengali.

Bank of English An international English language project established in 1991

with the aim of compiling a database of 220 million words of contemporary speech
and writing. It was set up by COBUILD at the University of Birmingham, under the
editorship of John Sinclair and Gwyneth Fox. »COBUILD; corpus.

Bantu /ban'tu:/ A large group of languages (estimates vary between 300 and S00)
spoken by Bantu peoples throughout central and southern Africa; c.100 million
speakers. Bantu languages have often been treated as a separate language family, but
nowadays they are usually classified as part of the Benue-Congo group of Niger-Congo
languages. They include such prominent languages as Swahili, Rwanda, and Zulu.
»>Bamileke; Benue-Congo; Kongo; Makua; Nyanja; Rwanda 2; Swahili; Xhosa; Zulu.

Barbados (population in 1995 estimated at 261,000) The official language is

English. The local dialect (Bajan) shows the increasing influence of US English, as
well as some features of West Indian creoles. »»English.

bare infinitive >infinitive.

Bari /'ba:ri:/ A Nilotic (or, in some classifications, Nilo-Hamitic) language spoken

by c.300,000 people, mainly in southern Sudan, with some in the Congo DR and
Uganda. Many small and widely dispersed tribes use the language, which conse-
quently has a wide range of dialects. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »>Nilotic.

Bashkir /bafkie/ A member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic family of languages,
spoken by c.950,000 people in the Bashkir region of Russia (where it is an official
language) and neighbouring regions. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. »>Turkic.

Basic English A project to simplify the English language by reducing the size of
its vocabulary, thus enabling it to be more easily put to international use. Devised
in 1930 by Charles Kay Ogden (1889-1957), BASIC is an acronym of ‘British
American Scientific International Commercial’. It consists of a basic vocabulary of
850 words selected to cover general needs, supplemented by several international
and scientific words (e.g. names of countries, chemical elements). The proposal
achieved strong support in the 1940s, and still attracts enthusiasts, but is now largely
of historical interest. »>artificial language; English.

basilect >creole.

Basque /bask/ An isolated language spoken by c.590,000 people chiefly in northern

Spain (c.580,000) and south-western France; it is an official regional language both
in the Pais Vasco (Basque Provinces), Spain, and in the Pays Basque (Basque Country),

34
 Belorussian

France. It is written in the Roman alphabet. Efforts have been made to show a
relationship with Caucasian languages, North African languages, and Iberian, but
none has been convincing. The written history of the language can be traced to
Roman times through various inscriptions, with a continuous literary tradition from
the 16th century. There is now intensive local concern to develop the language and
introduce it into education, following a period under Franco (from the late 1930s
to the mid-1950s) when its use was forbidden. The language (Euskara in Basque) is
also closely associated with the demands of the political separatist movement, ETA
(Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna, ‘Basque Homeland and Liberty’). »>isolate.

Batak /'batak/ An Austronesian language spoken by c.2 million people in Sumatra,

Indonesia; also called Toba Batak (from the name of the highland people who
lived around Lake Toba). It is generally written in the Roman alphabet, but some
use is still made of a local Batak script. »»Austronesian.
Bazaar Malay >Malay.

BBC English >standard English.

Beach-la-Mar /'bi:t{la'ma:/ >Bislama.

bel >decibel. ;
Belarus or Byelarus (population in 1995 estimated at 10,424,000) The official
languages are Belorussian (spoken by c.98% of the population) and Russian (by
c.10%). In the border areas, there are some speakers of languages used further west,
especially Polish and German. »>Belorussian; Russian.

Belau or Palau (population in 1995 estimated at 16,800) The official language is

English. Most of the population speak an Austronesian language, Palauan (Belauan).
»> English.
Belgium (population in 1995 estimated at 10,099,000) The official languages are
Dutch (Flemish, spoken in the north by c.57% of the population) and French
(Walloon, spoken in the south by c.33%). The Brussels region is a bilingual zone.
German is an official regional language in the eastern provinces of Eupen-
Malmédy-St Vith, where it is spoken by c.150,000. Minority languages include
Arabic, Turkish, Kabyle, Spanish, Portuguese and Létzebuergesch. >»>Dutch; French.
Belize (population in 1995 estimated at 212,000) The official language is English.
Over 25% of the population have an English-based creole (Kriol) as a first language,
and most people use it as a lingua franca. Spanish is spoken by over 20%, and over
15% use Amerindian languages, chiefly Carib and Quekchi. There are also c.5000
speakers of Mennonite German. »>creole; English.
Belorussian or Byelorussian /bela'ra{n, bjelo'rafn/ A member of the East Slavic
group of languages, spoken by over 10 million people chiefly in the republic of
Belarus (where it is the official language), and in parts of Poland; also formerly called

35
Bemba

White Russian. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Literary remains date from
the 11th century, and the modern standard language is based on the dialect of the
capital, Minsk. There has been considerable vocabulary borrowing from Polish.
»> Belarus; Slavic.

Bemba /'bemba/ A member of the Bantu group of the Benue-Congo family of

languages, spoken by c.2.5 million people chiefly in Zambia (c.2 million) and the
Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). It is written in the Roman alphabet,
and is an important lingua franca in the region. »>lingua franca; Niger-Congo.

Bengali /ben'go:li:/ Amember of the eastern group of Indo-Aryan languages, spoken

by c.100 million people in Bangladesh (where it is the official language), by a further
68 million in India, chiefly in West Bengal, and by many more as an immigrant
language in Great Britain and elsewhere — possibly 200 million, including second-
language users. The language is diglossic in character, and is written in the Bengali
alphabet. Its literature dates from the 12th century. In modern times, it was the first
Indian language to show the influence of Western literary styles, and the poet and
philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who wrote in Bengali, was the first
Asian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913. »>Bangladesh; diglossia;
Indo-Aryan.

Benin (population in 1995 estimated at 5,420,000) The official language is French.

Over SO local languages are in use, with Fon (1.5 million speakers) widely used as a
lingua franca. Others include Yoruba (c.400,000), Burba, Fulfulde, Gun, and Tem.
»>French; lingua franca.

Benue-Congo /‘benu:1 'kongou/ The largest group of languages within the Niger-
Congo family — c.800 languages spoken throughout central and southern Africa by
c.150 million people. The vast majority are Bantu languages, such as Swahili, Rwanda,
and Zulu. The most important non-Bantu languages are in Nigeria; they include Efik
and Tiv. Several Nigerian and Benin languages formerly classified as part of the Kwa
group are now placed under this heading (e.g. Edo, Idoma, Igbo, Nupe, Yoruba).
»>Bantu; Efik; Igbo; Niger-Congo; Rwanda 2; Shona; Sotho; Swahili; Tiv; Tswana;
Yoruba; Zulu.

Berber /'b3:ba/ A branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages, spoken by c.10

million people throughout North Africa, chiefly in Algeria and Morocco. The group
of c.30 languages includes Riff, Kabyle, Shluh, and Tamashek, the widely scattered
language of the Tuareg nomads. The Arabic alphabet is used for writing, in almost
all cases (an exception is Tamashek, which uses a system derived from Old Libyan).
There are some early inscriptions, but there is very little native literature. »»Afro-
Asiatic; Kabyle.

Bermuda (population in 1995 estimated at 62,000) The official language is English.

The local dialect shows some creole influence. »>creole; English.

36
 biolinguistics

BEV »>African-American Vernacular English.

Bhojpuri /bodgpori:/ >Bihari.

Bhutan (population in 1995 estimated at 1,622,000) The official language is

Dzongkha (Bhutani). About 10 other languages are in use, including Nepali
(c.300,000). English is increasingly used for international trade and tourism.
>> Dzongkha.

Bhutani or Bhutanese /bu'ta:ni:/ »Dzongkha.

bidialectism The use by a person or community of two (or more) dialects of a

language; also called bidialectalism. Following the increased mobility of popu-
lations, many people now have some degree of bidialectal ability, perhaps switching
between regional dialects, or using the standard language at work and a local variety
at home. In educational contexts, the term refers to the principle of attributing equal
linguistic validity to different dialects — typically, between standard and nonstandard
varieties, each of which is recommended for use in its appropriate settings. »>bilingu-
alism; dialect; English as a second dialect; standard.

Bihari /bi:'ha:ri:/ Several varieties (considered by some to be separate languages)

belonging to the Midland group of Indo-Aryan, spoken by c.60 million people in
the state of Bihar, north-eastern India, with a further 3.5 million in Nepal, and some
in nearby parts of adjoining countries. They comprise Bhojpuri (c.25 million) in the
west, and Maithili (c.24 million) and Magahi (c.11 million) in the east. They are
written in the Devanagari alphabet. Hindi/Urdu is spoken as an educated lingua
franca by the majority of the population. »»Devanagari; Indo-Aryan; lingua franca.
bilabial Descriptive of a consonant sound made with the two lips—-most commonly,
[p], [b], and [m]. »consonant; labial; rounding.

bilingualism A speech situation where an individual or community controls two

(or more) languages; less usually called polyglottism (though the term polyglot
for someone who speaks several languages is common enough; contrasting with
monoglot). In simultaneous bilingualism, the languages are learned at the same
time; in sequential bilingualism, the second is acquired after the first has been
established. Bilingual education is the use of two languages of instruction at
some point in a student’s career. It also refers to the use of educational programmes
designed to promote bilingual skills among students. The majority of the world’s
speakers are bilingual — a point which tends to surprise Britons and Americans, for
whom knowledge of a single language (monolingualism) is traditionally thenorm.
»>bidialectism; immersion; language learning; multilingualism; national language.

biliteracy >literacy.
binding »>government and binding theory.
biolinguistics The study of the biological preconditions for language development

37
Bislama

and use, both in the human species and in individuals; also called biological
linguistics. It includes such topics as the extent to which language can be said to
be species-specific, the factors constraining the development of language in the child,
and the neurophysiological processes involved in language disorders. »>acquisition;
language pathology; linguistics.

Bislama /biz'la:ma/ An English-based pidgin, with local language influences, widely

used (over 150,000) in Vanuatu, Fiji, and surrounding areas as a lingua franca; also
called Beach-la-Mar. The name derives from béche-de-mer, a local variety of sea
slug. There is now some use as a first language. »>lingua franca; pidgin.

Black English Vernacular »>African-American Vernacular English.

black letter writing A form of writing which developed out of the 9th-century
minuscule associated with Emperor Charlemagne, in which the rounded strokes
became straighter, bolder, and more pointed; often called Gothic script. Widely
used in many variations between the 11th and 15th centuries, it became the earliest
model for printer’s type in Germany. »>letter; minuscule; writing.

blade The part of the tongue between the tip and the centre; also known.as the
lamina. When the tongue is in a neutral position, the blade lies opposite the teeth
and alveolar ridge. »tongue.

blasphemy »>taboo language.

blend >cluster.

blending A process in grammar or vocabulary which takes place when two elements
that do not normally co-occur are combined into a single linguistic unit (a blend).
Examples in English vocabulary include brunch (from breakfast and lunch) and Euro-
vision (from European and television). When the process affects syntax, it is called a
syntactic blend, as seen in I think it’s the money is one problem (from I think it’s the
money and The money is one problem). » borrowing; word formation; cartoon, p: 39.

Blissymbolics /'blis sim'boliks/ A visual supplement to speech devised to help

people with a communication handicap. Developed in Canada in the 1970s, it was
created by a chemical engineer, Charles Bliss (1897-1985), whose aim was to devise
a set of symbols which could be translated into any language (as could the symbols
of chemistry). Blissymbols have since been used with a variety of clinical populations,
such as the mentally handicapped and the autistic. »»alternative communication
system; language pathology.

blocking In stuttering, an obstruction experienced by the speaker that prevents

the production of speech. The utterance is temporarily halted, and during the silence
the speaker may make bodily movements (e.g. movement of the lips and jaw,
swivelling of the head) indicative of the struggle going on inside. Blocks of several
seconds may occur. »>stuttering.

38
 hee
© »

‘Breakfast turned to brunch, then brunch became brinner and somehow brinner
became brupper!’ (blending)

block language The use of abbreviated structures in restricted communicative

contexts, special use being made of the word or phrase rather than the clause or
sentence. Examples include the language of posters, notice boards, book titles, and
newspaper headlines. >>ellipsis.

Bloomfieldian Adjective derived from Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), an

American linguist whose thinking dominated the development of linguistics
between the 1930s and the 1950s. He is known especially for his book Language
(1933), the first major statement synthesizing the theory and practice of linguistic
analysis. The Bloomfieldian approach later came to be called ‘structuralist’, because
of the various kinds of technique it employed to identify and classify features of
sentence structure. It also represented a behaviourist view of linguistics, especially
in its approach to the study of meaning. »>linguistics; structural.

body language Communication using body movement, position, and appearance,

such as facial expressions, hand gestures, and the mutual body orientations of
the speakers; called, more technically, nonverbal communication. The word
‘language’ is not being used here as strictly as in the case of speech, writing, and
sign. The range of signals which can be sent using body ‘language’ is highly limited
and unstructured compared with the virtually limitless and complex possibilities of
language proper. »>communication; kinesics; language 4; proxemics; semiotics.

Bokmal /'bukm9:1/ >Norwegian.

39
bold

bold A typeface in which the lines and dots which make up the symbols appear in
thickened form, giving extra emphasis or prominence to the text; also called bold-
face. Headings and sub-headings are typically printed in bold, which may also be
used for technical terms and other special features within a text (as in its use for a
synonymous term in the present entry). A typeface with strokes midway in thickness
between ordinary roman and bold is called semi-bold. »>typography.

Bolivia (population in 1995 estimated at 8,120,000) The official language is

Spanish, spoken by c.43% of the population (3.5 million). Over 40 other languages
are in use, including Quechua (c.34%), and Aymara (c.22%). There were c.18,000
speakers of Mennonite German in the mid-1980s. English is increasingly used, along
with Spanish, for international trade and tourism. »>Spanish.

borrowing The introduction of a word (or some other linguistic feature) from one
language or dialect into another. Vocabulary borrowings are usually called loan
words. Examples include smoking and computer (from English into French) and
restaurant and chic (from French into English). In a loan blend, the meaning is
borrowed but only part of the form, such as when English restaurant retains a French
pronunciation of the final syllable. In loan shifts, the meaning is borrowed but
the form is nativized, such as when restaurantis given a totally English pronunciation.
These terms are all something of a misnomer, as the words are not given back, in
any sense. »>calque; vocabulary.

Bosnia and Herzegovina (population in 1995 estimated at 4,200,000) The

official language is increasingly being referred to as Bosnian (before the civil war,
Serbo-Croatian), but the unique ethnic mix in the country (c.2 million Bosnians, c.1.6
million Serbs, and c.500,000 Croats) means that several varieties of Serbo-Croatian
currently co-exist. English is increasingly being used for international purposes.
»>Serbo-Croatian.

Bosnian >Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Botswana (population in 1995 estimated at 1,540,000) The official languages are

Tswana (spoken by c.70% of the population) and English. Over 25 local languages
are in use, including Shona and several Khoisan languages. »»English; Khoisan;
Tswana.

bound form A minimal grammatical unit which cannot occur on its own as a
word, as in English un- and -tion; also called a bound morpheme. It contrasts with
free form, where the unit can be used as a word without additional elements, as
in hope and on. »>free form; morpheme; word.

boustrophedon /bu:'strofedn/ Writing in which the lines run in alternate direc-

tions; the name derives from Greek, and means ‘ox-turning’ (the reference is to the
way an ox pulling a plough moves first in one direction then the other). It was

40
 bracketing

especially used in an early period of Greek writing, but inscriptions using this method
have been found in many other parts of the world. »>graphology 1.

bow-wow theory The name of one of the speculative theories about the origins
of language: it argues that speech arose through people imitating the sounds of the
environment, especially animal calls. The main evidence is the use of onomatopoeic
words (which are few, in most languages). »>origins of language.

brace »>brackets.

brachygraphy /bra'kigrafi:/ >shorthand.

bracketing A way of showing the internal structure of a string of elements. In a

sentence, for example, the technique can be used to distinguish between subject
and predicate, and within the predicate between verb and object: ((The cat) ((chased)

(a) This is an illustration of

writing of way possible one
in a boustrophedon style. The
but direction reverse lines
the words do not.
(b) This is another illustration
nl .gnitirw nodehportsuob fo
this case, both the lines and
.desrever era sdrow eht
(©) The third illustration shows
219i3el nedw ensqqsn isihw
are reversed as well as words
.2onil bas

“RAO TOC TIGEN,

XSELL OLOSAIKELO
SA IAIZ19 op“ ox ATA
FEVPAVMEWNEEMEgp
AMOQIIAS WAAINA
This drawing of an early Greek treaty (6th-Sth century 8c)
is of the third kind, as can be seen most clearly from the
reversed Es in the third and fifth lines.

There are three possible ways of writing boustrophedon. In (a) the lines
reverse but the words do not. In (b) the words reverse as well as the lines. In
(c) the letters reverse as well as words and lines.

41
brackets

(the leaf ))). Working from the outside brackets inwards, the first pair encloses the
whole construction (the sentence); within these there are two pairs which identify
the subject and the predicate; and within the right-hand pair there are two further
pairs identifying the verb and the object. »>syntax.

brackets A pair of correlative punctuation marks which typically signals an

included, parenthetic unit. In British English, the term is ambiguous, as it is used
for both ‘square brackets’ [ ] and ‘round brackets’ ( ). American English tends to
distinguish these, reserving ‘brackets’ for square brackets, and calling round brackets
‘parentheses’. The latter usage has widespread British currency also. The brace { },
sometimes informally called ‘curly brackets’, tends to be restricted to technical
writing. The less common angle brackets ( ) are likewise specialized in use. >>par-
enthesis 1; punctuation.

Brahmi /'bra:mi:/ An early script of southern Asia, found in various inscriptions

from the 3rd century sc. The script, which was written from left to right, was the
ancestor of many scripts used in southern Asia, such as Devanagari, Bengali, Tibetan,
and Telugu. Its origins are controversial, most scholars deriving it from an earlier
Semitic script, but with some linking it to the Indus Valley script of the 3rd millen-
nium Bc. »>alphabet; Devanagari.

braille /bretl/ A system devised to enable written language to be read by a blind

person. It consists of a sequence of cells, each of which contains a matrix of embossed
dots representing letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and a few other features.
The blind person’s fingers ‘read’ the brailled text, shapes being recognized through
the sense of touch. The system was devised by French teacher Louis Braille (1809-
52). »>alternative communication system.

A B DEF GHIJK LMN O QR

S$ TUUWX ¥ Z and for of th with

The Braille alphabet, with examples of word abbreviations.

Brazil (population in 1995 estimated at 159,233,000) The official language is

Portuguese, spoken by over 96% of the population. There are about 190 Amerindian
languages spoken, often by very small numbers, and all under threat from the
encroaching Western economy — perhaps 150,000 speakers in all. The larger lan-
guages (whose numbers are likely to exceed 5000) include Baniwa, Guajajara, Guar-
ani, Kaingang, Teréna, Ticuna, and Yanomami. There are also c.6000 speakers of
Mennonite German, and an uncertain (but probably large) number of speakers of

42
 Brown University Corpus of American English

Romani. Several other immigrant languages are found, notably Japanese, standard
German, and Italian. English is increasingly used for international purposes. »»Amer-
indian; Portuguese.

breaking (of the voice) >voice mutation.

breathy voice A state of phonation in which the vocal folds are held somewhat
apart, thus allowing the escape of audible breath during speech; also known as
murmur. It is an important component of certain tones of voice, such as those
associated with sexiness and secrecy. »>paralanguage; phonation; voice quality.

Breton /'breton/ A member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic family of languages,
spoken by c.500,000 people in France, chiefly in Brittany (where it is an official
regional language), with a few thousand more speakers as a result of emigration to
other parts of the world, especially the USA. There was a movement into Brittany
from southern England during the Sth and 6th centuries, following the Anglo-Saxon
invasions, and in its early period Breton was very close to Cornish. It is written in
the Roman alphabet, and remains date from the 8th century. There was an increasing
amount of literary writing in the 20th century, and a certain revival of interest in
Breton language and culture, but there was a general decline in the number of
speakers. »>Celtic. '

British National Corpus A computer corpus of 100 million words of contemporary

spoken and written British English. It was compiled in a three-year project (1991-
4) by a six-member consortium, based at Oxford, consisting of Oxford University
‘Press, Longman Group UK, W. &R. Chambers, the British Library, and the universities
of Oxford and Lancaster. Spoken material comprises 10% of the corpus. All words
are tagged for their grammatical class. »>corpus; tag 2.

British Sign Language »American Sign Language.

British Virgin Islands (population in 1995 estimated at 13,000) The official

language is English. Most speakers use an English-based creole widespread through-
out the Lesser Antilles. »>creole; English.

broad transcription »>transcription.

Broca’s aphasia /'brauka/ A type of aphasia which arises from damage to Broca’s
area, located towards the front of the left hemisphere of the brain; also called
expressive aphasia. It is named after the French neurologist Paul Broca (1824-
80), who first described the syndrome. It is characterized by effortful speech, with
problems of word finding, and disruption to the grammatical system. Comprehen-
sion may be unimpaired. >»>aphasia; language areas.

Brown University Corpus of American English A corpus drawn from printed

sources published in America in 1961. It comprises 500 samples of c.2000 words
each, representing 15 main varieties of the language. Lexical concordances, word

43
Brunei

frequency lists, and other materials have been derived from the corpus. »>corpus.

Brunei (population in 1995 estimated at 293,000) The official languages are Malay
and English. Over half the population have Malay as a first language; less than
10,000 have English as a first language. Several varieties of Chinese are in use, spoken
by c.12% of the population, with a number of local languages used by small numbers.
Malay is a lingua franca, but English is increasingly the language of trade and tourism.
»» English; lingua franca; Malay.

Brythonic /br'@pnik/ >Celtic.

BSL An abbreviation of British Sign Language.

buccal sounds /'bakl/ Sounds made in or near the cavity of the cheek. One of the
most famous buccal voices is that of Donald Duck. »>articulatory phonetics; cartoon
below.

Buginese /bago'ni:z/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken

by c.3.5 million people in Sulawesi (Celebes); also called Bugis. It is written in both

T'm terribly sorry — I can’t understand a single word you're saying.’

44
 Byelarus

the Buginese alphabet (as a result of influences from India) and the Roman alphabet.
»> Austronesian.

Bugis >Buginese.

Bulgaria (population in 1995 estimated at 8,670,000) The official language is

Bulgarian, spoken by c.85% of the population. Minority languages include Turkish
(c.9%), Albanian, Armenian, Gagauz, Greek, Macedonian, and Romanian. Thete are
significant numbers of Romani speakers, perhaps 200,000. English, German, and
Russian are all used for international purposes. »»Bulgarian; Romani.

Bulgarian A member of the South Slavic group of languages, spoken by nearly 9

million people, chiefly in Bulgaria (where it is the official language) and also in parts
of Greece, Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
The closely related Macedonian is commonly included within these statistics. Old
Bulgarian, the first Slavic literary language to develop, dates from the 10th century.
»> Bulgaria; Slavic.

Burkina Faso (population in 1995 estimated at 10,328,000) The official language

is French. About 70 local languages are spoken, notably More (c.5 million), Bissa,
Bobo, Dagari, Fulfulde, Gourma, and Lobi. French is the language used for inter-
national purposes. »»French.

Burma >Myanmar.

Burmese A member of the Tibeto-Burman group of Sino-Tibetan languages, spoken

by c.25 million people in Myanmar (Burma), where it is the official language. It
is written in the Burmese alphabet, with records dating from the 11th century.
»> Myanmar; Sino-Tibetan.

burst A sudden, short peak of acoustic energy which occurs in the production of
certain sounds. The clearest case is the release stage in the production of plosive
consonants, such as [p] or [b]. »acoustic phonetics; plosive.

Burundi (population in 1995 estimated at 6,131,000) The official languages are

Rundi (also called Kirundi or Urundi) and French. Swahili is quite widely used as a
lingua franca, but French is normal for international purposes. »»English; lingua
franca; Rwanda 2.

Burushaski /burv faski:/ An isolated language spoken in north-west Kashmir, India,

and in a small part of nearby Pakistan, by c.50,000 people belonging to the Burusho
tribe. It has no written form. »>isolate.

Buryat /bor'jat/ Amember of the Mongolian group of the Altaic family of languages,
spoken by c.320,000 people chiefly in the Buryat region of Russia (where it has
official status). It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. »Mongolian.

Byelarus »>Belarus.

45
Byelorussian

Byelorussian >Belorussian.

byname A supplementary name, added to someone’s personal name in order to

help identification, and sometimes replacing it completely. For example, several
singers with identical surnames in North Wales are publicly known by their village
of origin (e.g. Williams Penygroes, Williams Brynsiencyn). History is full of bynames
— Eric the Red, James the Bold, Ethelred the Unready. A byname can in principle be
distinguished from a surname, because it is not its purpose to be passed on between
generations; however, many surnames undoubtedly started out life as bynames (e.g.
Michael Carpenter). »>nickname; onomastics.

46
3
C An abbreviation of complement or consonant.

CA An abbreviation of conversation analysis or contrastive analysis.

cacophony The use of unpleasant, harsh sounds, especially in speech. A similar

term has been coined for unacceptable hand-writing or spelling — cacography -
but is less used. A more general label for unacceptable uses of language also exists:
cacology. None of these terms has developed a conventional use in linguistics; all
have derived from popular reactions to language use. »»euphony.

caesura /si'zjvare/ A break in the rhythm of a line of poetry; the term derives from
Latin, where it means ‘cutting’. A caesura may occur anywhere in the line, and is
usually (but by no means always) marked by punctuation. An example occurs in the
second line of this extract from Pope’s An Essay on Man: Why has not man a microscopic
eye? / For this plain reason, man is not a fly. »>metrics.

CAI >computer-assisted language learning.

CALL An abbreviation of computer-assisted language learning.

calligraphy /ka'ligrafi:/ >chirography.

calque /kalk/ A type of borrowing where the parts (morphemes) of the borrowed ~
word are translated item by item into equivalent parts (morphemes) in the new
language; sometimes called a loan translation. An example is English power politics
from German Machtpolitik. »borrowing; morpheme.

Cambodia (formerly Kampuchea) (population in 1995 estimated at 9,692,000)

The official language is Khmer, spoken by c.90% of the population. There are c.15
other languages in use, including Chinese (c.350,000) and Vietnamese (c.750,000).
French is used for international purposes. »»Khmer.

Cameroon (population in 1995 estimated at 13,986,000) The official languages

are English and French. There are a remarkable number of languages found in this
relatively small country (about twice the size of the UK) - about 280. The most
widely used are Fang (c.1.7 million), Bamileke (c.1.2 million), and Duala (c.1.3
million). Fulfulde (c.700,000) and Arabic (c.60,000) are both used as lingua francas
in the north of the country. The most important lingua franca, however, is
Cameroonian Pidgin, used by about half the population. This is an English-based

47
Canada

variety, now spoken by increasing numbers as a first language. »»English; French;

lingua franca; pidgin.
Canada (population in 1995 estimated at 28,972,000) The official languages are
English and French, with French the official regional language of Québec. English
is usually used for international purposes. There are many European immigrant
languages, including three varieties of German associated with religious settlement
(Hutterite, Mennonite, Pennsylvanian). Over 70 Amerindian languages are spoken
by 100,000-150,000, notably Blackfoot, Chipewyan, Cree, Dakota, Eskimo, and
Ojibwa. The chief families represented are the Algonkin, Athabaskan, Eskimo-Aleut,
Iroquoian, Siouan, and Wakashan, with several isolated languages. »»Amerindian;
English; French; isolate.

Canary Islands (population in 1995 estimated at 1,468,000) The official language

is Spanish. English is increasingly used in relation to tourism. »»Spanish.

cant >argot.

Cantonese »>Chinese.

Cape Dutch »Afrikaans.

Cape Verde (population in 1995 estimated at 394,000) The official language is

Portuguese. About 70% of the people speak a Portuguese-based creole (Crioulo).
Minority languages are Balanta and Mandyak. Some use is also made of English for
international purposes. >»creole; Portuguese.

capital letter >letter; majuscule.

cardinal number >numbers.

cardinal vowels A set of standard reference points for the articulation and recog-
nition of vowels, devised by Daniel Jones. They provide a fairly precise way of iden-
tifying what the vowel sounds are in a language. The front, centre, and back of the
tongue are distinguished, as are four levels of tongue height. A set of eight primary
vowels is recognized, and a further set of secondary vowels is produced by reversing
the lip position (rounded to unrounded, or vice versa). »>Jones, Daniel; vowel.

caregiver/caretaker speech »>motherese.

caret /‘karat/ A diacritic (A) used to indicate that something needs to be inserted
in a line of manuscript or typed text. It is used both informally and as a convention
in proof correcting. »>diacritic; proof.

caretaker speech >motherese.

Carib »>Gé-Pano-Carib.
case (grammar) A way of showing the grammatical relationship between certain
kinds of word and phrase by variations in word structure. Nouns, adjectives, and

48
 Catalan

Front Central Back

Close i joe blair
AO ah eer el u

Close-mid °

Open-mid 2)

Open Dp
The cardinal vowels. (Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents
a rounded vowel.)

pronouns are the main word classes affected. In European languages, case typically
involves varying the word endings (the inflections), as in Latin (nominative homo,
accusative hominem, genitive hominis, etc.). Each case is associated with a range of
meanings — genitive, for example, typically conveys possession - and some
approaches in linguistics use these meanings as a way of analysing all languages,
whether they make use of a system of inflectional endings or not. »»ablative/ -
accusative/dative/genitive/instrumental/locative/nominative/vocative case; case
grammar; inflection 1; typology of language.

case (typography) >letter.

case grammar An approach to grammatical analysis which recognizes a set of syn-

tactic functions (‘cases’) in the analysis of a sentence, giving these an interpretation
in terms of the semantic roles that these functions express, such as agentive, dative,
and locative. Devised by US linguist Charles Fillmore (1929-_) in the late 1960s, in
the context of generative grammar, it exercised considerable influence on subsequent
developments in linguistic theory. »>case; generative grammar; semantics.

catachresis /kata'kri:sis/ »malapropism.

Catalan /‘katalan/ A member of the Romance family of languages, spoken by over

9 million people (by c.4 million as a first language) chiefly in north-eastern Spain,
with some in southern France, Andorra, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, and the USA.
It is an official regional language in Catalonia (Spain) and Roussillon (France), and
it has official status in Andorra and Valencia. It was the official language of the
Kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, and literary texts date from the 12th century. It
is written in the Roman alphabet. The language (as the culture) is still recovering
from long periods of repression, first under the Bourbon monarchy, and in the 20th

49
cataphora

century under Franco, and has been much influenced by Spanish (especially in
vocabulary), but there has been a marked revival of interest and pride in its status
and use in recent years. »Andorra; Romance; Spain.

cataphora /ka'tafera/ >anaphora; endophora.

catch phrase A phrase which is so appealing that people take pleasure from using
it, and which for a time (often just a few months) is heard everywhere. Phrases
derived from television advertisements or news stories are among the most transient.
Some catch phrases become so popular that they emerge as long-term additions to
the language: in English, these include Humphrey Bogart’s Here’s looking at you, kid
(from the film Casablanca) and Phone home (from the film, ET). »>set expression.

catenative /ka'tiznativ/ A lexical verb which governs the nonfinite form of another
lexical verb, as with try in She tried to leave. Quite lengthy ‘chains’ of such verbs can
be found (such as She wanted to keep on trying to do the exam) — hence the term
(which derives from the Latin word catena, ‘chain’). In linguistics, catenation or
concatenation is often used to describe the serial linking of a series of forms.
>> finite; verb.

Caucasian A family of 38 languages spoken by nearly 8 million people in and

around the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. They are
classified into three groups: Abkhazo-Adyghian, Nakho-Dagestanian, and Kartvelian.
Several of the northern languages have a written form, using the Cyrillic alphabet,
and have official status. There is much evidence of the influence of previous periods
of contact with nearby languages, such as Arabic, Persian, and Slavic (Russian).
»> Abkhazo-Adyghian; Kartvelian; Nakho-Dagestanian.

causative A grammatical category which expresses a causal relationship, such as

‘cause to eat’. Causatives are usually expressed by verbs (kill, for example, can be
analysed as ‘cause to die’), special conjunctions (such as because), or affixes (such as
-en, as in deafen, ‘to make deaf’). »>affix; conjunction; verb.

cavity In phonetics, any of the anatomically defined chambers of the vocal tract
which help to influence the character of a sound. The main cavities are the eso-
phageal (from the esophagus to the stomach), the pulmonic (the lungs and
trachea), the pharyngeal (the larynx to the base of the soft palate), the oral (the
whole mouth area), and the nasal (the nose and that part of the pharynx above the
soft palate). »>vocal tract.

Cebuano /serbwa:nsau/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken

by over 15 million people in the Philippines (nearly a quarter of the population). It
is written in the Roman alphabet, but is little used as a literary language. >»Austrone-
sian; Philippines.

cedilla /sa'dila/ A diacritic placed under a letter to indicate a change in the way the
letter is normally pronounced. An example is French ¢, as in garcon ‘boy’. »>diacritic.

SO
 centum language

Ceefax >teletext.

Celtiberian /kelta'biorian/ >Celtic.

Celtic An Indo-European family of languages, spoken originally by a group of

peoples who emerged in south-west Europe around the Sth century sc. The Celts
spread across Europe in a series of waves, reaching the Black Sea and Asia Minor,
south-west Spain, central Italy, and Britain. The main migration was by the Galli, or
Gauls, into northern Europe, and Gaulish is found in place names and inscriptions.
Galatian, spoken by the Celts who went into Asia Minor, remained in use until
around the Sth century ap. Celtiberian is the name given to the language of the
Celts in Spain (the Celtiberi), known from a few inscriptions. The range of dialects
spoken on the continent of Europe is called Continental Celtic, to be distinguished
from the Insular Celtic spoken in the British Isles and Brittany, the ancestor of
the modern Celtic languages. The first wave of invasion to the British Isles took
place into Ireland in the 4th century, resulting in a variety now called Goidelic (or
Gaelic); a later wave into southern England and Wales is called Brythonic. Goidelic
spread from Ireland (Irish Gaelic) into the Isle of Man (Manx) and Scotland (Scottish
Gaelic); Brythonic into Cornwall (Cornish), Wales (Welsh), Cumbria (Cumbric),
and Brittany (Breton). There are currently c.1 million speakers of Celtic languages.
»>Breton; Cornish; Irish Gaelic; ogham; Scottish Gaelic; Welsh.

Central African Republic (population in 1995 estimated at 3,422,000) The

official languages are French and Sango. Sango is a Ngbandi-based creole, now used
in the media, commerce, and government; itis spoken by c.350,000 as a first language,
and by most of the population as a second or third language. Over 60 other languages
are spoken in the country, notably Banda, Gbaya, and Zande, but the status of several
forms (as language or dialect) is unclear. French is the language used for international
purposes. »>creole; French.

central sound A sound made in the centre of the mouth or by the central part of
the tongue. The notion is particularly used in describing vowels: the vowel of bird
or the last vowel of butter would be described as ‘central vowels’. If an articulation
is made more towards the centre of the mouth than is normal, it is said to be
centralized, and the process called centralization. >»front sound; shwa; tongue;
vowel.

centre (UK) or center (US) 1. The top part of the tongue, between front and back,
used especially in the production of vowels such as [a]. »>tongue; vowel. 2. The
most sonorous part of a syllable, typically consisting of a vowel; for example, [e] is
the centre of the syllable [set]. »»sonority; syllable.
centum language /‘kentam/ An Indo-European language in which the velar stop
/k/ of Proto-Indo-European was retained in such words as Latin centum ‘hundred’;
contrasts with a satem language /'sa:tom/, where this sound changed to an alveolar
fricative /s/, in such words as Avestan satem ‘hundred’. Celtic, Romance, and Ger-

S1
Chad

manic languages are among the centum languages, according to this criterion.
Balto-Slavonic and Indo-Iranian languages are among the satem languages. »>Indo-
European.

Chad (population in 1995 estimated at 6,424,000) The official languages are French
and Arabic, the latter being an important lingua franca, spoken by about half the
population. There are over 120 other languages, notably Kanuri, Marba, Mbai, Mosi,
Sango, and Teda. Several have become lingua francas (e.g. Hausa, Ngambai, Sara).
French is the language used for most international purposes. »»Arabic; French; lingua
franca.

Chadic /'tjadik/ A branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages, c.160 languages

spoken by c.30 million people in an area extending from northern Ghana to the
Central African Republic. Hausa is the most important language of the group; other
languages include Angas, Kotoko, and Mubi. »»Afro-Asiatic; Hausa.

chain »speech chain.

character A graphic sign used in a writing system, especially one that is not
part of an alphabet, but represents a word or morpheme directly. The best-known
examples occur in Chinese and its derivative script, Japanese kanji, where the
characters are often classified on the basis of the number of strokes used to write
them. »>alphabet; graphology 1; kanji; p. 53.

Chari-Nile /‘fari:'natl/ >Nilo-Saharan.

Chechen /t{e'tfen/ A member of the Nakho-Dagestanian group of Caucasian lan-

guages, spoken by c.950,000 speakers in the Chechen-Ingush region of Russia (where
it has official status, along with Ingush) and by several thousand more in Turkey,
Jordan, and other nearby regions. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. »»Nakho-
Dagestanian.

Cheremis /‘feramis/ >Mari.

cherology /ka'rpladi:/ The study of sign language. The term was coined on analogy
with phonology to refer to the study of the smallest contrastive units (cheremes)
which occur ina sign language. Signs are analysed into such features as the location
in the signing space in which a sign is made, the hand configuration used, and the
action of the active hand. »phonology; sign language.

chest pulse A contraction of the chest muscles which forces air into the vocal tract.
It is a central notion in one theory of syllable production. »>syllable.

Chewa /'t(etwa/ >Nyanja.

chiasmus /ki:'azmas/ A balanced pattern of sentence construction in which the

main elements are reversed. A Shakespearean example is Love’s fire heats water, water
cools not love (Sonnet 154). »>figurative language.

52
(a)
Stroke
dot

s\ly
horizontal

(b)
vertical
\v
left-falling

right-falling

rising
YA AY
LW A133
hook

turning

Example Stroke order Rule

+ First horizontal,
then vertical
First left-falling,
AV then right-falling
From top to
bottom

1 Ha From left to right

First outside,
Linke liack then inside
Finish inside,
1 1777 ow then close

Middle, then the

‘] i]s two sides

Chinese characters: (a) the eight basic strokes; (b) the directions in which
the basic strokes are written; (c) the order of strokes of some simple characters.
CHILDES

CHILDES /t{atldz/ An abbreviation of Child Language Data Exchange System,

established in 1984 by an international group of language acquisition researchers.
Tape-recorded data is transcribed directly into computer files, which can be shared
by researchers who have access to the central database. The system permits a consider-
able saving of time and money. »acquisition; transcription.

Chile (population in 1995 estimated at 14,263,000) The official language is Spanish.

There are c. 200,000 speakers of Mapudungun (Araucanian). The Austronesian lan-
guage Rapanui is spoken on Easter Island. English is increasingly used for inter-
national purposes, along with Spanish. »»Austronesian; Spanish.

China (population in 1995 estimated at 1,215,293,000) The official language is

Mandarin Chinese, spoken by c.70% of the population. The other varieties of Chinese
are: Gan (€.2%), Hakka (c.2.5%), Min Nan (Southern Min, c.2.5%), Min Pei (Northern
Min, c.1.2%), Wu (c.7.5%), Xiang (c.3.5%), and Yue (Cantonese, c.4.5%). There are
c.130 other languages, comprising c.6.5% of the population; 55 of these are official
minority nationalities. Mongol (c.4.8 million), Tibetan (c.4.5 million), Uighur (c.7.2
million), and Zhuang (Northern and Southern, c.14 miilion) are official regional
languages. Other languages include Yi (c.5 million), Miao (Hmong, c.5 million),
Bouyei (c.2 million), Korean (c.1.9 million), Yao (c.1.4 million), Bai (Minchia,
c. 900,000), Dong (Kam, Northern and Southern, c.2.5 million), and Hani (c. 500,000).
English is increasingly used for international purposes. »Chinese.

Chinese A group of languages (traditionally called ‘dialects’) forming the Sinitic

branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, spoken by c.1,220 million people in
China and Taiwan, and in many countries of the Far East, especially Malaysia, Hong
Kong, Thailand, and Singapore, and through immigration all over the world, notably
in the USA. It has official status in China and Taiwan. Because there has long been
a single method for writing Chinese, and a common literary and cultural history
throughout China, a tradition has grown up of referring to the eight main varieties
of speech in China as ‘dialects’, though they are mutually unintelligible, and thus
best thought of as different languages. These languages are Gan, Hakka, Mandarin,
Min Nan (Southern Min), Min Pei (Northern Min), Wu, Xiang, and Yue (Cantonese).
Mandarin, as spoken in Beijing (Peking), is the basis of the modern standard language,
called putonghua (‘common speech’), now the normal written medium. The language
is traditionally written in Chinese characters, with a literary language recorded from
c.1500 Bc; this provides the unifying medium for all varieties of Chinese, as the
characters can be read by all literate people regardless of their spoken language
background. Several systems of romanized writing have been invented, notably
Wade-Giles (introduced in the mid-19th century by two British Chinese scholars,
Sir Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles), which produced the traditional spellings
familiar to Western eyes, such as Peking and Mao Tse-tung. This has been largely
supplanted by pinyin (‘phonetic spelling’), a system introduced in 1958, and now
in widespread use; the above words (omitting symbols for tones) would be Beijing

54
 chunking

and Mao-Zedong. These developments are part of an ambitious modern programme

of language reform, in which the classical characters have been reduced. in number
and complexity, and a single standard of spoken communication and spelling
introduced. »>character; China; kanji; logograph; Roman alphabet; Sino-Tibetan;
Taiwan.

Chipewyan »>Na-Dene.

chirography /karrogrofi:/ The study of handwriting forms and styles. The subject
has attracted a wide range of aesthetic, psychological, and scientific approaches.
There is no agreed system of classification, though several important notions have
emerged from historical studies. Handwriting variation is analysed using several
parameters, such as line direction, letter size, angle, and connection, and the thick-
ness of strokes. The art of penmanship, or handwriting at its most formal, is called
calligraphy. »>black letter writing; cursive; graphology 2; italic; majuscule; minus-
cule; uncial; writing.

Chomskyan or Chomskian Adjective derived from (Avram) Noam Chomsky

(1928- ), an American linguist whose ideas have dominated the development of
linguistic thought since the 1950s. As professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) he developed the conception of a generative grammar,
which departed radically from the structuralism and behaviourism of the previous
decades. His book Syntactic Structures (1957) proved to be a turning point in 20th-
century linguistics. »competence; generative grammar; MIT; Standard Theory.

choral repetition The unison repetition of an example given by a teacher to a

group of students. The technique is commonly used with those learning a foreign
language. >»>method.
chrestomathy /kre'stoma0i:/ An anthology of passages compiled to help those
engaged in learning a language. The term is derived from Greek words for ‘useful’
and ‘learning’. »language learning.
chronogram /'kronagram/ A phrase or sentence in which letters that are also
Roman numerals (e.g. C, I, X) combine to form a date. The significant letters are
usually written in capitals, producing an odd graphic appearance to the line (e.g.
DoMVs ‘house’ contains D, M, and V (for U)). Chronograms are often found on
tombstones, foundation stones, and other items which mark the date of an event.
»>verbal play.
Chukchi /'tfoktfi:/ A member of the Luorawetlan family of languages, spoken by
c.12,000 people in the Chukchi region of Russia (where it has official status), in the
northeasternmost corner of Siberia. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. »»Luor-
awetlan.
chunking In the study of the psychology of language, the division of an utterance
into parts, to make it easier to process. Some aphasic patients, for example, find it

55
Chuvash

easier to say the sentence The fat cat was chasing a big mouse if it is ‘chunked’ into
three parts: the fat cat— was chasing—a big mouse. Chunking is also used as a technique
in foreign language teaching. »>aphasia; psycholinguistics.

Chuvash /'tfu:va{/ A language spoken by c.1.7 million people in the Chuvash region
of Russia (where it is an official language), in the middle Volga region. It is usually
listed as a member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic family of languages, but often
considered to be a separate branch within that family. It is written in the Cyrillic
alphabet. »>Turkic.

cipher or cypher A secret code in which letters are transposed or substituted. A

message may be enciphered and deciphered. For example, using a simple cipher
alphabet (in which each letter is replaced by the immediately preceding letter of
the alphabet), the word jewels is enciphered as idvdkr. More complex cipher alphabets
use several equivalents for a letter, such as when j might be replaced by either gy, sf,
or ni. Modern cipher machines can produce highly complex systems using millions
of (poly-alphabetic) transformations. »>code 2; cryptology.

Circassian /s3'kasian/ >Adygey; Kabardian.

circumflex The accent *, used to indicate the pronunciation of a particular letter,

such as French é in méme. This accent may also be used to indicate other features of
speech, such as a type of pitch movement in a tone language or phonetic transcrip-
tion. »>accent 3.

circumlocution The use of more words than is necessary to express a meaning.

Circumlocution usually attracts criticism, when it is noticed, but it can have a
positive value, such as when a speaker wishes to avoid an awkward or sensitive word.
In some language pathologies (notably, in stuttering and certain kinds of aphasia),
the term describes the roundabout expressions which a person may use in order to
avoid a difficult word. >»>aphasia; language pathology; periphrasis; tautology.

citation form The form of a linguistic unit (typically, a spoken word) when this
is produced in isolation for purposes of discussion. There are often substantial
differences between a citation form and the way the word sounds in connected
speech: have, for example, is pronounced [hav] in isolation, but may be reduced to
[a] in such phrases as would have been. In lexicography, the citation slip provides
the written evidence, culled from books, magazines, and other sources, on which
to base a dictionary entry. »lexicography.

class In language study, a set of entities sharing certain formal or semantic properties.
The class of consonants, for example, has features which distinguish it from the
class of vowels. The class of nouns is distinguishable from the class of verbs. »>word
class.

class dialect »>sociolect.

56
 cliché

Classical Greek »>Greek.

classical language A stage in the historical development of a language when it is

thought to have reached its highest level of literary or cultural importance. The term
is typically applied to Latin in ancient Rome and Greek in ancient Greece (‘Classical
Greek’, as opposed to ‘modern Greek’), but Hebrew, Sanskrit, and several other
languages have recognized classical periods. »Greek; Hebrew; Latin; Sanskrit.

Classifier A linguistic form which indicates the semantic class to which a group of
words belongs; for example, the -ess suffix in English indicates membership of a
noun class referring to females. In many languages, classifiers express a wide range
of notions, such as size, animateness, and shape. »»word class.

clause A type of grammatical construction intermediate between a sentence and a

phrase, containing such major functional elements as subject and verb. It may be
equivalent to a sentence (I saw a cow), but it need not be (when I looked over the
wall). Clauses have been classified in many ways, but most distinguish between
independent (main) and dependent (subordinate) kinds. The role of the clause
in the sentence is also recognized, illustrated by the subject clause (performing
the function of a subject as in What I said was correct), and the adverbial clause
(performing the function of an adverb, as in the when example above). »>finite;
grammar 2; relative.

clear I A type of lateral sound which has a resonance similar to that of a front vowel
of an [i] quality, as in English leaf. It contrasts with a dark I, where the resonance
is that of a back vowel with [u] quality, as in English pool. »>lateral.

cleft palate speech Speech which results from a cleft palate — a congenital fissure
in the middle of the palate, often found along with a single or double split in the
upper lip and/or teeth ridge. The label ‘hare lip’ for the latter condition (once used
because of the supposed similarity with the divided upper lip of members of the
rabbit family) is now considered to be a demeaning form of description, and has
been replaced in clinical usage by cleft lip. A nasal voice quality and an excessive
use of glottal stops are among the most noticeable features of the early stages of cleft
palate speech. >»glottal; nasal; speech therapy.

cleft sentence A construction where a single clause has been divided (‘cleft’) into
two separate sections, each with its own verb. For example, Janet is looking at John
can be ‘cleft’ into It is Janet who is looking at John. »>clause.

cliché or cliche An expression which has come to be so overused that it no longer

conveys much meaning, and tends to attract criticism when people continue to use
it. Examples from various contexts in present-day English include at the end of the
day, sick as a parrot, and someone who needs no introduction. At times, clichés can be
useful, in helping people to communicate in an awkward or stressful situation.
>»>neologism.

57
 click

click A type of consonant produced by the velaric airstream mechanism. The

Khoisan languages have the most complex click systems. Click consonants are not
used in European languages, but click sounds are common enough; they include
the ‘tut tut’ effect, where the tongue articulates against the teeth (a dental click),
and the noises of encouragement to horses and other animals (including people),
made with the sides of the tongue (a lateral click). »Khoisan; velaric.

clinical linguistics The application of linguistics to the analysis of disorders of

language, especially those involving the production or comprehension of speech. A
development of the 1970s, the subject chiefly involves the transcription, description,
and analysis of language samples obtained from patients (both children and adults),
with the aim of relating the information to their diagnosis, assessment, and therapy.
Other kinds of investigation (e.g. experimental, cross-linguistic) are also now prac-
tised as part of a concern to improve our understanding of the genera! nature of
language disorder. »>language pathology; linguistics; profile.

clipping A type of word formation in which a new word is derived by shortening

another word. Examples include exam from examination and ad from advertisement.
»> abbreviation. :

clitic A form which resembles a word, but which cannot be used on its own as anormal
utterance because it is structurally dependent on a neighbouring word ina construction.
Examples include the contracted forms of be in English (I’m, he’s) and the pronoun je
(‘1’) in French, which must always be followed by a verb. »>contraction 1; enclitic.

closed class A word class whose membership is fixed or limited, such as the class
of articles, pronouns, or conjunctions; also called a closed system. An open class
or open set, by contrast, allows the unlimited addition of new items, the chief
classes being nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. »»word class.

closed syllable >open 2.

close vowel >high vowel.

closure An articulation where the contact between active and passive articulators
_ obstructs the air flow through the mouth and/or nose. Closure is complete, in the
case of plosives; partial, in the case of laterals; and intermittent, in the case of flaps.
»> articulation; flap; lateral; plosive.

cloze A technique used in the teaching and testing of reading comprehension, in

which readers guess which words have been omitted at regular intervals from a text. The
technique can be - from the present sentence, — every fifth word has — omitted. Some
omissions are more predictable than others, of course, but working out the possibilities
certainly demonstrates how well you know your language. »>language teaching.
cluster A sequence of adjacent consonant sounds, occurring in restricted patterns
at the beginning or end of a syllable. Initial clusters in English include [spr-] and

58
 code

(fl-]; final clusters include [-mps] and [-It]. The notion is also used for consonant
letters in the written language (where such clusters are sometimes referred to as
blends). There is no one-to-one correspondence between clusters in speech and
writing: the last letter of fox is a consonant cluster in speech, [ks]; and the last sound
of [sik] is a consonant cluster in writing, sick. »consonant; syllable.

cluttering A disorder of fluency, in which utterances are produced in an excessively

rapid way. Clutterers seem unable to control their speech rate, and as a result
introduce distortions of rhythm and articulation into their speech. Sounds become
displaced, mispronounced, or omitted, and syllables telescope into each other. The
speed may increase as the utterance proceeds. »>festination; fluency; stuttering.

coalescence The merging of linguistic units which occur in a sequence. In the

history of English, for example, /z/ coalesced with the following sound /j/ to produce
the /3/ heard in such words as measure. In contemporary English, the same kind of
effect can be heard in such phrases as would you, where the /d/ of would coalesces
with the /j/ of you. »>assimilation; convergence 2; sound change.

coarticulation The overlap of articulatory movements associated with different

speech segments; for example, the /t/ of too is produced with rounded lips, because of
the influence of the rounding which is part of the following vowel (compare the /t/ of
tea, where there is no rounding). Simultaneous articulations of different consonants,
such as [p] and [k], appear in several African languages. Coarticulation effects are
extremely common, and the study of speech from this point of view has largely
replaced the traditional study of articulation as a series of independently functioning
segments. >»>articulation; assimilation; parametric phonetics; secondary articulation.

COBUILD /kavbild/ An abbreviation of Collins-Birmingham University

International Language Database, a research unit established in 1980 by Collins
English Dictionaries and the University of Birmingham, under the direction of John
Sinclair. It created a 20-million-word corpus during the 1980s, which led to the
publication of a wide range of lexical reference works and teaching materials. »Bank
of English; corpus.

Cockney The accent and dialect associated with people native to the East End of
London. Several accents of south-east England, from the south coast to north of
Cambridge and Oxford, now show the influence of Cockney speech. >»»Estuary
English; rhyming slang.

cocktail party effect The process of selective listening. People listening to several
utterances (or conversations) at once are able to attend consciously to one of them,
and to ignore the others. The effect is studied as part of psycholinguistics. »psycho-
linguistics.

code 1. Any system of signals used for sending messages; the senders are said to
encode the message, and the receivers to decode it. Specifically, the term is used

59
code mixing

for a system which converts one set of symbols into another, such as the alphabet
(which converts sound units into letter units) or the Morse code (which converts
letters into dot/dash sequences). 2. A system of symbols used in the preparation
(encoding) and interpretation (decoding) of secret messages. A code in this sense
is a system of phrases, words, syllables, or letters, each of which has an associated
‘code word’ or ‘code number’, and which can be decoded using a ‘code book’. The
word jewels, for example, might be assigned the code word ‘shape’ or the code
number ‘36598’. »>cipher; cryptology. 3. In the sociology of language, used loosely
by some writers to mean a language, or a variety of a language. A code, in this sense,
is chosen by a speaker for use in a particular speech situation (code selection). It
may be used consistently, or changed midway (often several times) within a sentence
orconversation (code switching). Different codes may also be used in an apparently
haphazard way as part of a single system of communication (code mixing). »code
mixing/switching; elaborated code; lect; variety.

code mixing In bilingual speech, the transfer of linguistic elements from one
language into another. A single sentence might begin in one language, and then
introduce words or grammatical features belonging to the other. The process can be
illustrated from the kind of Spanish-English mixing used in the south-west USA
(‘Tex-Mex’). A shopper asks a supermarket clerk a question. Shopper: Donde esta el
thin-sliced bread? Clerk: Esta en aisle three, sobre el second shelf, en el wrapper rojo.
(‘Where is the thin-sliced bread? It is in aisle three, on the second shelf, in the red
wrappet.’) >»>bilingualism.

code switching The use by a speaker of more than one language, dialect, or variety
during a conversation. Which form is used will depend on such factors as the nature
of the audience, the subject matter, and the situation in which the conversation
takes place. An informal street conversation between friends will tolerate far more
code switching than a job interview between strangers. »>accommodation; bidia-
lectism; bilingualism.

codification A systematic account of a language, especially of its grammar and

vocabulary. This task is often undertaken when a language is being written down
for the first time, but it can also happen when a language is developing a standard
form, or after a period of considerable creativity and change (as in the case of the
English grammars and dictionaries of the 18th century). The task is often delegated
to an academy or special body, but in many instances it is carried out by individuals
(as with Dr Johnson’s dictionary). »academy; English; standard.

cognate A language or linguistic form which is historically derived from the same
source as another. Spanish, French, and Portuguese are all cognate languages, deriving
from Latin. Many of their words, accordingly, have a common origin, and are also
said to be cognate, such as the various words for ‘father’ — padre, pére, pai. »>genetic
classification; reconstruction.

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 colon

cognitive meaning >reference.

coherence The underlying functional connectedness of a piece of language;

opposed to incoherence. In some approaches, a distinction is drawn with
cohesion, which refers to the specific features that link different parts of a discourse.
A pronoun, for example, has a cohesive role to play, in the way it refers backwards
or forwards to a noun phrase (as illustrated by the use of it, referring to a pronoun,
in the present sentence.) »»anaphora; discourse analysis; pronoun.

cohesion »>coherence.

coinage >neologism.

collective noun A noun which denotes a group of entities, such as government and
committee. In English, such nouns are formally different from others in that they have
a distinctive three-way pattern of number contrast. Committee, for example, may be
used asa singular witha singular verb (The committee is interested ) and witha plural verb
(The committee are interested ), and again asa plural witha plural verb (The committees are
interested ). The difference between the first two patterns is one of point of view: in
committeeis, the committee is being seen asa single undifferentiated body; in committee
are, the emphasis is on the individuals who comprise it. »noun; number.

collocation The habitual co-occurrence of individual lexical items, such as aus-

picious and occasion. The potential of items to collocate is called their collocability.
»>lexeme.

colloquialism A pronunciation, word, or grammatical construction which is heard

in the most informal levels of speech, and which tends to be avoided in formal
spoken and written language. The use of contracted forms (such as I’m, can’t) is
typical of colloquial speech, as is the use of slang (Let’s have a butcher’s) and nonstan-
dard coinages (Eurowimpishness — said of one politician who was expressing his
support for a common European currency in what was claimed to be an excessively
weak manner). »>formality.

Colombia (population in 1995 estimated at 35,021,000) The official language is

Spanish. There are c.75 Amerindian languages, mostly spoken by very small numbers.
An English-based creole is used on the San Andrés and Providencia Islands. »Amer-
indian; creole; Spanish.

colon A punctuation mark whose typical function is to express that what follows
in the sentence is an expansion of what has preceded. We have an important principle
here: people must have freedom of choice. There is a clear interdependence between the
separated units, and in this respect the colon differs from the semicolon, where there
is not usually such a close semantic relationship. In British English, it is not usual
to have the clause following the colon begin with a capital letter; but this is more
common in American English. »punctuation; semicolon.

61
comma

comma A punctuation mark with a wide range of grammatical and prosodic

functions, and displaying considerable flexibility in its use. Among its typical uses
are the separation of a series of clauses within a sentence (John sang, Mary played,
and Mike drank), the separation of a series of words of the same grammatical type
within a phrase (tall, dark, and handsome), and the marking of an included unit (the
car, he was sorry to say, was a wreck). Even in such straightforward grammatical
contexts, however, there is much variation in usage, with many authors and pub-
lishers preferring not to use a comma before and. Certain rules do exist, especially
stating where commas may not go; for example, phrases cannot be interrupted by a
comma (we cannot write *a, car or *they will, go), and the comma is disallowed
between subject and verb (*The car which I bought in France last year, has just been
sold). But apart from such contexts, authors vary greatly in the extent to which they
use commas to reflect the rhythm, pace, and intonation of speech. »>punctuation.

command A sentence whose typical function is to tell someone to do something.

The form of such sentences typically involves the use of a verb in the imperative
mood: Leave!, Sit over there!. »>directive; imperative; sentence.

comment >given.

comment clause A type of clause whose function is to add a parenthetic comment

to another clause; examples include you know, you see, generally speaking, and to be
honest. Overuse of such clauses in conversation (especially on formal occasions) can
lead to criticisms of ‘empty speech’; but comment clauses have an important role to
play in ensuring conversational naturalness and smoothness. »>clause; parenthesis 2.

common core The range of linguistic features which would be used and understood
by all speakers, regardless of their regional or social background. Common core
features of a language would include its basic rules of word order and word formation,
and its high frequency vocabulary. However, it is by no means clear just how many
features can legitimately be called ‘common core’, because of the considerable
divergence which actually exists between varieties, and it is very difficult to identify
such features in some aspects of language structure (such as the vowel system).
»>Nuclear English; variety.

common noun A noun that refers to a class of objects or concepts, such as chair,
cat, information. It is generally contrasted with a proper noun (or proper name),
which refers to a unique person, place, animal, etc., such as Fred, London, Mrs Jones.
The grammar of the two kinds of noun is different: for example, English common
nouns typically express a contrast between singular and plural, whereas proper
nouns do not - we can say a chair and chairs, but not a Fred and Freds. »noun.

communication The transmission and reception of information between a signal-

ler and a receiver. Various steps in this process can be recognized. A message is
formulated in the signaller’s brain, and is then encoded in the nervous and muscular
systems. It leaves the signaller (typically via the vocal tract or hands), and is trans-

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 communication science

DREN

mitted through air, paper, electrical system, or other medium to the brain of the
receiver (typically, via the eye or ear), where it is decoded. The receiver may influence
the nature of the message at any time by sending feedback to the signaller. In
principle, any of the five senses can be involved, but humans tend to use only the
auditory/vocal, visual, and tactile modes for active communication (the other two
modes, smell and taste, being widely employed among certain animal species).
»>body language; communication board/disorder/science; feedback; miscommuni-
cation; zodsemiotics.

communication board A piece of apparatus which displays common words, the

alphabet, numbers, and other important features of language, used by those who
are unable to express themselves in any other way (such as the severely physically
handicapped). People point to the item they wish to signal, either with their hands,
or by using another part of the body (e.g. the shoulder or eyebrow) to move a
pointer or other locater on the board. »>alternative communication system; language
pathology.

communication disorder A lack of development or breakdown in a person’s

ability to communicate. It may be mild, moderate, or severe, and affect any or all
of the chief communication channels - auditory/vocal (speech), visual (writing,
signing, facial expressions, bodily gesture), and tactile. The notion is much broader
than that of a language disorder, and would include, for example, problems of
maintaining or using eye contact efficiently (such as affect many autistic children).
»>alternative communication system; communication; language pathology.

communication science The scientific study of all aspects of communication;

sometimes referred to as the communication sciences. The domain includes
linguistics and phonetics, their various branches (e.g. psycholinguistics, socio-

63
communicative approach

linguistics), and relevant applications of associated subjects (e.g. acoustics, anatomy,

neurology). All modes of communication are involved - spoken, written, and signed.
>»>communication; linguistics; phonetics.

communicative approach An approach to language teaching which focuses

on language functions and communicative competence, and not on grammatical
structure. Language functions include such notions as requesting, apologizing, nar-
rating, commanding, and expressing dislike. The emphasis is on the processes
involved in actual communication, and on the appropriate use of language in real
situations. »>communicative competence; language teaching; notional syllabus.

communicative competence A person’s unconscious knowledge of the rules

governing the appropriate use of language in social situations. It is usually contrasted
with linguistic competence, the person’s unconscious knowledge of the formal
patterning of language. Communicative competence includes our formal knowledge
of language, but in addition includes our awareness of the factors which govern
acceptable speech, such as how to begin and end conversations, how tointerrupt, how
to address people, and how to behave in special speech situations (e.g. apologizing,
thanking, and expressing formality or informality). »competence.

community language A language used by a particular community — typically, by

an ethnic minority. In Britain, for example, there are over 100 community languages,
including Bengali, Panjabi, Turkish, Italian, and Hindi. »speech community.

community language learning A method of foreign language teaching, devised

by American educator Charles Curran, which uses techniques derived from group
counselling for people with psychological problems. Learners are organized into small
groups, great emphasis being placed on the students’ personal thoughts and feelings
while engaged in the task of language learning. They first express these feelings in their
mother tongue. The utterances are then translated by the group leader into the
foreign language, and the learner tries to repeat this translation, expressing the
feelings again to the other members of the group. »humanistic; language learning.

Comoros (population for 1995 estimated at 600,000) The official language is

French. A variety of Swahili is spoken as a first language by most people, and Malagasy
is well represented among immigrants from Madagascar. »>French; Swahili.

comparative A grammatical form used to make a comparison, such as the use of

-er or more with adjectives in English (taller, more necessary). The construction which
may follow the use of a comparative is a comparative clause: That was easier than
I expected. »>clause; degree.

comparative linguistics The branch of linguistics which interrelates the charac-

teristics of different languages believed to have a common historical origin. The
subject is sometimes still referred to by its older labels, comparative philology
or comparative grammar. >linguistics; philology; reconstruction.

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 complex sentence

comparative method »reconstruction.

comparative philology »>philology.

comparative reconstruction >reconstruction.

competence A person’s unconscious knowledge of the system of rules underlying

his or her language; contrasts with performance. The notion emerged in the 1960s
as a tenet of Chomskyan linguistics. It has since led to the development of several
related terms, notably pragmatic or communicative competence, referring to
the ability to produce and understand sentences appropriate to the social context
in which they occur. »Chomskyan; communicative competence; performance 1;
pragmatics.

competence grammar >grammar 1.

complement An element of clause or sentence structure, traditionally associated

with ‘completing’ the meaning specified by the verb. The domain of comple-
mentation may subsume all obligatory features of the predicate other than the
verb (e.g. including objects) or it may be restricted to a single class of constructions
(e.g. those following the verb be and semantically related verbs). In subject comple-
mentation, the complement element relates directly to the subject of the clause
(She is a lawyer); in object complementation, the complement element relates
directly to the clause object (She called him a nuisance). Categories other than the
verb are sometimes said to take complements; for example, the item governed by a
preposition can be called a prepositional complement. >>clause; copula; object;
preposition; subject; verb.

complementarity A type of oppositeness of meaning, in which the assertion of

one term implies the denial of the other, as in single vs. married. The terms are
sometimes called contradictories. They display no gradability — such phrases as
*more single and* less married are not normally possible. »antonymy; converseness.

complementary distribution The mutual exclusiveness of a pair of sounds in a

certain phonetic environment. Sound A may appear only in environment B, and
sound X only in environment Y; A may never appear in Y, and X never appear in
B. In English, for example, voiceless and voiced varieties of /1/ are in complementary
distribution: the voiceless sound heard in play can never replace the /l/ sounds in
such words as leap or pool, and vice versa. »>distribution; phoneme; voicing.

complex preposition A multi-word construction consisting of a noun or noun

phrase both preceded and followed by a single preposition, as in on account of and
in accordance with. The term is sometimes used to include any preposition consisting
of more than one word, such as next to. »preposition.

complex sentence In its most general application, a sentence consisting of more

than one clause. In a somewhat narrower sense, the term refers to a sentence

65
component

consisting of a main clause and at least one subordinate clause; it thus contrasts
with such notions as compound sentence. »>clause; compound.

component 1. A major section of the organization of a generative grammar, used in

such terms as the ‘phrase structure component’ or the ‘syntactic component’. There
may be further analysis of these sections into sub-components. >>generative gram-
mar. 2. An irreducible feature in terms of which the sense of lexical items can be
analysed. Theitem girl, for example, canin this approach be analysed into such seman-
tic components as ‘human’, ‘child’, and ‘female’. »componential analysis; lexicon.

componential analysis The analysis of a set of lexical items in terms of a semantic

space structured by various semantic dimensions, such as sex, generation, colour,
and shape. Each dimension is composed of contrasting semantic features (male
vs. female, adult vs. child, etc.). The approach was developed in the 1960s by
ethnosemanticists, and was particularly used for the analysis of kinship terms.
>»>component 2; ethnosemantics; kinship terms; semantics.

composition In language teaching, a type of writing practice which makes the

learner produce longer texts than a sentence, such as an essay, report, or story. In
free composition, the student has total control over what is written about; in
controlled composition, stimulus questions, pictures, or other techniques are
used to guide the student’s response. »>language teaching; method.

compound Descriptive of a linguistic unit composed of two or more elements,

each of which could function independently in other circumstances; usually con-
trasting with simple. A ‘compound word’, for example, consists of a combination
of stems, such as washing machine. A ‘compound sentence’ consists of a combination
of main clauses, such as It rained and it snowed. »>clause; stem.

comprehension The ability to understand and interpret language, whether spoken,

written, or signed; contrasts with production. The notion is used both theoretically
(e.g. with reference to the psycholinguistic processes underlying language) and
pedagogically (e.g. with reference to a pupil’s ability to grasp the meaning of a
particular text). »meaning; paraphrase; reading; speech perception/production;
Wernicke’s aphasia.

computational linguistics A branch of linguistics in which the techniques and

concepts of computer science are applied to the investigation of linguistic and
phonetic problems. Research areas include speech synthesis, the production of
concordances, automatic translation, and the testing of grammars. »concordance;
corpus; linguistics; machine translation; natural language; Standard Generalized
Markup Language; system architecture.

computer language >language 2.

computer-assisted language learning (CALL) The use of a computer in the
teaching of a language; also subsumed under the more general notion of computer-

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 Congo

assisted instruction (CAI). Typically, a computer screen presents a learner with

a series of linguistic tasks, to which the student responds, and the program then
indicates whether the responses are correct or in error. Other programs might perform
such tasks as providing guidance about the syllabus to be followed, monitoring the
student’s progress, and testing. »language learning/teaching.

concessive Descriptive of a word or grammatical construction which expresses the

meaning of ‘concession’. The point expressed in the main clause continues to be valid
despite the point which is being made in the subordinate clause (the concessive
- Clause). In English, the most widely used markers of concession are although and
though: Although I went to bed early, I still felt tired; I felt tired though I went to bed early.
>>clause.

concord The way in which a particular form of one word requires a corresponding
form of another; also called agreement. In French, the gender of the noun requires
a corresponding pronoun: masculine nouns take il (‘he/it’), as in II est la, le sucre
(‘It’s there, the sugar’); feminine nouns take elle (‘she/it’), as in Elle est la, la table
(‘It’s there, the table’). In languages which have no fixed patterns of word order,
such as Latin, concord is the main means of expressing grammatical relationships.
»> gender; government; word order. :

concordance A list of words, usually organized alphabetically, which shows the

frequency, citations, and locations for each item in a written text. If you wish to
determine how often (and where) Shakespeare uses the word fortune, for example,
a concordance of his works will tell you. Concordances are commonly used in
projects in literary and linguistic computing. They may also be organized on the
basis of principles other than the alphabet, such as subject matter or chronology.
»>computational linguistics.

concrete 1. Descriptive of nouns which refer to physical entities (book, car, egg);
contrasts with abstract, which applies to nouns lacking physical reference (infor-
mation, idea, certainty). The distinction is not clear-cut, as many nouns have properties
which would allow either interpretation (structure, music, version). >»noun.
2. Descriptive of any analysis which emphasizes the phonetic reality of speech
sounds; contrasts with abstract. »phonetics.

conditional A clause or sentence which expresses a hypothesis or circumstance

under which a statement may be valid. In English, conditional constructions are
typically introduced by ifand unless, as in If the bus comes soon, we'll be all right. Some
languages use distinctive verb forms to express conditional meaning, and these
forms are then analysed as conditional tenses or moods (as in French Je marcherais,
‘I would walk’). »>clause; tense 1.

conductive deafness >deafness.

Congo 1. (country name) (population in 1995 estimated at 2,954,000) The official

67
Congo, Democratic Republic of

language is French. There are over 50 local languages, including Kongo (spoken by
nearly half the population) and the Teke group of languages (c.500,000). Lingala
and Sango are important as lingua francas in certain areas. »>French; lingua franca.
2. (language name) >Kongo.

Congo, Democratic Republic of (formerly Zaire) (population in 1995 estimated

at 41,837,000) The official language is French. Kongo (spoken by c.15% of the
population), Bangala (Ngala, c.8%), Lingala (c.20%, mainly as a second language),
Luba (c.19%), and Swahili (c.22% as a second language) also have special status, and
are widely used as lingua francas. There are over 200 other languages, notably Ngala,
Kituba (a Kongo-based creole, c.4 million), Songe (c.1 million), Lugbara, Mongo,
Nandi, Rwanda, and Zande. French is used for international purposes. »>creole;
French; Kongo; lingua franca; Swahili.

conjoining >coordination.

conjugation In an inflecting language, a set of verbs which occur in the same

range of forms. Latin verbs, for example, have four conjugations. In verbs of the first
conjugation, traditionally illustrated using the forms of amare (‘to love’), the endings
of the active present tense are amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant (‘1 love, you
love, he/she loves, we love, you love, they love’). Fourth conjugation verbs, typified
by audire (‘to hear’) conjugate differently: audio, audis, audit, audimus, auditis, audiunt
(‘I hear, you hear, he/she hears, we hear, you hear, they hear’). These differences are
systematic, applying to dozens of verb forms, and to hundreds of different verbs.
»> declension; inflection 1; Latin; principal parts; verb.

conjunct >conjunction.

conjunction A type of word whose chief function is to connect words or other

constructions. Conjunctions are traditionally classified into coordinating con-
junctions (the main items being and, or, and but) and subordinating conjunc-
tions (e.g. because, although, when). Certain adverbs also have a primarily connective
function (e.g. however, moreover), and these are sometimes called conjunctive
adverbs or conjuncts. »coordination; subordination; word class.

connected speech Speaking as part of a natural discourse. It might be thought

that all speech is, by definition, connected. The point of the term is to draw a contrast
with certain speech styles which involve the use of isolated words and artificial
pauses, such as can be found in some foreign language teaching or speech therapy
exercises. A learner may be able to pronounce or recognize a word in isolation, but
be unable to do so when it occurs within the rhythms of rapid connected speech.
Several important features of language can be found only in connected speech, such
as complex intonation patterns, and the modification or omission of sounds between
and within words. »»assimilation; discourse analysis; elision; intonation.

connective A word (or part of a word) whose chief function is to link linguistic

68
 constriction

units; also sometimes called a connector. Examples include the conjunctions (e.g.
and, because), some adverbs (e.g. nevertheless, otherwise), and certain verbs (notably,
be). »>conjunction; correlative.

connector >connective.

connotation The personal or emotional associations which are suggested by words,

and which thus form part of their meaning, for individual speakers; for example,
the word automation may connote ‘efficiency’ to one person, and ‘redundancy’ to
another. A contrast is drawn with denotation, which is the relationship between
words and the entities in the world to which they refer — in the present example,
reference to a particular automatic system or apparatus. The denotation is essentially
the ‘dictionary meaning’ of the word, though information about the most widely
shared connotations is usually given in dictionaries. »»affective meaning; referential
language; semantic differential.

consonance The harmonious use of sounds in speech; contrasts with dissonance.

The term has a narrower use in the study of versification, referring to the correspon-
dence of consonants, especially at the ends of words (e.g. knife, leaf, brief). »euphony.

consonant (C) In phonetics, a speech sound produced by a relatively constricted

or totally closed configuration of the vocal tract; in phonology, a unit of the sound
system which typically occupies the margins of a syllable. In both approaches, the
term contrasts with vowel (as it does with the corresponding use in the writing
system). The two views coincide in the classification of such sounds as /p/, /f/, and
/t{/, but they do not always do so. It is possible for a sound to act like a consonant
in the sound system, but to behave phonetically like a vowel. An example is /w/,
which sounds like the vowel [u], but which only ever occurs before a vowel at the
beginning of a syllable (as in we). Such cases are often called semiconsonants or
semivowels. »>cluster; semivowel; syllable; vowel.

consonant harmony >harmony.

constituent A linguistic unit which is an element of a larger construction. Con-

stituent analysis is the process of analysing sentences into a series of constituents,
which are organized in a hierarchical way. The major divisions made at a given level
are called the immediate constituents (or ICs); the smallest units resulting from
this process of analysis are the ultimate constituents (or UCs). A grammar which
analyses sentences in this way is called a constituency grammar. »>hierarchy;
phrase-structure grammar; tree; p. 70.

constriction A narrowing within the vocal tract. Different kinds and degrees of
constriction are the basis of the articulatory classification of sound qualities. A
maximum constriction is a closure, as in the case of [p]. Less constriction is involved
in fricative sounds, such as [f]. Open vowels are least constricted. »>articulation;
fricative; vocal tract; vowel.

69
constructional homonymity

D N

saw the dog

Constituent analysis. The immediate constituents of the sentence (S) are

the NP (noun phrase) and VP (verb phrase). The immediate constituents of
the first NP are D (determiner) and N (noun). The ultimate constituents of
the sentence are the words in the bottom line - though saw could be further
analysed into see + past tense.

constructional homonymity >ambiguous.

consultant >informant.

contact language >language contact; pidgin.

contentive >grammatical word.

content word »>grammatical word.

context 1. The parts of an utterance next to or near a linguistic unit (such as a

word) which is the focus of attention; also called environment. In that first
sentence, for example, focus is being used in the context of attention (as opposed to,
say, in the context of camera). Without knowing the context, the meaning of a word
is likely to be ambiguous; providing this context is called contextualization. In
generative grammar, forms can be classified in terms of whether they occur only in
a specific structural context (they are context-sensitive) or are independent of
context (they are context-free). In a context-sensitive grammar, the rules apply
only in particular contexts; in a context-free grammar the rules apply regardless of

70
 contrastive stress

context. » ambiguous; distribution; generative grammar. 2. The features of the

nonlinguistic world in relation to which linguistic units are systematically used; also
called the situational context or environment. The historical context identifies
the general time-period within which a language is being used (such as the 17th
century). The geographical context identifies regional factors which correlate with
the use of language (such as dialect). The social context identifies such features as
the age, sex, or occupation of the speaker. »>dialect; variety.

context-free/sensitive »>context 1.

continuant A sound made with an incomplete closure of the vocal tract, as can
be heard with vowels and certain types of consonant (e.g. fricatives). Sounds which
have a complete closure are called noncontinuants or stops. »>closure; consonant;
vocal tract; vowel.

continuous >progressive.

contour A distinctive configuration of tones in an utterance; also called an inton-

ation contour ora pitch contour. Contours are usually classified into ‘rising’ and
‘falling’ basic types, with more complex variations recognized. A statement in English
often hasa falling contour; a question often has arising one; anda hesitant or doubtful
utterance often has a contour which falls then rises. »>intonation; pitch; tone.

contraction 1. The shortening of a linguistic form so that it comes to be attached

to an adjacent form, as in English am becoming ’m in I’m; sometimes called
reduction. The term also applies to cases of fusion, where both forms alter their
shape, as in French du from *de le, ‘of the (masculine)’. »>assimilation. 2. >ellipsis.

contradictories >complementarity.

contrast A difference between linguistic units, especially one which serves to

distinguish meanings in a language; also called an opposition, especially in pho-
nology. Such differences, which will be found at all linguistic levels, may also be
referred to as distinctive, functional, or significant. Contrasts in English include
(in sounds) /p/ vs. /b/, (in grammar) the vs. a and he is vs. is he?, and (in vocabulary)
big vs. small. »>distinctive; level 1; markedness; redundant.

contrastive analysis (CA) In the study of foreign language learning, the identifi-_
cation of points of structural similarity and difference between two languages. The
assumption is that points of difference will be areas of potential difficulty (called
‘interference’ or ‘negative transfer’) in the learning of one or other of the languages.
ACA approach aims to predict what these difficulties will be, and to provide teaching
materials which will help. »>interference; language learning; transfer.

contrastive stress Extra emphasis given to a word, in order to draw special

attention to its meaning. It often suggests a specific contrast with another word: I
need a RED pencil (not a blue one). >>stress.

TA
conundrum

conundrum »>riddle.

convergence 1. In sociolinguistics, a process of linguistic change in which dialects

become more like each other; contrasts with divergence, where dialects become
less like each other. Convergence is widespread, being commonly found within
adjacent speech communities, which tend to borrow words and sounds from each
other. Also common are cases where a nonstandard variety becomes more like the
standard language, as can be seen in several West Indian creoles. »accommodation;
creole; dialect 2. In historical linguistics, the merging of forms which were contrastive
at an earlier stage of a language; also called merger or coalescence, and contrasted
with divergence, where a form splits into two functional units. For example, in
Middle English the vowels of see and deep were distinct, but these have now merged
to /i:/. »coalescence; language change; syncretism.

conversational implicature >implicature.

conversational maxims »>maxims of conversation.

conversation analysis (CA) The analysis of the methods people use to engage in
conversation and other forms of social interaction involving speech. The central
concern is to determine how individuals experience, make sense of, and report their
interactions. Tape recordings are made of natural conversations, and the associated
transcriptions are analysed to determine the properties which govern the way a
conversation proceeds. »»adjacency pair; cooperative principle; discourse analysis;
implicature; interactional sociolinguistics; repair; sociolinguistics; turn.

converseness A type of oppositeness of meaning, in which one member of a pair

of terms presupposes the other. Examples include buy vs. sell and employer vs.
employee. »>antonymy.

conversion A process of word formation in which an item comes to belong to a

new word class without the addition of an affix; also called functional shift.
Examples include the change of noun to verb in carpet (I’ve bought a new carpet vs.
I’m going to carpet the floor), and (much less typical) the change of auxiliary verb to
noun in must (That’s a must). »»affix, word formation.

cooing The earliest point in infant vocalization when speech-like sounds can be
heard. The sounds are phonetically indeterminate, typically vowel-like in character
(though some consonant-like noises can occur), and gradually develop into the
more varied and definite sounds of babbling. The onset of cooing is usually around
three months. »»babbling; vocalization.

Cook Islands (population in 1995 estimated at 18,200) The official language is

English. Cook Islands Maori (Rarotongan) is spoken by c.75% of the people as a first
language. Four other Austronesian languages are also represented on the islands.
>> Austronesian; English.

72
 corpus

cooperative principle A principle used in the analysis of conversations which

states that speakers try to cooperate with each other when communicating; in
particular, they try to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear. Listeners normally
assume that a speaker is following these conventions. »»conversation analysis;
implicature; maxims of conversation.
coordinating conjunction »>conjunction.
coordination The linking of linguistic units which are usually of equivalent
syntactic status, such asa series of clauses, ora series of nouns; also called conjoining;
contrasts with subordination, where the units being linked are not equivalent.
Coordinate clauses are illustrated by Mary got aBA and Frank gotaBSc. Items which
signal coordination are called coordinators or coordinating conjunctions —
such as and, or, and either/or. »>conjunction; subordination.

coordinator >coordination.

coprolalia /kppra'leilis/ The uncontrolled use of obscene language — a symptom

of certain rare neurological disorders, notably Giles de la Tourette syndrome. The
term is used only in clinical contexts. »language pathology; taboo language.

Coptic >Egyptian.
copula /‘kppjula/ A verb with little or no independent meaning, whose primary func-
tion is to link elements of clause structure, typically the subject and the complement,
to show that they are semantically equivalent; also called a linking verb. In English,
the main copular verb is be, in its various forms, as used in such sentences as She is a
doctor, They are happy. This somewhat unusual term derives from a Latin root meaning
‘pond’ or ‘join’ —as seen also in couple and copulate. »complement; subject; verb.
Cornish A member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic family of languages,
spoken chiefly in Cornwall from around the Sth century until the end of the 18th
century. It is closely related to Breton. Written remains date from the early 15th
century. Since the 1950s there has been an active revivalist movement. »>Celtic.
corpus, plural corpora A collection of linguistic data, either compiled as written
texts or as a transcription of recorded speech. The main purpose of a corpus is to
verify a hypothesis about language — for example, to determine how the usage of a
particular sound, word, or syntactic construction varies. Corpus linguistics deals
with the principles and practice of using corpora in language study. A computer
corpus is a large body of machine-readable texts. Very large computer corpora have
been developed: the British National Corpus, for example, contains 100 million
words. >»>Bank of English; British National Corpus; Brown University Corpus of
American English; COBUILD; computational linguistics; International Computer
Archive of Modern English; International Corpus of English; Lancaster—Oslo/Bergen
Corpus of British English; London/Lund Corpus of Spoken English; Longman/Lan-
caster English Language Corpus; natural language; Survey of English Usage.

73
corpus planning

corpus planning >language planning.

correctmess An absolute standard of language use deriving from the rules of
institutions (such as language academies) or respected publications (grammars,
dictionaries, manuals of pronunciation and style). When applied to aspects of lan-
guage where there is no usage variation among educated users, the notion is uncon-
troversial: the spelling form */angauge is incorrect, as is the word order *Hardly he
had left. The notion becomes controversial only when it is used to condemn usages
which are common within the whole or part of the speech community, such as the
use of the split infinitive (to really know) or regional dialect forms (It do no harm).
»>appropriateness; normative; prescriptivism.

correlative Descriptive of constructions which use a pair of connecting words. A

typical correlative construction is Either we leave now or we'll have to stay until
morning. Other correlatives include not only . . but also, both... and, and if. . . then.
»>connective; disjunction.

Corsican /‘ko:stkn/ A variety of Romance spoken by c.340,000 people chiefly in the

island of Corsica (by over half the population), where it is recognized as an official
regional language (alongside French, the standard language) by the French govern-
ment. There are also several thousand speakers in Italy and various countries of
North and South America. Linguistically, the variety is closer to Tuscan (in Italy)
than to French. »>Italian; Romance.

Costa Rica (population in 1995 estimated at 3,383,000) The official language is

Spanish, spoken by most of the population. About 2% speak an English-based creole
widespread throughout the western Caribbean. There are also a small number of
Amerindian languages spoken by a few thousand people, and an immigrant group
of c.4500 Chinese (Yue). English is increasingly used for international purposes,
along with Spanish. >>creole; Spanish. :

Céte d’Ivoire, formerly Ivory Coast (population in 1995 estimated at 14,651,000)

The official language is French. There are c.70 local languages in use, notably Akar ©
(Baule), widely used as a lingua franca, Bete, and Senufo. French is the language
used for international purposes. »>French; lingua franca.

countability A contrast in the grammatical classification of nouns, in which nouns

denoting separable entities (countable or count noums) ate distinguished from
those denoting continuous entities, having no natural bounds (noncountable,
uncountable, noncount or mass nouns). English identifies count nouns by
their co-occurrence with such forms as a, many, and the numbers; noncount nouns
co-occur with such forms as much and some: compare a table vs. some music. Many
nouns can be used in both contexts: a cake vs. some cake. »noun; number.

count noun >countability.

covert prestige >overt prestige.

74
 Croatian

_ creaky voice A vocal effect produced by a very slow vibration of only one end of
the vocal folds; also called creak or laryngealization. Because the sound some-
what resembles that of frying, the effect has also been described as ‘vocal fry’. Filmstar
Vincent Price produced excellent creaky voice in his especially menacing moments.
»> larynx; paralanguage; phonation; vocal folds.
creativity, linguistic >productivity.
creole A pidgin language which has become the mother tongue of a speech com-
munity. The process of expanding the structural and stylistic range of the pidgin is
called creolization. A process of decreolization takes place when the standard
language begins to exert influence on the creole, anda whole range of varieties emerges
to form a continuum between the standard and the creole (a post-creole con-
tinuum). Among the varieties which have been recognized are the acrolect (charac-
terized by prestige or standardization), the basilect (most remote from the prestige
variety), and the mesolect (intermediate between acrolect and basilect). »»Black Eng-
lish Vernacular; Gullah; Jamaica; Krio; monogenesis; Papiamentu; pidgin; Sheldru.

critical linguistics An approach to language analysis which aims to reveal hidden

power relations and ideological processes at work in linguistic texts. It is especially
used in critical discourse analysis, the analysis of texts in relation to the social
context which gave rise to them, and within which they need to be interpreted.
»> discourse analysis; linguistics.
critical period In child language acquisition, the hypothesis that there is a particu-
lar time-span during which a first language can be most easily acquired. The notion
of a critical period is well supported in several areas of child development (e.g. with
reference to the development of the mechanism of swaliowing), and was felt to be
also relevant to the emergence of language. It was argued that the critical period for
language ends at puberty, because by this time the brain has become specialized in
its functions, and no longer has the adaptability found at earlier stages of biological
development. The hypothesis has proved to be extremely difficult to test, and remains
controversial. »>acquisition.

Croatia (population in 1995 estimated at 4,876,000) The official language is now

called Croatian (before independence in 1991, Serbo-Croatian), spoken by most of
the population. There are c.250,000 speakers of Italian, in the north of the country,
and uncertain numbers of speakers of Slovak, Romani, and other people from
nearby countries. English is increasingly being used for international purposes.
»> Serbo-Croatian.
Croatian The name increasingly being used since the early 1990s for the Slavic
language spoken chiefly in Croatia by c.4.8 million people; before the civil war,
considered a variety of Serbo-Croatian. It is also found in nearby territories, and
through emigration is in Germany, Sweden, and several other countries. It is written
in the Roman alphabet. »>Croatia.

75
crossword

crossword A word game in which the aim is to fill out a symmetrically patterned
grid of black and white squares by writing in the answers to a set of numbered clues.
The location of the first letter of an answer is given by a number in a square,
corresponding to the number of the clue, and answers interlock horizontally and
vertically. The crossword is complete when all clues are answered correctly, so that
all blank squares are filled. The origins of the puzzle are unclear, but it became widely
known in 1913, when a US journalist, Arthur Wynne, devised a newspaper puzzle
called a ‘word cross’. Over the years, the game has developed several variant shapes
and conventions, though a square grid is usual. »>cryptic clue.

cryptic clue A type of clue in a crossword puzzle which is deliberately mysterious

and ambiguous. Anagrams, hiding words in phrases, the use of puns, and other
stratagems are all popular examples. Cryptic clues were introduced by Torquemada
(Edward Powys Mathers), who composed puzzles for the Observer in the 1920s and
1930s. »>crossword.

cryptology The study of how secret messages are constructed, using codes and
ciphers (cryptography or ‘code-making’), and then deciphered or decoded (cryp-
tanalysis or ‘code-breaking’). The messages themselves are called cryptograms.
»>cipher; code 2; steganography.

cryptophasia >idioglossia.

Cuba (population in 1995 estimated at 11,089,000) The official language is Spanish,

spoken by almost everyone. There area few speakers of Russian. English is increasingly
used for international purposes, along with Spanish. »>Spanish.

cued speech A method of speech reading in which manual cues help to distinguish
sounds that have a visually similar articulation. The aim is to help a deaf person to
‘see’ the sounds of speech as they are spoken. Different positions and shapes of the
hand are used near the speaker’s mouth, chin, and throat to signal vowels and
consonants. The system was devised in 1966 by the American educator R. Orin
Cornett (1913-—__), and it has since been adapted for use in 56 languages (as of 1995).
»>sign language; speech reading.

cuneiform /'kju:nif>:m/ An ancient writing system using wedge-shaped characters.

The name derives from Latin cuneus ‘wedge’, and refers to the technique used to
make the symbols. A stylus was pressed into.a tablet of soft clay to make a sequence
of short straight strokes. The strokes are thicker at the top and to the left, reflecting
the direction of writing. At first, symbols were written from top to bottom; later
they were turned on their sides, and written from left to right. The system dates
from the 4th millennium Bc, and was used for over 3000 years throughout the Near
East in a wide range of languages. Decipherment of these languages began only in
the 19th century. »>writing; p. 77.

curly brackets >brackets.

76
 cuneiform

Pictogram Original or
Original in position Early derived
pictogram of later Babylonian Assyrian meaning
cuneiform

: Ox
pictogram
ia cor romeo

to plough
to till

boomerang
to throw
to throw down

to stand
to go

Examples of Sumerian pictograms and their meanings, seen in relation to later

cuneiform developments. The signs were later rotated 90° anticlockwise, to
facilitate writing, and thus lost their immediate pictorial recognizability. Two
stages of cuneiform representation are shown.

TR
cursive

cursive A form of handwriting in which the separate characters in a sequence have

been joined together in a series of rounded, flowing strokes, promoting ease and
speed; called informally (especially by children), ‘joined-up writing’. It is found in
general use from around the 4th century ap, and in time replaced uncial and
half-uncial writing as a handwriting norm. »uncial.

Cushitic /ko'fittk/ A branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of c.50 languages, spoken by

c.24 million people in Ethiopia and nearby areas to the south and east. Galla,
Somali, and Beja are the most widespread languages. A western group of languages
is sometimes classified separately as Omotic. »»Afro-Asiatic; Omotic; Oromo; Somali.

CV An abbreviation of consonant-vowel (when talking about sequences of sounds

in syllables), often expanded to CVC, CVCC, etc.; also, an abbreviation of cardinal
vowel.

cypher >cipher.

Cyprus (population in 1995 estimated at 600,000) The official languages are Greek
(in the Greek part of the island) and Turkish (in the Turkish part) —c.77% and c.18%
of the population, respectively. There are also several thousand speakers of Arabic,
Armenian, and Syriac. English is the language used for international trade and
tourism. »»Greek; Turkish.

Cyrillic /si'rlik/ An alphabet devised by Saints Cyril and Methodius in the 9th
century AD for Eastern Orthodox Slavic speakers. Derived from the Greek uncial
script, it came to be used (in various adaptations) for Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian,
and several languages which fell under the influence of the Soviet Union during the
20th century (e.g. Ukrainian). »>alphabet; Glagolitic; Russian; Slavic; uncial.

Czech A member of the West Slavic group of languages, spoken by c.12 million
people chiefly in the Czech Republic, where it is the official language, and also in
nearby parts of adjoining countries, the USA (c.1.5 million), and Canada. It is very
closely related to Slovak (with which it is largely mutually intelligible). Written in
the Roman alphabet, traces of the language can be found in 11th century texts in
Old Church Slavonic. The standard language became established in the 16th century,
based on the Prague dialect. »Czech Republic; Slavic; Slovak.

Czech Republic, formerly (to 1992) part of Czechoslovakia (population in 1995

estimated at 10,411,000) The official language is Czech, spoken by over 96% of
the population. Other languages include German (both Bavarian and standard,
c.200,000), Polish (c,50,000), and Romani (perhaps 150,000). English, German, and
Russian are all used for international purposes. »»Czech.

78
 D
D An abbreviation of determiner.

DA An abbreviation of discourse analysis.

dacty] /'daktil/ >foot.

dactylology /daktr'lvladi:/ >finger spelling.

DAF An abbreviation of delayed auditory feedback ( >feedback 2).

Dagestanian >Nakho-Dagestanian.

dagger >obelisk.

Dalmatian >Romance.

dangling participle The use of a participle, or a phrase introduced by a participle,

which has an unclear or ambiguous relationship to the rest of the sentence; also
called a misrelated participle. If taken literally, the sentence often appears non-
sensical or laughable: Driving along the street, a runaway dog gave John a fright. To
avoid such inadvertent effects, manuals of style recommend that such sentences be
rephrased, with the participial construction moved or replaced, as in When John was
driving along the street, a runaway dog gave him a fright. »>participle.

Danish A North Germanic language, a memberof the East Scandinavian group,

spoken by over 5 million people in Denmark, and also by the inhabitants of the
Faeroe Islands and Greenland, where it is an official language (alongside Faeroese
and Greenlandic Eskimo, respectively), in north Germany, and through emigration
to the USA and Canada (a further c.300,000). The earliest traces of the language are
runic inscriptions from the 3rd century. Danish began to emerge from common Old
Norse in the 12th century, and literary texts date from a century later. It is written
in the Roman alphabet. The political power of Denmark from the Middle Ages led
to Danish being used as an official language in Norway for several hundred years, and
its influence on all the Scandinavian languages is apparent. » Denmark; Norwegian;
rune; Scandinavian.

Dardic /‘da:dik/ A group of Indo-Iranian languages spoken in Pakistan, Kashmir,

and Afghanistan. They are sometimes seen as a separate branch of Indo-Iranian,
and sometimes placed within the Indo-Aryan branch (Northwestern group). The
languages include Khowari, Kafiri, and Kashmiri. »>Indo-Iranian; Kashmiri.

79
Dari

Dari /‘da:ri:/ >Afghanistan; Persian.

dark I >clear /.
dash A punctuation mark which typically signals an included unit — such as this
one - especially in informal writing. A single dash may also precede an afterthought
at the end of a sentence, and be used as a sign that a construction is incomplete.
>> punctuation.

dative case One of the ways in which inflected languages make a word change its
form, in order to show a grammatical relationship with other words in the sentence.
The dative mainly affects nouns, along with related words (such as adjectives and
pronouns), and signals a range of meanings typically expressed in English by the
prepositions to or for— for example, Latin civi is the dative of civis ‘citizen’, and would
be translated as ‘to/for the citizen’. »>case; inflection 1; object; recipient.

daughter language >family of languages.

dB The symbol for decibel.

dead language A language which is no longer used as a natural daily means of

spoken communication within a community; contrasts with living language.
Latin is a dead language, in this sense, despite its continued use as an official language
by the Roman Catholic Church. Attempts may be made to bring a dead language
back to life, as in the case of Cornish and Manx, which both have enthusiastic groups
of supporters. »Cornish; Hebrew; language death; Latin; Manx.

deafness Loss of the ability to hear, for whatever reason. In practice, total deafness
(anacusis) is unusual, and more use is made of a scale of classification which
recognizes levels of hearimg loss. Six levels are often used: slight (a loss of up to 25
dB), mild (a loss of between 25 and 40 dB), moderate (a loss of between 40 and 55
dB), moderately severe (a loss of between 55 and 70 dB), severe (a loss of between
70 and 90. dB), and profound (a loss of over 90 dB). With a profound loss, a person
may hear some loud sounds, but these are perceived more as vibrations than as
speech patterns. If the hearing loss occurs before the normal development of speech
in the child, it is referred to as prelingual; if it occurs after speech has begun to
develop, it is postlingual. If sound fails to reach the cochlea, the hearing loss is
described as conductive; if the loss arises from within the cochlea itself, it is
described as sensorineural. »>decibel; sign language; speech reading.

decibel (dB) A unit for measuring the relative intensity of sounds, especially used
in the measurement of hearing loss. The term bel is named after Alexander Graham
Bell (1847-1922). »»deafness; p. 81.

decipher 1. To decode a writing system which is no longer in use and no longer

comprehensible. »hieroglyphic. 2. To work out the meaning of a message in code
— especially one in cipher. »>cipher.

80
 decreolization

(a) (b)
0 threshold of audibility O29 re 23 SP S20 NETS HOLO
10 rustle of leaves D228 S22 a1 O78 12) obs :8
20 ticking of watch (at ear); radio ar26 un 22-18 ssiel2sid 28
studio i 268i, (Z2.omel Fate WS <p. 1.7
30 quiet garden; whispered Su252W 21h Pp
iemgaLh faz.
conversation au 24 ate 20itnel Sy, kei tle 10200
40 residential area, no traffic vu 24 j; 20 &13 v 10
50 quiet office; typewriter
60 conversation at 1 m; carat 10m
70 very busy city traffic at 30 m
75 telephone bell at 3 m; shouting
80 noisy tube train; loud radio music
90 pneumatic drill at 1m
100 car horn at 5 m; orchestra fortissimo
110 boilermakers’ shop
120 pneumatic hammer, 1 m; amplified
rock band
130 four-engined jet aircraft, 30 m
At around 120 dB, the sensation of
hearing is replaced by that of pain.

Measurement in decibels. In (a) the relative intensity of different kinds of

speech can be seen by relating them to the average intensities of some everyday
sounds. In (b) the values of English sounds, expressed in decibels, are related
to the sound with the lowest intensity, [6], as in thin.

declarative /diklarativ/ Descriptive of a verb form or a type of sentence or clause

which is typically used in the expression of a statement - that is, a ‘declaration’ that
something is or is not the case. Most of the sentences in this book are declarative. A
contrast is intended with other types of utterance, primarily question and command.
»>interrogative; statement.

declension In an inflecting language, a set of nouns, adjectives, or pronouns that

share the same set of endings. In Latin, for example, the ‘first declension’ refers to
nouns whose endings are -a, -am and -ae, in the various cases in the singular (e.g.
insula ‘island’, poeta ‘poet’). There are a further four declensions with different types
of ending, as well as several nouns which decline in an irregular way. >>case;
conjugation; inflection 1; Latin; noun.

decode >code 1, 2.

deconstruction >logocentrism.

decreolization >creole.

81
deep structure

deep structure In transformational grammar, the abstract or underlying syntactic

representation of a sentence, specifying the factors which govern its interpretation;
also called deep grammar; contrasts with surface structure. For example, the
deep structure common to both active and passive sentences (Mary kicked the ball
vs. The ball was kicked by Mary) would need to recognize an actor (‘Mary’), action
(‘kick’), and goal (‘ball’). The notion has been presented in several ways, and has
proved to be a controversial issue in the recent history of grammatical thought.
»>surface structure; transformation; underlying.

defective Descriptive of words which do not follow all the rules of the class to
which they belong. The English modal verbs, for example, are defective in that they
do not permit the usual range of verb endings: must, can, shall, etc. do not vary
(*musted, *cans, *shalling). »mood; word class.

defective speech >speech defect.

deficit hypothesis The view that some children, especially those belonging to an
ethnic minority or with a working-class background, lack a sufficiently wide range
of grammar and vocabulary to be able to express complex ideas, such as will be
needed for success in school. It is contrasted with the difference hypothesis -—
the view that.the language used by such children is simply different from that
found in middle-class children, though its social standing is lower. The difference
hypothesis views all dialects as intrinsically equal and able to express ideas.of any
complexity, though children who speak nonstandard dialects may not have had
the same kind of opportunity or motivation to use their language in demanding
educational contexts. »»educational linguistics; elaborated code; variety.

defining modification »>restrictiveness.

defining vocabulary A set of words used as part of the definition of other

words. The notion is found in such contexts as language teaching and dictionary
preparation. Some dictionaries ensure that every word used in a definition is itself
defined elsewhere in the book. »>lexicography.

definiteness A feature of noun phrases, allowing a contrast between an entity (or

class of entities) which is specific and identifiable (i.e. defimite) and one which is
not (indefinite or nondefinite). The contrast is generally conveyed through the
use of a definite vs. indefinite determiner, especially the definite and indefinite
article (English the/a). In. some languages (e.g. Hungarian), verbs can express a
contrast of definiteness, a verb agreeing with the definiteness of its direct object.
»>article; noun phrase.

degree A grammatical category which specifies the extent of a comparison between

adjectives or adverbs. A three-way contrast is usually recognized, distinguishing
positive from comparative from superlative, as in big/bigger/biggest
or interesting/

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 dental

more interesting/most interesting. Other types of comparative construction exist, such

as the equative, illustrated by as big as. »»adjective; adverb; comparative.
deixis /‘daiksis/ A grammatical category involving direct reference to the character-
istics of the situation where an utterance takes place; also referred to as indexicality.
The meaning of a deictic utterance is thus relative to the situation in which it is
used. For example, the interpretation of the pronouns J and you varies, depending
on who is doing the talking and who is being addressed. The location of the speaker
in time and place governs the interpretation of certain temporal and spatial adverbs,
such as today, tomorrow, here, and there. »adverb; pronoun.

delayed auditory feedback »feedback 2.

delayed language >language delay.
deletion The process of omitting a constituent from a construction. For example,
in order to explain the structure of the sentence The children sang and danced, we
can say that the subject of danced (which is also the children) has been deleted. Sounds,
too, are often deleted, especially in rapid speech (as in cup o’ tea). The notion has
been particularly used as part of the approach to-sentence analysis proposed by
transformational grammar. >>elision; ellipsis; transformation.

demonstrative A form whose chief function is to distinguish one item from other
members of the same class. In English, the chief demonstratives are this and that,
used alone (as pronouns) or with nouns (as determiners): Look at this/that and Look
at this/that book illustrate the two possibilities. »determiner; pronoun.
demotic /di'motik/ Descriptive of a style of language used for or by ordinary people;
usually contrasted with a hieratic style used for special (e.g. religious) purposes.
Examples include the simplified hieroglyphic of Ancient Egyptian, and the vernacu-
lar variety of Modern Greek (>hieroglyphic for an illustration). »»>diglossia; Egyp-
tian; Greek; Rosetta Stone.

denasal /di:'ne1zl/ Descriptive of a sound or voice quality whose nasality has been
reduced or removed. The notion is especially relevant as part of the description of
voice disorders, where several clinical conditions give rise to voices with poor nasal
resonance (such as adenoids). »>nasal; voice quality.
Denmark (population in 1995 estimated at 5,188,000) The official language is
Danish, spoken by almost everyone. Faeroese also has official status in the Faeroe
Islands, as does Greenlandic Eskimo in Greenland. German is an official regional
language in North Slesvig (Sydjylland), spoken by c.25,000. English is widely used
for international purposes and tourism. »»Danish; Eskimo; Faeroese.

denotation >connotation.
dental Descriptive of a consonant sound made by contact between the tongue tip
or blade and the upper incisor teeth, as in the pronunciation of /t/ and /d/ in French

83
dependent

or in certain dialects of English (e.g. Irish). Sounds made by the tongue tip between
the teeth, like the ‘th’ sounds of such words as this and thin, are sometimes distin-
guished as interdental. >»consonant; tongue.

dependent Descriptive of any element whose form or function is determined by

another part of the sentence. In the phrase the black book, for example, the article
and adjective both depend on the noun. In the sentence, She said she was going, the
clause she was going depends on the verb said, and may thus be described as a
dependent clause. »modification 1; qualification; subordination.

dependent clause »dependent; subordination.

deponent verb /di'paunent/ A term from traditional Latin grammar, used for verbs
which are passive in most of their forms, but active in meaning. Examples include
loquor ‘speak’ and. hortor ‘I exhort’. They are called ‘deponent’ because they have
‘put away’ (de + pono) some of their parts — in other words, the inflections associated
with the active voice, »»verb; voice 1.

derivation 1. A major type of word formation, in which a certain kind of affix (a

derivational affix) is used to form new words, as with happiness and unhappy from
happy, or determination from determine. A contrast is intended with the process of
inflection, which uses another kind of affix in order to form variants of the same
word, as with determine/determines/determining/determined. >>affix; inflection 1; mor-
phology. 2. In generative grammar, the structural history of a sentence — the formally
identifiable stages which need to be recognized in order to generate a sentence from
an initial symbol to a terminal string. »generative grammar. 3. The origins or
historical development of a language, or of a word or construction in a language.
»>etymology.

derivational morphology >morphology.

descender >ascender.

description A systematic, objective, and precise account of the patterns and use
of a specific language or variety. The aim of descriptive linguistics is to account
for the facts of linguistic usage as they are, in a particular language, and not as purist
critics or prescriptive grammarians imagine they ought to be. A descriptive grammar
(e.g. of English) may also be contrasted with a theoretical grammar, in which the
aim is to make statements about language as a whole. »»grammar 1; linguistics;
prescriptivism; purism.

descriptive grammar »>grammar 1.

det. An abbreviation of determiner.

determiner (D, det.) A grammatical element whose main role is to co-occur

with nouns to express such semantic notions as quantity, number, possession, and
definiteness; for example, the, a, this, some, my, much. These words ‘determine’ the

84
 diacritic

way in which the noun is to be interpreted — a car vs. the car vs. my car, etc. The term
is sometimes extended to include other types of word within the noun phrase (such
as adjectives). »>article; postdeterminer; predeterminer.
determinism, linguistic >Sapir—Whorf hypothesis.
Devanagari /devano'garri:/ An Indian alphabet used to write Sanskrit, Hindi, and
several other languages of the Indian subcontinent; also called Nagari. As the script
of Sanskrit literature (the name comes from the Sanskrit word deva ‘holy’), it became
the most widely used writing system in India. Its main visual feature is the use of a
horizontal line on the top of a letter, which forms a continuous line when writing
_text. The alphabet, which can be traced from the 7th century AD, uses 48 letters, and
is written from left to right. »»alphabet; Brahmi; Sanskrit; p. 86.

developmental aphasia/dysphasia >aphasia.

developmental language disorder >acquired language disorder.

developmental linguistics A branch of linguistics concerned with the study of

the acquisition of language in children - and, for some writers, with the continuing
development of language through adulthood and into old age. Because psychological
factors are so important in studying language acquisition, the subject is often called
developmental psycholinguistics. »acquired language disorder; linguistics;
psycholinguistics.

deviance Lack of conformity to the rules of a grammar. Deviant sentences are

conventionally marked with a preceding asterisk, as in *Some the cars were damaged.
The notion is used both with reference to language in general (applying to any
departure from linguistic norms by someone with normal language skills) and with
reference to pathological conditions (applying to linguistic symptoms which could
not be considered part of the usual developmental process). »>grammar 1; language
delay/disorder/pathology.
devoiced Descriptive of a sound in which the normal amount of vocal fold vibration
(‘voice’) has been reduced. In English, for example, voiced consonants at the end of
a word are generally devoiced, as in bib or did. »>voicing.
Dhivehi >Maldivian.

diachronic linguistics /dato'kronik/ The study of languages from the viewpoint

of their development through time; also called historical linguistics. Ferdinand
de Saussure introduced the contrast between this approach and that of synchronic
linguistics, where languages are studied at a theoretical single point in time,
disregarding whatever changes might be taking place within them. »>philology;
Saussure.

diacritic /data'kritik/ A mark added to a written symbol which alters the way it
should be pronounced. The mark may be placed over it, under it,before it, after it,

85
 (a) Brahmi script

Northern Indian Group Southern Indian Group

Kusan Gupta Grantha Kalinga Kadamba_ Central

CeLD Indian
hss 1
5 aie
Pali Sarada Nagari ames
x
\ Tamil Malayalam
XN !
ss Ul
x
Siamese Takri Devanagari Proto-Bengali Tibetan | Old Kanarese
Burmese , ak i
_
Kavi —< n
z Mongolian /
Kashmiri x) i
Bengali Y < Gujarati 1
Nandinagari Oriya~s. Manipuri i
‘ !
Gurmukhi Maithili Fee a Modern Telugu
TENS Kanarese
N

Sinhalese

(b)
Vowels Consonants

=
a gutturals
aAdda

<
x
3 .°) be 3;
palatals
si Se
semivowels

t (or ri)
y f (Corr)
S ! (or |i)
cerebrals
Z
, e ser
-Ooent
Oo
oS
|S) Hitaac
A
3)
Alol
aad

z ai
ott h(visarga)
° ‘m orm
a ?+a+ au fA)
|
Al
A
4!
FH
yt
AAA
AAA35aaQq
(anusvara)

* initial form of letters + medial form of letters

 dialectology

or through it. For example, in a phonetic transcription, the use of a small circle
under a symbol indicates that the sound in question has been devoiced. In an
alphabet, a diacritic used above a symbol is usually referred to as an accent. »»accent
3; caret; cedilla; dieresis; macron; transcription.

diaeresis >dieresis.

diagramming >parsing.

dialect A language variety in which the use of grammar and vocabulary identifies
the regional or social background of the user; the systematic study of dialects is
known as dialectology or dialect geography. A regional dialect conveys
information about the speaker’s geographical origin; a social dialect conveys
information about the speaker’s class, social status, educational background, occupa-
tion, or other such notions. Rural dialects are heard in the country; urban
dialects in the cities. The term is sometimes used in a pejorative way, as when
someone refers to the speech of a primitive or rural community as ‘just a dialect’.
In fact, everyone speaks a dialect, even those who use a standard variety of a language
(such as standard English — which is, technically, that dialect of English adopted
as the norm for educated use). »»accent 1; bidialectism; dialect atlas/continuum;
dialectometry; idiolect; isogloss; language 1; patois; standard; variety.

dialect atlas A map (orseries of maps) displaying dialect information within a geogra-
phical area; also knownasa linguistic atlas. The first such atlas, of German, appeared
in 1881, based on the analysis of over 50,000 questionnaires about local dialect use. The
Linguistic Atlas ofEngland appeared in 1978. Dialect surveys have now been carried out
in many countries, and their results summarized in atlas form. »>dialect; p. 88.

dialect continuum A chain of dialects spoken throughout an area; also called a

dialect chain. At any point in the chain, speakers of a dialect can understand the
speakers of other dialects who live adjacent to them; but people who live further
away may be difficult or impossible to understand. For example, an extensive con-
tinuum links the modern dialects of German and Dutch, running from Belgium
through the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria to Switzerland. »>dialect; mutual
intelligibility.

dialectology The study of dialects, especially regional dialects; also sometimes

known as dialect geography or linguistic geography, though these terms
usually suggest a much broader regional scope for the subject. In recent years,
dialectologists have increasingly begun to study other factors than the purely
regional, in order to explain linguistic variation (such as age, sex, and social class),

(Opposite) (a) The most important Brahmi-derived scripts of India. Devamagari is a

member of the northern group. (b) The Devanagari alphabet for Sanskrit, showing
the order devised by the ancient Indian grammarians. The colon (visarga) represents
weak aspiration; the dot (anusvara) represents nazalization.

87
dialectometry

A YOU ARE
(\ YE ARE
SCOTLAND M THOU ARE
THOU ART
THEE ART
© THOU IS
© YOU BE
YNDUNBWH—
© THEE BE
co ° YOU BIN
THEE BIST
v YOU AM

A map from a dialect atlas, the Linguistic Atlas of England (1978), showing
variation in the forms equivalent to standard English you are.

and these emphases are reflected in such terms as social (as opposed to regional)
dialectology, and urban dialectology. »>dialect; dialect atlas; geolinguistics.

dialectometry A statistical method of analysing dialects. It measures the ‘linguistic

distance’ between individual localities in a dialect region, based on the number of
contrasts found in a large sample of linguistic features. Some dialects emerge as very
closely related, while others diverge greatly. »>dialect.

88
 diglossia

dialogue >monologue.

dichotic listening /dai'kpttk/ A technique for determining which half of the brain
is primarily involved in processing auditory effects. Subjects wear headphones,
through which different sounds are presented to each ear. They are then asked to
say what they hear. Some sounds are heard better through the right ear (a right-ear
advantage), and some through the left (a left-ear advantage), suggesting that the
two hemispheres of the brain play different roles in the perception of speech. Vowels
and consonants, for example, seem to be mediated by the left hemisphere, in most
people, whereas the right hemisphere is also involved in aspects of intonation.
»» auditory phonetics; intonation; psycholinguistics; speech perception.

diction The effective choice of words. The notion is usually employed in describing
the vocabulary of a literary author, but any kind of writing can have its diction
evaluated — as indeed can the spoken language, where clarity of pronunciation
becomes an additional factor in achieving a particular effect. In traditional literary
analysis, the notion is often used to refer to a specifically poetic kind of vocabulary, as
illustrated by such words as nymph and slumber. »>stylistics.

dictionary >lexicography.

dieresis or diaeresis /dat'erasis/ A diacritic mark which indicates a change of vowel

quality; often called an umlaut, from its use to mark the fronted pronunciations
of certain vowels in German (e.g. schon ‘beautiful’). It is sometimes used in English
to mark the separate pronunciation of adjacent vowels, as in naive and codperate,
especially in American texts, but this usage seems to be dying out. »>diacritic.

difference hypothesis >deficit hypothesis.

diffusion The increased use of a language, or a feature of language (such as a sound

or word), in a given area over a period of time. The notion emphasizes the view that
change spreads gradually through a language, and not in an ‘across-the-board’
manner. Some speakers introduce a change into their speech before others; some
use it more frequently and consistently than others; and some words are affected
before others. »>language/sound change; variable.

diglossia /dar'glpsta/ A sociolinguistic situation where two very different varieties

of alanguage—sometimes two languages—co-occur throughout a speech community,
each performing an individual range of functions, and each having acquired some
degree of status as a standard. The varieties are usually described as high (H) and
low (L), corresponding broadly to a difference in formality. H is used in such
contexts as sermons, lectures, speeches, news broadcasts, and newspaper editorials,
and is learned in school. L is used in everyday conversation, radio soaps, folk
literature, and other informal contexts. Diglossic languages are widespread, and
include Arabic, Modern Greek, (Swiss) German, and the Dravidian family. A situation
where three varieties or languages are used with distinct functions within a com-

89
digraph

munity is called triglossia. An example is the use of French, Classical Arabic, and
Colloquial Tunisian Arabic in Tunisia, the first two being rated H and the last L.
»>Arabic; Bengali; Dravidian; formality; German; Greek; standard; variety.

digraph /‘daigraf/ 1. A graphic unit in which two symbols are combined to function
as a single element in a writing system. Digraphs such as z and ce were formerly
common in English, and are still used in the alphabets of some languages (e.g. Dutch,
Swedish), as well as in special contexts, such as the phonetic alphabet. »>graphology
1. 2. In the study of reading and spelling, any sequence of two letters pronounced
as a single sound (e.g. the first two letters of ship or the middle two letters of wool ).
»>trigraph.

dimeter >metrics.

diminutive A form, usually expressed by an affix, with the general meaning of

‘little’, such as Italian -ino, Greek -aki, or English -let (booklet, piglet). It may be used
either literally or metaphorically, often as a term of endearment. The term is usually
contrasted with augmentative, where the general meaning is ‘large’, often
implying awkwardness or ugliness, as in Italian -one. >>affix.

ding-dong theory The name of one of the speculative theories about the origins
of language; it argues that speech arose because people reacted to the stimuli in the
world around them, and spontaneously produced sounds (‘oral gestures’) which in
some way reflected the environment. The main evidence is the use of sound symbol-
ism (which is, however, very limited in a language). The theory has also been called
the ta-ta theory - a sceptical reference to the claim that the way the tongue moves
while saying the words ta-ta reflects the physical act of waving good-bye. »>origins
of language; sound symbolism. ji

Dinka A Nilotic language spoken by c.2 million people in southern Sudan; also
known as Jieng. It is written in the Roman alphabet. The Dinka are spread over a
very wide area in the Nile basin, and consequently there are many dialects, some of
which have been postulated as distinct languages. »>Nilotic.

diphthong /'dif6vn/ A vowel with a perceptible change of quality during a single

syllable. It may be represented by a single letter (my) or a sequence of letters (tie); in
the case of these words, the quality changes from a vowel of an [a] quality to one of
an [i] quality. Phonetic symbols for diphthongs represent the beginning and the
end of the vowel glide: [ai] in my, [ou] in go, etc. One element in the diphthong is
always more sonorous than the other: if this is the first element, the diphthong is
said to be ‘falling’ or ‘descending’; if the second, it is ‘rising’ or ‘ascending’. Other
classifications of diphthong types have also been made. The process of forming a
diphthong is diphthongization. »monophthong; triphthong; vowel.

diplomatics The study of legal and administrative documents. The name derives

90
 discrete

from Greek diploma ‘folded’. One of its main aims is the identification of genuine
documents as distinct from drafts, copies, and forgeries. »»writing.
directive An utterance whose purpose is to get other people to do something for
the speaker. The commonest method is to give a command, expressed either directly
(Sit down) or indirectly (I wonder if you’d kindly ...), but other formulations are
possible, such as a noun said with appropriate intonation (e.g. Window? - meaning,
‘Close it’). »command; imperative; speech act.

direct method A method of language teaching in which students speak only in

the target language in the classroom. The teacher communicates with the students
in as direct a way as possible, using mime, gestures, and other cues. The method
avoids the conscious learning of grammar, and leaves work on reading and writing
until after speaking and listening skills are well established. »>language teaching;
method; natural approach.
direct object >object.

direct speech The use of an actual utterance, without grammatical modification,

as part of a narrative, such as Hilary asked, ‘Is the car ready?’ (a direct question). The
term contrasts with indirect speech, also called reported speech, where the
words of the speaker are subordinated to a verb (of ‘saying’) in the main clause, and
several grammatical changes are introduced (such as in the use of tense forms):
Hilary asked if the car was ready (an indirect question). »quotation marks.
disambiguate >ambiguous.
discontinuous construction A construction which is split by the insertion of
another grammatical unit. Examples include the separation of the particle from the
verb in such cases as switch the light on, and the use of the two-part negative
construction in French ne... pas. »>syntax.

discourse analysis (DA) The study of continuous stretches of language longer

than a single sentence; also called discourse linguistics. It especially investigates
the organization of such general notions as conversations, arguments, narratives,
jokes, and speeches, looking out in particular for linguistic features which identify
the structure of the discourse (discourse markers), such as J mean to say or Well,
anyway. The term has been used to apply to both spoken and written language, but
some authors restrict it to speech, and deal with the structural organization of writing
under the heading of text. »connected speech; conversation analysis; monologue;
narrative; paragraph; text.
discrete Descriptive of linguistic elements which have clearly definable boundaries,
with no continuity between them. The units of a language’s consonant system (e.g.
[p] vs. [k]) are discrete. Features which do not have clear boundaries are said to be
nondiscrete, such as the variations in pitch height which comprise a language’s
intonation system. »>consonant; intonation.

91
disjunction

disjunction The relating of two propositions so that they are in an alternative or

contrastive relationship, as in (Either) I’m late or you're early, The either/or interpret-
ation may be inclusive (either or both of the propositions is true) or exclusive
(only one proposition is true). This distinction is often signalled by extra emphasis:
compare Would you like beans or peas? (‘You have the choice of both’) and Would
you like beans OR peas? (‘Choose one only’). »>correlative; proposition.

displacement A suggested defining property of human language, seen in contrast

with other systems of communication: language can be used to refer to contexts
removed from the immediate situation of the speaker (such as past and future time
reference). The meaning of animal signals, by contrast, is restricted to the setting in
which they are used; a hunger cry, for example, means that hunger is present ‘now’,
not yesterday or tomorrow. »communication; language 1.

dissimilation The influence exercised by one sound segment upon another, so

that the sounds become less alike; contrasts with assimilation. The effects are
often seen in the history of a language, such as the change from /1/ to /I/ in the
derivation of the word pilgrim from Latin peregrinus. »>assimilation; sound change.

dissonance >consonance.

distinctive Descriptive of any feature which enables a contrast to be made between

linguistic units; distinctive contrasts are also called functional or significant.
The main use of the term has been in phonology, where distinctive features
(such as voicing, tongue height, lip rounding) are the smallest contrastive units
proposed to explain how the sound system of a language is organized. »>contrast;
phonological feature theory.

distribution The total set of linguistic contexts in which a unit can occur. A
distributional analysis plots the places in larger linguistic units in which smaller
units appear, such as the distribution of sounds within a word, or the distribution
of words within a phrase. In English, for example, the sound ng [n] is used at the end
and in the middle of words (sing, banger), but not at the beginning. »complementary
distribution; context 1; phonotactics.

disyllable /di'silabl/ A linguistic unit (typically a word) consisting of two syllables.

Unit, bottle, and seven are disyllabic words. »>syllable.

ditransitive Descriptive of a verb which can take both a direct and an indirect
object (e.g. give). A contrast is drawn with monotransitive verbs, which take only
one object. »>object; transitivity.

Divehi >Maldivian.
divergence >convergence.
Djibouti (population in 1995 estimated at 607,000) The official languages are
French (spoken by c.3% of the population) and Arabic (c.11%). Two of the local

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 Dravidian

languages — Afar (Danakil, c.55%) and Somali (c.33%) — are used on the radio. French
is the language mainly used for international purposes. »»Arabic; French.
DO An abbreviation of direct object.
Dolomitic /dola'mitik/ »Rhaetian.

Dominica (population in 1995 estimated at 83,900) The official language is

English. Over 96% of the population speak a French-based creole (Patwa), widely
used throughout the Lesser Antilles. »>creole; English; Patwa.
Dominican Republic (population in 1995 estimated at 7,994,000) The official
language is Spanish, spoken by c.87% of the population. About 2% speak Haitian
Creole French, and there are a few thousand speakers of an English-based creole
(Samana). English is increasingly used for international purposes, along with Spanish.
»>creole; Spanish.

dorsal Descriptive of any sound made with the back (‘dorsum’) of the tongue in
contact with the roof of the mouth. Examples include [k] and [g]. »>tongue.

double articulation >duality of structure.

double negative A construction in which more than one negative word is used
within the same clause. The two negative words do not cancel each other out (as
negative signs do in mathematics), but simply add emphasis. This kind of construc-
tion is common in many languages. French uses a double negative construction (ne
... pas), as do many dialects of English. However, standard English condemns the
construction as uneducated, and eliminating the use of the double negative (such
as I didn’t give him nothing) is one of the chief targets of prescriptive approaches to
English grammar. »>negation; prescriptivism.

Doublespeak Awards »>Plain English Campaign.

doublet_1. A pair of different words in a language which have a common origin
and display similarities of form and meaning (e.g. wine/vine, poison/potion). >>etymol-
ogy. 2. A type of word game in which a series of single-letter substitutions links
pairs of words. The challenge is to carry out this task in as few steps as possible. The
game was invented by Lewis Carroll, who gave as one of his first examples, Drive
PIG into STY. His solution involved five steps: PIG-WIG-WAG-WAY-SAY-STY.
>»>word game.

Dravidian A family of over 25 languages, most of which are found close together
in the southern and eastern areas of India, and now widely represented in south-east
Asia, Africa, and the Pacific through emigration. There is little agreement about the
origins of the family, with some scholars arguing for a movement to the area from
Asia, others for a movement from lands to the south, now submerged. There is
evidence that Dravidian languages were formerly spoken in the north of India, being
displaced by the arrival of the Indo-European invaders. The main languages are

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Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, each of which is identified with a state in
southern India. Other languages include Gondhi, Kurukhi, Tulu, Kui, Malto (an
isolated language in the north-east), and Brahui (curiously isolated 1000 miles away
from the rest of the family, in the north of Pakistan). Distinctive Dravidian features
include the widespread use of retroflex consonants, and a sociolinguistic situation
of diglossia. Speakers of Dravidian languages total over 160 million. Several other
languages have been proposed as belonging to the family. »>diglossia; Kannada;
Malayalam; retroflex; Tamil; Telugu.

drill In language teaching, the use of guided repetition to instil a particular aspect
of language in a learner; when practising a grammatical construction, often called
a pattern drill. Three main types of drill are common: an imitation technique, in
which the student repeats the stimulus sentence without changing anything; a
substitution technique, in which the student has to replace a target word in the
stimulus sentence; and a transformational technique, where the student has to
change the construction into a related form (e.g. statement into question). »>langu-
age teaching; method.

drum language The use ofa drum to simulate selected features of speech (primarily,
tones and rhythms). The signals consist mainly of short, formulaic utterances, but
are used to build up quite elaborate systems of communication, especially in Africa.
Drum signalling is used both within villages (e.g. in summoning people, controlling
meetings) and between communities. »>speech surrogate.

dual A grammatical contrast of number in some languages (e.g. Eskimo, Old English),
referring to ‘two of’, and contrasting with singular (‘one of’) and plural (‘more than
two’). Some languages (e.g. some Australian languages) have a trial category (‘three
of’). »number.

dual alphabet >majuscule.

duality of structure A suggested defining property of human language, which

sees language as structurally organized into two abstract levels; also called double
articulation. At one level, language is analysed into combinations of meaningful
units (such as words and sentences); at the other level, it is analysed as a sequence
of phonological segments which lack meaning. Facial expression, body gesture, and
animal systems of communication are said to lack duality of structure. »>language
1; zodsemiotics.

duration The length of time involved in the articulation of a sound or syllable.

Vowels, for example, may be long (as in car) or short (as in cat). Consonants in
some languages (e.g. Hungarian) may also contrast in duration. Some sounds are
intrinsically short (e.g. a flapped r, as in very), whereas others can be held for varying
periods of time (e.g. fricatives and trills). »consonant; length; syllable; vowel.

durative In the grammatical analysis of aspect, descriptive of a category expressing

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 dyslexia

an event which involves a period of time; contrasts with nondurative or punctual,

where there is no duration implied. Some verbs are essentially durative in character
(e.g. grow); others are essentially punctual (e.g. kick). »»aspect; verb.

Dutch A West Germanic language spoken by c.20 million people, chiefly in The
Netherlands (14 million) and Belgium (5 million), with others in a small adjacent
area of north-east France, in Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles (where it has
official status), and by immigrants in several other countries. In Belgium, the language
is called Flemish and is the official language in the northern part of the country.
The Flemish/French language issue continues to divide the Belgian population.
There is very little structural difference with the language spoken in The Netherlands,
and the name Netherlandic has been proposed as a single term for all varieties of
the language. Dutch is written in the Roman alphabet, and texts date from the end
of the 12th century. »>Afrikaans; Belgium; Germanic; Netherlands, The.

dynamic linguistics The study of language variation in terms of the processes of

change which give rise to it. The term ‘dynamic’ refers to the way a particular
linguistic feature moves throughout a speech community in different directions at
different rates, being affected by such factors as the age, sex, class, and occupation
of the speakers. »>linguistics; variable.

dynamic verb A type of verb which typically occurs in the progressive form and
in the imperative, and which expresses such meanings as activity, process, and
bodily sensation (e.g. run, kick, change). A contrast is drawn with stative verbs (also
called static or state verbs), which do not usually occur in the progressive nor in
the imperative, and which express a state of affairs rather than an action (e.g. know,
seem, suppose). Thus, we may say They are running and Run!, but not *They are seeming
and *Seem!. »>imperative; progressive; verb.

dysarthria /dis'a:6112/ A motor speech disorder which leaves someone unable to

articulate speech sounds, caused by an impairment in the nervous system; in severe
form, sometimes called anarthria. The disorder may affect any part of the vocal
tract, and any aspects of speech sound production can be impaired. »language
pathology.

dysfluency The loss of ability to control the smooth flow of speech production,
resulting in hesitancy, poor rhythm, and stuttering; also called nonfluency. >>flu-
ency; stuttering.

dysgraphia /dis'grafia/ >dyslexia.

dyslexia A serious disturbance in the ability to read. The term is used both for
literate adults who lose their reading ability after brain injury (aquired dyslexia),
and for children who encounter special difficulties as they try to learn to read, in
the absence of evident brain injury (developmental dyslexia). The term alexia
replaces dyslexia in many (especially American) studies, and from time to time

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dysnomia

several other terms have been used for the condition, such as ‘word blindness’.
Several types of dyslexia are now recognized. A commonly associated disorder is
dysgraphia (or agraphia), a disturbance in the normal ability to write. »>>language
pathology; literacy.

dysnomia /dis'noumie/ >anomia.

dysphasia /dis'fe1za/ >aphasia.
dysphasic children >language delay.
dysphemism /'disfamizm/ The use of an offensive or disparaging expression instead
of a neutral or pleasant one. Examples include mug for face, and boneshaker for car.
»>euphemism.
dysphonia /dis'faunia/ The loss of ability to use the vocal folds to produce normal
voice; also, especially in severe form, called aphonia. The term is chiefly used in
speech therapy. »>language pathology; voice disorder.
dyspraxia /dis'praksia/ >apraxia.
dysprosody /dis'prosadi:/ The loss of ability to produce speech with a normal
intonation, loudness, and rhythm. Rhythmical difficulty is often labelled separately
as dysrhythmia. Both terms are used mainly in clinical linguistic contexts. »>langu-
age pathology; prosody; rhythm.
dysrhythmia >dysprosody.
Dyula or Jula /‘dju:la/_ A Mande language spoken by c.1 million people in the
Céte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and parts of Mali and Ghana, with over 3 million
second-language users. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Mande.

Dzongkha or Dzongka /'dzpnks/ A member of the Tibeto-Burman group of

Sino-Tibetan languages, spoken by c.400,000 people chiefly in Bhutan (where it is
the official language); also called Bhutani or Bhutanese. It is written in the
Dzongkha alphabet. »>Bhutan.

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E
EAP »>English for Special Purposes.

ear training A technique in phonetics which trains aspiring phoneticians to

discriminate and identify the whole range of human speech sounds. It is usually
complemented by training in performance - the controlled movement of the
vocal organs to produce any of these sounds. »»auditory phonetics; cartoon below.

Easter Island »>Chile.

Ebonics /i:'boniks/ The name given to African-American Vernacular English when

given the status of a language distinct from standard English; derived from ebony
and phonics. Although the name was coined as long ago as 1973, it did not become

Scuwaornn

‘can try to pronounce your illness, Mrs Creedmore, but I would highly recommend
your getting a second opinion.’

oF
echo

widely known until December 1996, when the local school board in Oakland,
California, concerned about the low level of achievement among the African-
American children in its care, and anxious to increase the respect for the language
the children used at home, decided to give the variety official status — the first school
district in the USA to do so. The decision proved to be enormously controversial
— among both black and white populations - and was dropped a month later.
»> African-American Vernacular English.

echo A type of sentence which repeats, in whole or in part, what has just been said
by another speaker; also called an echo utterance. An example is the following
sequence: A: I told him he was fired. B: You told him he was what?’ (an instance of an
echo question). »>question.
echolalia /ekau'letlia/ The automatic repetition of all or part of what someone has
said. It is often heard at an early stage of normal language development, and is also
a symptom of certain language disorders, especially those in which comprehension
is poor. The meaning of the speech is usually not apparent to the speaker —a situation
which distinguishes echolalia from the controlled, contrastive focus of other kinds
of echo utterance. »>echo; language pathology.

ecolinguistics An emphasis within language study — reflecting the notion of ecology

in biological studies - in which the interaction between language and the cultural
environment is seen as central; also called the ecology of language, ecological
linguistics, and sometimes green linguistics. An ecolinguistic approach high-
lights the value of linguistic diversity in the world, the importance of individual
and community linguistic rights, and the role of language attitudes, awareness,
variation, and change in fostering a culture of communicative peace. »»endangered
languages; peace linguistics; Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights.

Ecuador (population in 1995 estimated at 11,423,000) The official language is

Spanish, spoken by c.80% of the population. Quechua is spoken in several varieties
by c.15%. About 10 other Amerindian languages are spoken by small numbers. There
is some use of English for international purposes. »»Spanish.
-ed form An abbreviated way of referring to the simple past tense form of verbs in
English. The addition of an -ed ending to the present tense is the commonest way
of making this form (walked, jumped), but the term is used for all past tense forms,
whether they are regular or not (e.g. took, went). »>past tense; verb.
educational linguistics The application of linguistics to the teaching and learning
of a native language, in both spoken and written form, in schools and other edu-
cational settings; also called pedagogical linguistics. It thus includes the study
of the various problems associated with literacy, as well as more advanced topics in
grammar, vocabulary, stylistic appreciation, and language use. In a broader sense,
the subject deals with the application of linguistics to all contexts of teaching, such
as the way language is used in scientific texts and materials, or the nature of the

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dialogue between teachers and students. »»deficit hypothesis; knowledge about

language; language in use; linguistics; literacy; oracy; parsing.

Efik /‘efik/ A language spoken in the Cross River area of southern Nigeria by c.400,000
people. A non-Bantu member of the Benue-Congo family, it became a literary
language in the 19th century, written in the Roman alphabet, and a local lingua
franca (c.2 million speakers). The Efik belong to the Ibibio group of peoples, and the
language is closely related to Ibibio (c.3 million speakers). »»Benue-Congo; lingua
franca.

EFL >Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

egocentric speech Speech which does not take into account the needs of the
listener, but is used for such purposes as self-expression and language play. The
notion was introduced by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) as part of a
basic classification of types of speech observed in young children; it contrasts with
the socialized speech which is used for communication with others. »acquisition.

EGP >English for Special Purposes.

egressive /i:'gresiv/ Descriptive of a speech sound produced using an outward-

moving airstream, which is the norm for speech production; it contrasts with
ingressive, where the air moves towards the lungs (heard, for example, when people
try to speak while out of breath). A few speech sounds in some languages make use
of ingressive air. »>glottalic; pulmonic; velaric.

Egypt (population in 1995 estimated at 60,284,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken by most of the population. Several varieties of colloquial Arabic are in use.
Other languages include Domari (a Gypsy language, spoken by perhaps half of the
c.1 million Muslim Gypsies in the country), Armenian, Greek, and Nile Nubian.
Coptic has a restricted, liturgical use. English is increasingly used for international
trade and tourism. »»Arabic; Coptic.

Egyptian A branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages, formerly spoken

throughout the Nile Valley. Its history dates from before the 3rd millennium Bc,
preserved in many hieroglyphic inscriptions and papyrus manuscripts. Five periods
in the history of the language are distinguished: Old Egyptian (c.3000-c.2200 Bc),
Middle Egyptian (c.2200-c.1600 Bc, regarded as the classical period of the language),
Late Egyptian (c.1500-c.700 Bc), Demotic (c.700 Bc-c.aD 400), and Coptic (from the
2nd century AD). Egyptian was originally written in hieroglyphic, and developed
both a hieratic form, used mainly for religious texts, and a demotic form, used for
everyday purposes. Coptic, the final stage of development in the language, was
employed mainly for Christian religious writing. It used a modified Greek alphabet,
and introduced a great deal of Greek vocabulary. Its latest texts date from the 14th
century, but the language is still in ritual use by Coptic Christians in their liturgy.
»>Afro-Asiatic; demotic; hieroglyphic.

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Eire

Eire >Ireland.

ejective /i'djektrv/ A type of consonant produced with the glottalic airstream

mechanism. A closure is made in the vocal tract while the vocal folds are brought
together, impounding the air. The closed glottis is then elevated, increasing the air
pressure. When the closure is released, an egressive airstream is produced, which
can be used to make a wide range of sounds, such as ejective (also called ‘glottalized’)
stops. Ejective sounds are transcribed with a following apostrophe: [p’], [f’], etc.
»>consonant; egressive; glottalic.

elaborated code A relatively formal, educated use of language, involving a com-

paratively wide range of linguistic structures; contrasts with the notion of restricted
code, which displays a limited range of structures. The concepts, associated chiefly
with the work of British sociologist Basil Bernstein (1924- ), are part of an expla-
nation of how a society’s distribution of power can shape modes of communication
which carry the cultures of different social classes and that of the school, and so
reproduce unequal educational advantages. Restricted codes arise where meanings
are particular to a local context, and the need to make meanings explicit is reduced
because of shared understandings, values, and identifications. By contrast, the forms
of elaborated codes arise out of social relations where less is taken for granted,
and so where explicitness is more likely to be demanded. The theory asserts that
middle-class children have access to both of these codes, whereas lower-working-class
children are more likely to be initially limited to a restricted code, and to experience
difficulty in acquiring the form of the elaborated code required by the school. »>code
3; variety.

Elamite /‘i:lamart/ A language spoken in the ancient country of Elam (Khuzistan,

south-west Iran). The oldest writings are pictographic inscriptions from the 3rd
millennium sc. Later writing is in cuneiform script. The language was still in use at
the end of the 1st millennium sc. No clear relationship exists with other languages.
>»>cuneiform; isolate; pictograph.

electroaerometer >aerometry.

electrokymograph /ilektrau'kaimagraf/ An instrument which records changes in

the air flow from mouth and nose during speech, in the form of traces on paper
(kymograms); also called a kymograph. It was an important tool in the early
days of instrumental phonetics. »experimental phonetics.

electrolaryngograph /tlektravla'rm gougraf/ >larynx.

electromyograph /ilektrau'matograf/ An instrument which records muscular con-

tractions during speech. The technique uses electrodes which are applied to the
muscles in the vocal tract, and the results are recorded as visual traces (electromyo-
grams). »>experimental phonetics; speech production.
electropalatograph /tlektrau'palataugraf/ An instrument which records the con-

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 elicitation

Computer printout of electropalatographic data showing patterns of

tongue contact (represented as zeros) from the release of the [p] to the first
part of the [s] in the word pigsty. A phonemic transcription is included on the
right of the printout to aid segmentation.

tacts made between the tongue and the palate during speech. The technique uses
an artificial palate containing electrodes which register an articulatory contact as it
is made. The results are presented visually (e.g. on acomputer screen) as electropala-
tograms. »>palate; phonetics; speech production.
elicitation A method of obtaining reliable linguistic data from native speakers —
either utterances, or judgements about utterances (e.g. whether they are acceptable);
also called direct elicitation. A great deal of effort is devoted to obtaining this

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elision

information in an indirect and unselfconscious manner, so that informants do not

provide artificial or misleading data. »informant.
elision The omission of sounds, syllables, or words in connected speech, as shown
in such forms as Febr’y, y’know, and cup o’ tea; contrasts with intrusion. Elision is
a normal and unavoidable feature of informal discourse, though it is condemned as
‘lazy’ speech by purist critics. Some elisions may be standard usage, e.g. French j’ai
(‘I have’). »>apocope; assimilation; purism; syncope.

ellipsis A sentence where part of the structure has been omitted, for reasons of
economy, emphasis, or style; also sometimes called reduction, contraction, or
abbreviation. Typically, the omitted element can be recovered from a scrutiny of
the context (and some grammatical approaches insist that this must be possible): A
Where are you going? B: Town (where the ellipted utterance is ‘I am going to’). Using
this criterion, a sentence such as Thanks would not be a clear example of ellipsis, as
it is unclear what other words have been omitted. »>syntax.

elocution The art of speech training to produce effective public speaking, practised
since ancient times (originally as part of rhetoric). It was a fashionable activity in
Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it became strongly associated with the
achievement of excellence in the use of a single accent, Received Pronunciation,
other accents being criticized as inferior or ugly by comparison. In recent years,
elocution has fallen somewhat out of fashion, as a result of people adopting a
more tolerant and egalitarian attitude towards regional accents. However, there are
contemporary signs of a revival of interest, with a fresh focus on the need for
effectiveness and clarity, whichever accent is employed. »>rhetoric.
El Salvador (population in 1995 estimated at 5,811,000) The official language is
Spanish, used by almost everyone. There are a few thousand speakers of Quekchi,
but other Amerindian languages have almost all died out. English is increasingly
used for international purposes, along with Spanish. »»Spanish.

ELT An abbreviation of English Language Teaching.

embedding In generative grammar, the process or result of including one sentence

within another. The sentence I went to the shop can be embedded within the sentence
The shop was open by turning it into a relative clause within the noun phrase: The
shop which I went to was open. »>generative grammar.

EmergencySpeak »>Seaspeak.

emic vs. etic /'i:mik, 'ettk/ Terms which characterize contrasting approaches to the
study of linguistic data. An etic approach is one where the physical patterns of
language are described with a minimum of reference to their function within the
language system. An emic approach takes full account of functional relationships,
setting up systems of contrastive units. In studying intonation, for example, an etic
approach would describe a very large number of rises and falls in pitch, whereas an

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emic approach would propose a small number of basic contrasts, such as ‘low rising’,
‘high falling’, and ‘level’. »intonation; phonetics; phonology.
emotive language Language whose primary function is the expression of emotion;
also called expressive language. The clearest case is the use of swearing or obscenity
as a means of getting rid of nervous energy when people are under stress. Other
emotive utterances include involuntary responses to beautiful art or scenery,
expressions of fear or affection, and the outpourings found in a great deal of poetry.
»> figurative/taboo language.

empty word >grammatical word.

encipher >cipher.
enclitic /en'klitik/ An unstressed form attached to a preceding word (e.g. cannot).
Enclitics are common in informal speech, and this is occasionally reflected in writing,
as in cuppa (‘cup of’) and pinta (‘pint of ’). There is a contrast with proclitic, where
the unstressed form depends on and is pronounced with the following word: an
example is English indefinite article an, used before words begining with a vowel.
»>clitic; stress.

encode >code 1, 2.

endangered languages Languages which are at risk of becoming extinct within

the foreseeable future. As a result of increased survey information during the 1980s,
it is now thought that over half the world’s languages are moribund — not being
effectively passed on to the next generation. The 1990s, accordingly, saw a significant
growth in international professional linguistic concern, including the formation of
national and international organizations devoted to gathering data, developing
international policies, raising public awareness, and promoting means of improving
the documentation of endangered languages. In particular, efforts were being made
to draw public attention to the irreparable loss of knowledge for the human race
which takes place when an unrecorded language dies. AUNESCO-sponsored clear-
ing-house was established at the University of Tokyo in 1995, and other important
bodies established at around that time include the Foundation for Endangered
Languages in the UK and the Endangered Languages Fund in the USA. Although
these organizations recognize that it is impossible to stem the global forces which
are at the root of language decline and loss, and that it is too late to do a great deal
in many cases, their aim is to work as much as is practicable with endangered
communities to provide support for their languages (e.g. through the provision of
literacy programmes), and to try to lessen the damage by recording as much as
possible of those languages which are in terminal decline. It is an expensive task,
however, and the amount that can be done will very largely depend on the money
which will become available through private and public fund-raising. »>ecolinguist-
ics; language death/maintenance/planning/shift; Universal Declaration of Linguistic
Rights.

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endearment, terms of

endearment, terms of Forms of address used between people who mutually

perceive their relationship to be one of intimacy (e.g. love, dear, honey, darling, mate).
These forms can also be used in an asymmetrical way, when one participant uses
them and the other does not. This happens, for example, in service encounters, such
as when a customer treats a clerk in a familiar manner by using one of these labels
(or, of course, the other way round). Whether the result is viewed by each participant
as friendliness, condescension, or some other attitude is not always predictable.
»>address, forms of.

end matter The material which is placed at the end of a book, following the text
proper; it includes appendices, bibliographies, and indexes. A contrast is drawn with
the front matter or prelims — containing the title page, contents list, preface,
and other preliminary information. The prelims are often numbered separately (in
Roman numerals). »>typography.

endocentric construction A group of syntactically related words where one word

can be shown to be the most important (the head), governing the way the group
works in the sentence. In the sentence The three red cars are expensive, cars is the head
of the noun phrase, its plural form forcing the selection of a plural verb (are). Other
words in the noun phrase are subordinate to the head in various ways. A contrast is
drawn with an exocentric construction, where no single word can be identified
as the head: in a subject-predicate construction, for example (such as She asked),
neither element can be seen as the head of the sentence as a whole. »>modification
1; phrase; syntax.

endoglossic /endav'glosik/ Descriptive of a language which is the native language

of most (or all) of the population in a geographical area; contrasts with exoglossic.
English, for example, is endoglossic for Australia and England, but not for Québec
or Singapore. >»>geolinguistics.

endophora /en'dpfera/ The relationships of cohesion which help to define the

structure ofa text, usually classified into anaphora (items which refer in a backward
direction) and cataphora (items which refer in a forward direction). A contrast is
drawn with exophora, where the interpretation requires reference to the extralin-
guistic situation: the meaning of that in Look at that requires a knowledge of what
is going on in the real world, and not of other words in the previous or subsequent
discourse. »>anaphora; cohesion.

-en form An abbreviated way of referring to the past participle form of the English
verb, which often ends in the suffix -en (e.g. taken, stolen). The term is used for all
past participle forms, whether regular or not; thus, gone, dealt, and walked (as in I
have walked) can all be described in this way. >>participle; verb.

England >United Kingdom.

English A Germanic language which has come to be spoken worldwide by a large

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 English as an International Language

and ever-increasing number of people — 1,000,000,000 by a conservative estimate,

1,500,000,000 by a liberal estimate. Some 400,000,000 use the language as a mother
tongue, chiefly in the USA (c.227 million), the UK (c.57 million), Canada (c.20
million), Australia (c.15 million), New Zealand (c.3.4 million), Ireland (c.3.5 million),
and South Africa (c.3.6 million). A further 400 million use it as a second language,
in such countries as Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Pakistan, and the Philippines. It has
official status in over 60 countries. At least 150 million people use English fluently
as a foreign language, and four or five times this number with some degree of
competence. A British Council estimate is of a thousand million people learning
English worldwide in the year 2000. In India, China, and most of the countries of
western Europe, the presence of English is noticeable or rapidly growing. English is
also the language of international air traffic control, and the chief language of world
publishing, science and technology, conferencing, and computer storage.
English developed in England as a consequence of the Anglo-Saxon invasions of
‘the Sth century, and is often accordingly referred to as Anglo-Saxon; however, its
oldest extant form, found in texts from the 7th century, is generally called Old
English, an inflecting language which preserves many features of Germanic. The
epic poem, Beowulf, preserved in manuscript from c.4D1000, is the chief example of
this period. The Middle English period, from the 11th to the 14th centuries, saw
the emergence of a language in which word order came to replace inflections as the
chief grammatical characteristic, and in which vocabulary was vastly increased
through recurring waves of borrowing, especially from Latin and French. Literary
excellence in this period is chiefly preserved in the work of Chaucer (c.1345- 1400).
After this time the language rapidly evolved into a recognizable modern form, with
the process of standardization hastened in the later 15th century through the
invention of printing. Shakespeare and the Authorized Version of the Bible represent
the peak of literary achievement of a post-Renaissance era that produced a highly
diversified and wide-ranging language, which in due course motivated the concern
to codify grammar and vocabulary. The resulting dictionaries, grammars, and
manuals of the 18th century, notably Johnson’s dictionary, heralded an age of
analysis whose attitudes and recommendations are still to be found in the prescriptive
concerns of modern grammars and usage books. However, fresh perspectives have
been generated by the post-colonial expansion of English around the world, which
has led to the rise of new regional varieties, both first language (e.g. American,
Australian, South African) and second language (e.g. Indian, Nigerian, Singaporean),
the nature of which has begun to be investigated only in recent times. »»>Basic
English; Black English Vernacular; codification; corpus; English as an International
Language; English as a Second Dialect; English for Special Purposes; Germanic; New
Englishes; Nuclear English; second language; standard English; Teaching English to
Speakers of Other Languages; typology of language; vowel shift.

English as an International Language The use of English for purposes of

international communication, as encountered especially among people who do not

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English as a Second Dialect

have the language as a mother tongue. The language is widely used among the
international political, business, academic, and scientific communities, for example.
It is often one of the standard varieties (such as British or American English), but
need not be so, as there may be many local forms which reflect features of the
speakers’ mother tongues. The kind of English used in a meeting between a Nigerian
and a Japanese businessman, for example, will contain several different features
from that used between an Arab and a Ugandan - though very little study has been
made of the nature and extent of this kind of variation. »non-native varieties.

English as a Second Dialect A name sometimes given to standard English when

it is being taught to someone who already speaks a regional dialect of the language.
This situation obtains both internationally (when a speaker of a creole, for example,
might wish to learn standard English) and intranationally (when children from a
regional background are taught standard English in school). »>bidialectism.
English for Special Purposes (ESP) The name given to courses for foreigners
where the kind of English taught is determined by the professional needs of the
students; contrasts with English for General Purposes (EGP), where the courses
aim to establish a general level of proficiency. Several areas have been recognized,
including English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Science and Technol-
ogy (EST), but any specific domain might be the focus of attention, such as medicine,
law, or commerce. >» Language(s) for Special Purposes; Teaching English to Speakers
of Other Languages.

English Vowel Shift >vowel shift.

enigma Intentionally obscure language; also, a word game which takes the form
of a riddle in verse. Popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, enigmas are now heard
only in traditional children’s verse (e.g. My first is in apple and Albert and Ann ...).
»>riddle.

enjambement /in'%ambment/, French /43ab’m4/ The running on of a sentence

between two lines of verse without pause; the term derives from French ‘striding
over’. A famous example is Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on
high o’er vales and hills. »>metrics.

entailment A semantic relationship between a pair of sentences, such that the

truth of the second necessarily follows from the truth of the first. If you say I have
seen a cat, it follows that I have seen an animal is true. The first sentence entails the
second. »>presupposition; semantics.

environment »context; distribution.

epenthesis /epan'Gi:sis/ A type of intrusion, in which an extra sound is inserted in

a word. In traditional description, a distinction is often made between cases where
the sound is added initially (prothesis) and those where it is added between two
consonants (anaptyxis). An example of the former is the sergeant major who adds

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 Equatorial Guinea

a brief vowel before shouting Left turn! (‘uh-left turn’); an example of the latter is
the pronunciation of film as ‘fillum’. These processes are common in historical sound
change; for example, Latin schola ‘school’ became Spanish escuela - an instance of
prothesis. »>intrusion; sound change.
epicene /‘episi:n/ A noun which can refer to either sex without changing its form.
The term is from Greek epikoinos ‘common to many’, and was used in Latin and
Greek grammar for nouns which stayed in the same gender regardless of the sex of
the being referred to (e.g. Latin vulpes ‘fox/vixen’). English examples include teacher
and doctor. »gender; noun.

epiglottis /epi'glptis/ An anatomical structure which closes over the larynx during
swallowing. It is not used as an active articulator in speech, though it can produce
an audible trill. >>trill.
epigram A short, witty statement in verse or prose. An example of an epigrammatic
utterance is Dr Johnson’s Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise. A
poetic example is Pope’s True wit is nature to advantage dressed, | What oft was thought
but ne’er so well expressed (An Essay on Criticism). »aphorism.
epigraph 1. An inscription on stone, buildings, pottery, and other hard, durable
artefacts. The techniques include engraving, carving, embossing, and painting. The
study of inscriptions, and especially of their interpretation in ancient times, is
epigraphy. When the inscriptions appear on coins, medals, and similar artefacts,
the subject is known as numismatics. »petroglyph; writing. 2. A phrase or
quotation above a section in a book or immediately before the book begins. Epigraphs
are especially common at the beginning of chapters.
epitaph A commemorative inscription on a tombstone or monument. The term is
also used for a brief statement, either in verse or prose, remembering a dead person
or past event. »>epigraph 1.
epithet A word or phrase which characterizes a noun and is regularly associated
with it. Examples include the haunted house, the iron lady (when Mrs Thatcher
was British prime minister), and William the Conqueror. The term can also be
found in pejorative contexts (as in They hurled foul epithets at each other for several
seconds). »>adjective.
eponym /‘epenim/ The name of a person after whom something (such as an
invention, or the title of a book or film) is named; also called an appellative.
Examples include Hamlet, biro, and sandwich. Place names are often eponymous, as
with Washington, San Antonio, and Sydney. »onomastics.
Equatorial Guinea (population in 1995 estimated at 472,000) The official lan-
guage is Spanish. About 75% of the population speak Fang, and there are a few
thousand speakers of other Benue-Congo languages, and a number of creole lan-
guages. Some use is made of English for international purposes. >>creole; Spanish.

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Eritrea

Eritrea (population in 1995 estimated at 3,950,000, though figures are uncertain

because of famines) About half the people speak Tigrinya; other languages of over
100,000 speakers are Afar, Kunama, Saho, Bedawi, and Tigré. Several varieties of
spoken Arabic are used in the country, and English is increasingly found as a lingua
franca. >»>Tigrinya.

error analysis In language teaching and learning, the study of the unacceptable
forms produced by someone learning a language, especially a foreign language.
Errors are considered to be systematic, governed by rules, and appear because a
learner’s knowledge of the rules of the target language is incomplete. They are of
particular interest in linguistic research because they provide evidence about the
nature of the language learning process. A contrast is drawn with mistakes, which
are unsystematic features of production that speakers would correct if their attention
were drawn to them (e.g. those arising out of tiredness or a lapse of memory).
»> interference. ;

Erse »>Irish Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic.

Eskimo A member of the Eskimo-Aleut family of languages, spoken in many dialects

by c.100,000 people in the Arctic, chiefly in Greenland (c.40,000), with some in
Alaska, Canada, and Russia. Its two main branches — Yupik in Alaska and Siberia,
Inupiag or Inupik (also called Inuit or Inuktitut) elsewhere — are sometimes
classified as separate languages. Greenlandic Eskimo has official status in Greenland
(along with Danish). The language has used several orthographies since the mid-18th
century, when missionaries first wrote it down; modern Greenlandic uses the Roman
alphabet, and Cyrillic is now used in Asia. »Eskimo-Aleut; Greenland.

Eskimo-Aleut /‘eskimav o'lju:t/ A small group of Amerindian languages spoken in

Alaska, Canada, and Greenland; and stretching along the Aleutian Islands into
Siberia. Eskimo is the main language, but there are also a few hundred speakers
still using Aleut, in the Aleutian, Pribilof, and Commander Islands. »»Amerindian;
Eskimo.

ESL and ESOL »Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

esophageal or oesophageal /i:spfa'dzi:al/ Descriptive of voice or sounds which

originate at or below the esophagus. The notion is chiefly used with reference to the
‘throaty’ voice quality produced by some people who have had their larynx removed.
»> laryngectomy.

ESP An abbreviation of English for Special Purposes.

Esperanto A language invented in 1887 by a Polish oculist, Ludwig Lazarus Zamen-

hof (1859-1917). The scheme was first published using the pseudonym Doktoro
Esperanto (‘Doctor Hopeful’). The language was first called ‘Lingvo Internacia’, but
the name ‘Esperanto’ quickly caught on, and in due course became the official title.
There is now a large translated literature in Esperanto, and several countries transmit

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 Ethiopia

tadio broadcasts in it. Estimates vary about the number of fluent speakers, from less
than 1 million to over 15 million. Most seem to be in the countries of Eastern
Europe, but there are significant numbers in Japan, China, and elsewhere. »>artificial
language.

EST An abbreviation of English for Science and Technology and also of

Extended Standard Theory.

Estonia (population in 1995 estimated at 1,568,000) The official languages are

Estonian (spoken by c.62% of the population) and Russian (c.30%). Finnish, Ukrain-
ian, Belorussian, and Romani are among the other languages used. »»Estonian;
Russian.

Estonian A member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric family of languages,

spoken by over 1 million people in Estonia, where it is an official language, in nearby
parts of Latvia and Russia, and through immigration in several other countries (e.g.
the UK, the USA, Finland, Sweden). The northern dialect, centred on Tallinn, is the
basis of the literary language, using the Roman alphabet. Estonian literature dates
from the 16th century, though the dominance of Russian and Swedish resulted in
little work being produced in the vernacular before the 19th century. Linguistically,
the Estonian sound system is noted for its three degrees of contrastive consonant
and vowel length. »Finno-Ugric; length.
Estuary English A variety of British English originating in the counties adjacent
to the estuary of the River Thames, and thus displaying the influence of London
regional speech (Cockney), especially in pronunciation; also called simply Estuary.
The variety has now a considerable presence in the London hinterland, reaching
towns over 100 miles away along the commuter roads and railways, and interacting
with other regional dialects. It achieved considerable public attention during the
1990s, when it was reported that several commercial organizations were finding it
amore attractive (‘customer friendly’) accent than RP. »»Cockney; language attitudes;
Received Pronunciation.
eth /ed/ The name of the symbol 6 used in Old English and Icelandic manuscripts
to represent the sounds spelled th in Modern English. It is also used in phonetic
transcription, as at the beginning of this entry, for the voiced interdental fricative
in such words as the - and eth. »»English.
Ethiopia (population in 1995 estimated at 57,919,000) The language of adminis-
tration is Amharic. English has auxiliary official status, being used in education,
trade, and for other international purposes. Over 80 languages are spoken in the
country, notably Oromo (c.14 million), Tigrinya (c.4 million), Gurage (c.1 million),
Welamo (Wolaytta, c.2 million), Afar, Somali, and Arabic. Figures for minority
languages are very uncertain. Amharic is spoken as a first language by c.25% of the
population, but is widely used as a lingua franca, as is Tigrinya (in the north), Oromo
(in the south), Arabic (especially among the Muslim population), and Italian. Ge’ez

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Ethiopic

(Ethiopic) is used as a liturgical language in the Ethiopian Christian Church. >>Am-

haric; English; lingua franca.

Ethiopic >Ethiopia.
ethnography of speaking An approach within linguistic anthropology which
views speech as a social institution, to be investigated using ethnographic techniques;
also called ethnography of communication. It typically involves the participant
observation of naturally occurring discourse within particular social groups and
communities. >anthropological linguistics; ethnolinguistics.
ethnolinguistics The study of language with reference to its cultural context.
The term is often used in a very general way, to include the subject-matter of
anthropological and ethnographic approaches to language. »>anthropological lin-
guistics; ethnography of speaking; ethnosemantics.
ethnopoetics The study of the way verbal art is learned, practised, represented,
and interpreted. Close attention is paid to linguistic detail and verbal form, and to
ways of reflecting on the page the characteristics of an oral original. »ethnolinguist-
ics; poetics.

ethnosemantics The study of the meanings of linguistic expressions with particular

reference to the cultures in which they are found. The approach was introduced in
the 1960s by anthropologists working within ethnoscience. A particular application
is historical ethnosemantics, the study of the development of the vocabulary
reconstructed in a proto-language, and of the cultural and historical contexts in
which the words came to be used in individual languages. »>ethnolinguistics; proto-
language; semantics.

etic >emic vs. etic.

Etruscan /a'traskn/ A non-Indo-European language spoken in the ancient country

of Etruria (Tuscany, Italy) where a civilization was at its height in the 6th century
Bc. It is known mainly from c.10,000 inscriptions, written in an alphabet probably
derived from Greek, from which the Roman alphabet was later derived. The Etruscan
alphabet had 20 letters in its classical form (c.400 Bc), and was usually written from
right to left. The language may still have been spoken as late as the 4th century ap.
Only a few words have been deciphered, and its relationship to other languages is
unclear. >»>alphabet; isolate.

etymology The study of the origins and history of the form and meaning of words.
The linguistic form from which a later form derives is called its etymon. A popular
or folk etymology arises when a word is assumed to come from a particular
etymon, because of some association of form or meaning, whereas in fact the word
has a different derivation. Examples include sparrow-grass as a gloss for asparagus,
and spitting image for spit and image. The etymological fallacy is the view that an
earlier (or the earliest) meaning of a word is the correct one — as when someone

110
 exegesis

argues that the ‘true’ meaning of history is ‘investigation’ or ‘enquiry’, because that
is what the word meant in Classical Greek. The view is fallacious because there are
always several earlier meanings which could claim to be the ‘true’ sense, though
they may no longer be in use at all, and the earliest senses of a word are always
unknown. »>metanalysis; paronymy; semantics.

euphemism The use of a vague or indirect expression in place of one which is

thought to be unpleasant, embarrassing, or offensive. Euphemisms are typically used
to replace expressions to do with death, sexual activity, and other bodily functions;
examples include pass on for die, or powder my nose for go to the toilet. »dysphemism.

euphony A pleasing or harmonious sequence of sounds. The notion is an inherently

subjective one, commonly used in the impressionistic description of poetry, but not
readily yielding to analysis in phonetic terms. »»cacophony; consonance.

Eurodicautom /juaraudi'ks:tm/ »>term bank.

eurythmy, formerly eurhythmy /ju:'r1dmi:/ A system which aims to promote a

close harmony between the sounds of speech and the patterns of body movement.
The approach was developed by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) as a kind of ‘visible
speech’, in which the body reflects in its physical shape the forms of sounds as they
are articulated. For example, the open articulation of /a/ is reflected in the stretching
of the arms upwards and outwards, and is interpreted as expressing the meaning of
astonishment and wonder. »»sound symbolism.

Evenki /a'venki:/ A member of the Manchu-Tungus group of the Altaic family of

languages, spoken by c.12,000 people in the Evenki region of north central Russia
(where it is an official language); formerly called Tungus. It is written in the Cyrillic
alphabet. »Manchu-Tungus.

Ewe /'evel, 'erwei/ A Kwa language spoken by c.2.5 million people in south-east
Ghana, south Togo, and south Benin, and also used as a lingua franca in several
areas. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »>Kwa; lingua franca.

exclamation In traditional grammar, an emotional utterance which lacks the

grammatical structure of a full sentence, and is marked by strong intonation (e.g.
Gosh!); usually contrasted with statements, questions, and commands. In writing,
exclamations are signalled by special punctuation (an exclamation mark or
exclamation point). In modern grammars of English, exclamatory sentences
are sometimes given a more restricted sense, referring to constructions which begin
with how or what without a following subject—-verb inversion (What a lovely day it
is!). »>intonation; inversion; sentence.

exclusive >disjunction; inclusive.

exegesis /eksa'di:sis/ A critical and systematic interpretation of a text. In classical

Rome, exegetes were professional interpreters of omens, dreams, oracles, and other

111
existential

such phenomena. The term came later to apply to the explanation of a sacred text,
especially the Bible, the branch of study being known as exegetics. It broadened
still further to include the critical exposition of any difficult work of literature.
>»>hermeneutics.

existential Descriptive of a sentence which emphasizes the idea of existence. In

English, the commonest type of existential sentence begins with unstressed There:
There are three books on the table. »»sentence.

existential quantifier >quantifier.

exocentric construction >endocentric construction.
exoglossic /eksou'glosik/ >endoglossic.
exophora /ek'spfara/ >endophora.
expansion 1. In grammar, the process of adding extra elements to a construction,
without its basic structure or function being affected; for example, the noun phrase
the car can be expanded by the addition of adjectives and other modifiers (the new
car in the street). »syntax. 2. In the study of child language acquisition and foreign
language learning, aresponse which adds extra elements that the speaker has omitted.
A child might say Man gone, to which the adult listener might reply, Yes, the man’s
gone. This type of response is thought to play an important role in guiding the
learner towards the rules of the target language, without the need to make explicit
corrections. »>acquisition; language learning.

experimental phonetics The use of instruments and experimental techniques

to investigate the acoustic, articulatory, or auditory properties of speech sounds;
also called instrumental phonetics. A wide range of devices is now available,
particular use being made of advances in electronic and computational technology.
»>acoustic phonetics; aerometry; electromyograph; electropalatograph; larynx; pho-
netics; pneumotachograph; segmentator; spectrograph; speech recognition/science/
stretcher/synthesis.

expletive >taboo language.

Expolangues /ekspo:'ldg/ An annual languages exhibition, held in Paris since 1983.

It reflects ongoing language-related activities in commerce, technology, culture,
education, publishing, and several other fields. About 500 languages have been
represented.

expressive 1. Descriptive of any use of language which displays or affects a person's

emotions. Poetic language is usually highly expressive, as is the language of prayer,
political speaking, and advertising. »»affective meaning; emotive language.
2. Descriptive of a disorder of language production, as opposed to reception. Aphasia,
for example, is commonly classified into expressive and receptive types. »>aphasia;
language pathology.

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 eye rhyme

expressive aphasia >Broca’s aphasia.

extension 1. The class of entities to which a word or expression is correctly applied.
The extension of the word flower is rose, daffodil, crocus, and all the other entities
in the world which we recognize as flowers. »>reference 1. 2. In historical linguistics,
the widening of a word’s meaning over time. In Latin, for example, virtue was a male
quality (vir ‘man’); today it applies to both sexes. »>narrowing.
extensive Descriptive ofa construction where there is no closesemantic relationship
between the elements; contrasts with an intensive construction, where such a
relationship exists. An example of an extensive construction is the verb + object
construction, as in Mary saw a cow, where there is no especial semantic link between
the seeing and the cow. In an intensive construction, such as Mary is my sister, there
is a very close link (in this case, one of identity) between the elements of subject
and complement. Extensive verbs are typically transitive; intemsive verbs are
typically forms of the verb be, and are also called linking verbs. »>clause; comple-
ment; copula; transitivity; verb.

external speech >inner speech.

extralinguistic Descriptive of anything (other than language itself) to which
language can relate. The objects in the world to which language refers are extralinguis-
tic, therefore, as are the facial expressions and bodily gestures which accompany
speech. »>language 4.
eye dialect A way of spelling words which suggests a regional way of talking, such
as wuz for was or wimmin for women. The point of the term is that there is no regional
pronunciation involved: wimmin is pronounced /'wimin/ in Received Pronunciation,
too; but by using a nonstandard spelling, a nonstandard pronunciation is suggested.
»> dialect.
eye rhyme A pair of words which seem to rhyme from the spelling, but which
have different pronunciations. Examples include come and home, or love and prove.
»>rhyme.

113
ie
Faeroese or Faroese /fearavu'i:z/ A North Germanic language, a member of the West
Scandinavian group, spoken by the people in the Faeroe Islands (population in 1995
estimated at 47,000), located between Iceland and Shetland. The islands are part of
Denmark, but form a self-governing community in which Faeroese now has official
status, being taught alongside Danish in schools. Faeroese is closely related to
Icelandic. It has had a written form (using the Roman alphabet) only since 1846,
but a growing local literature exists. »Denmark; Icelandic; Scandinavian.

Falkland Islands (population in 1995 estimated at 2100) English is the official

and only language in the Islands. »»English.

falling tone Descriptive of a pitch movement from relatively high to relatively

low within a syllable, encountered in the study of tone languages and of intonation.
In many varieties of English, a iow falling tone is associated with an unemotional
tone of voice, often used on statements. It contrasts with such pitch movements as
rising tone, where the pitch movement goes from relatively low to relatively high
(often associated with a questioning tone of voice), level tome, where the pitch
movement stays constant throughout the syllable, and falling-rising tone (often
associated with a hesitant or doubtful tone of voice), where the pitch first falls and
then rises. »>intonation; tone.

false friends Words in different languages which resemble each other in form,
but which express different meanings; also called false cognates, and often known
by the French equivalent expression faux amis /fo:zami:/. Examples include French
demander, which translates into English as ‘to request’ not ‘to demand’, and Italian
caldo, which translates as ‘warm’ not ‘cold’. »>translation.

falsetto An unnaturally high-pitched voice produced by the vibration of the front

part of the vocal folds, either in speaking or singing. It is viewed as a voice disorder
(most noticeably in males), especially if it persists into adulthood. »>voice disorder/
mutation.

family of languages A set of languages deriving from a common ancestor, or

‘parent’; the derived languages are called ‘daughter-languages’, and are ‘sisters’ of
each other. A diagrammatic representation of these languages is a family tree.
>> genetic classification; Indo-European; isolate; phylum; p. 115.

Faroes >Denmark.

114
 PROTO
INDO-EUROPEAN

GOIDELIC BRYTHONIC INDO-IRANIAN

Scots Gaelic Cumbrian
Manx Gaelic Welsh Eaves perores
Irish Gaelic Cornish IRANIAN INDO-
Breton Ossetic ARYAN
(Insular) eh (Sanskrit)
,waSG ‘ Baluchi
ontinenta: ashto
Tadzhik North
i
i
Assamese
pa yeh r rc
Celtiberian Gaulish Galatian Panjabi Bengali
GERMANIC lt oe
Pahari
West East Dardic eae and
English Gothic ince
Flemish yeorosayamiaray
: : 178 i
eae wBihed genial
emis

rikaans teens
tide h Hindi/Urdu Sinhalese
Luxembourgis
Yiddish TOCHARIAN
North ARMENIAN
; , ANATOLIAN
Icelandic Danish
Faeroese Swedish ALBANIAN
Norwegian GREEK

ITALIC BALTO-
(Latin) SLAVIC

Rhaetian Romanian BALTIC SLAVIC

a : Lithuanian
Sardinian Italian Latvian
pln West East
F
Occitan Lekhitic Belorussian
s

Serre
Spanish Polish
SloIs k een
Portuguese ¢ sik South
Bulgarian
Croatian
Macedonian
Serbian
Slovene

A family of languages: the Indo-European family tree, reflecting

geographical distribution.
Faroese

Faroese »>Faeroese.
Farsi /'fa:si:/ >Persian.

fatherese >motherese.

faux amis >false friends.

feature >distinctive.

feedback 1. The process whereby the sender of a message obtains a reaction from
the receiver which enables a check to bemade on the efficiency of the communication
— such as a head nod, facial expression, or vocalization (e.g. mhm). Complete
feedback has been proposed as a defining property of human language, in that
speakers are able to monitor their own performance, both by observing themselves
and by observing the reactions of others. »communication; language 1. 2. Speakers’
awareness of their own production of sound. This may be auditory (via the ear),
kinesthetic (via the internal sensation of articulation), or vibratory (via bone conduc-
tion). Delayed auditory feedback (DAF) takes place when a delay is introduced
into the process of speech transmission between mouth and ear — an effect which
can be exploited in the treatment of stutterers, whose speech sometimes becomes
more fluent when they hear it through the medium of a DAF device. »>stuttering.

felicity conditions The criteria which must be satisfied if a speech act is to achieve
its purpose. For example, for the speech act of marrying to be properly used, the
speaker must have the authority to carry out the activity: not everyone is entitled
to say ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’. Or again, a speech act would be
‘infelicitous’ if it were used to request a response from someone who the speaker
knew was not in a position to carry it out, as in asking a non-driver to take the wheel
of a car. Such utterances would of course not normally be used without special intent
(such as sarcasm or humour) by the speaker. »>speech act.

feminine >gender.

festination An abnormal, gradual increase in speed while speaking. The effect is

noticeable in some speech disorders, notably cluttering. »>cluttering.

field >semantic field theory.

figurative language An expressive use of language where words are used in a

nonliteral way to suggest illuminating comparisons and resemblances; also called
figures of speech. Literal language, by contrast, refers to the usual meaning of a
word or phrase. Thus if Marie misses her turn for a portion of pig-meat at her school
dinner, she might be described literally as ‘not having a sausage’; but only if her
plate were completely empty (having missed out on potatoes and peas as well) could
she be described figuratively as ‘not having a sausage’. In traditional rhetoric, a
distinction is drawn (though not entirely clearly) between two types of figurative
language: an effect (such as rhyme) which changes the structure of language without

116
 finite state grammar

affecting its meaning is a scheme; one which does affect the meaning (such as
metaphor) is a trope. »>apostrophe 2; chiasmus; hyperbole; imagery; irony; litotes;
metaphor; metonymy; oxymoron; paradox; personification; rhetoric; simile; synech-
doche; zeugma.

figure of speech »>figurative language.

Fiji (population in 1995 estimated at 775,000) The official language is English.

Fijian is spoken by c.45% of the population. Nearly half the population (those of
Indian origin) speak Hindi, and c.10 other languages are represented, mainly other
Austronesian languages. »>English; Fijian.

Fijian /fd&i:an/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken by

c.380,000 people in the Fiji Islands. The standard form, based on the Bauan dialect,
is used in broadcasting and the press. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Austrone-
sian; Fiji.

Filipino /fila'‘pi:znau/ >Pilipino.

filled pause >pause.

filtered speech Speech which has been passed through filters to alter its acoustic
characteristics. The distorted speech produced is often used in research into auditory
perception — for example, determining the extent to which words can still be recog-
nized after certain frequencies have been removed. »>acoustic phonetics.

finger spelling A communication system which uses movements of the fingers to

represent letters of the alphabet (a manual alphabet); also called dactylology.
It is widely used by the deaf, especially for communicating words that do not have
conventional signs, and which thus have to be ‘spelled out’ (such as names of people
and places). »>sign language; p. 118.

finite Descriptive of a verb or construction which can occur on its own in an

independent clause, permitting formal contrasts of tense, number, and mood; con-
trasts with a nonfinite verb or construction, which occurs on its own only in a
dependent clause, and which lacks these contrasts. The notion of finiteness basically
refers to the extent to which a verb is limited by tense, number, and mood. Thus, I
walk is a finite use of a verb, because it expresses only one tense, number, and mood
(1st person present indicative), as can be shown by such contrasts as I walked and
He walks. The verb in Walking in the street ..., however, is nonfinite, as it is not
limited in this way: all options are available to continue this sentence — such as
Walking down the street, I/he/they felt happy or Walking down the street, they, were/are/
will be/must be satisfied. »>infinitive; mood; number; participle; tense 1; verb.

finite state grammar A simple kind of generative grammar, which generates

sentences by working through them from left to right. An initial element is selected, _
and thereafter the possibilities of occurrence of all other elements are determined

117
 Tse

<x uu ps a is He

&
)
f
N &
a

a
5
x af a e x< N a

Ot ecRAE
«Khia el
EEN SE
 first person

by the nature of the elements preceding them. The selection of a, for example, would
require a singular noun to follow, which would in turn require a singular form of
the verb, and so on. The perceived limitations of this way of proceeding is part of
the argument in favour of more ambitious kinds of grammar. >»generative grammar.

Finland (population in 1995 estimated at 5,110,000) The official languages are

Finnish and Swedish. Swedish is spoken as a first language by c.6% of the population,
andis an official regional language in the Ahvenanmaa/Aland islands. Same (Lappish)
is used by c.3000 in the northernmost part of the country. A few other Finnic
languages are represented (e.g. Estonian, Karelian). English is used for international
purposes. »>Finnish; Swedish.

Finnic >Finno-Ugric.

Finnish The chief member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric family of lan-
guages, spoken by c.6 million people, chiefly in Finland (c.4.7 million), with some
in nearby parts of Sweden (where it is an immigrant language), Estonia, Norway,
and Russia (Karelia), and also through immigration especially in the USA and Canada.
It is written in the Roman alphabet. The language’s official status in Finland dates
only from 1863 (Swedish being used there previously). Its written literature dates
from a 16th-century Bible translation. An important factor in raising national con-
sciousness about Finnish was the publication in the mid-19th century of the Kalevala,
an epic poem constructed by Elias Lonnrot out of a collection of oral folk tales.
»>Finland; Finno-Ugric.

Finno-Ugric A branch of the Uralic family of languages, found in one part of

central Europe, and in those northern territories where Europe and Asia meet. In
the north, the Finnic branch is located in the region between northern Norway
and the White Sea, the whole of Finland, and parts of nearby Russia. The languages
of this group include Finnish, Estonian, and Same (Lappish). Curiously isolated from
the rest of the group is the main language of the Ugric branch, Hungarian; other
Ugric languages include Khanty and Mansi, spoken in the region of the River Ob
(and sometimes described separately as Ob-Ugric). Other Finno-Ugric languages
are spoken in various parts of northern and central Russia, several with official
regional status, notably Mordvin, Mari, Udmurt, and Komi. The total number of
Finno-Ugric speakers is c.24 million. »Estonian; Finnish; Hungarian; Khanty; Komi;
Mari; Mordvin; Same; Udmurt; Uralic.

first language The language first acquired by a child (also called the mother
tongue or native language) or preferred in a multilingual situation. The second
context may not be identical to the first; for example, the children of many European
emigrants to the USA have come to use English as a first language. A native speaker
is someone for whom a particular language is a first language. »>second language.

first person >person.

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Firthian linguistics

Firthian linguistics An approach to linguistics based on the thought of J(ames)

R(upert) Firth (1890-1969), professor of general linguistics at the University of
London (1944-56), and the formative influence on the development of linguistics
in Great Britain. A central notion is his view that language cannot be accounted for
in terms of a single system of analytic principles and categories, but that different
systems must be established at different places within a given level of description
(polysystemicism). Many of his ideas were developed by a neo-Firthian group
of scholars in Britain, whose main theoretician, M(ichael) A(lexander) K(irkwood)
Halliday (1925-_), was professor of general linguistics at London (1965 — 70) before
moving to Australia. »>level 1; linguistics; scale and category grammar; systemic
grammar.

fixed expression »set expression.

flap A type of consonant in which an articulator (usually the tongue tip) strikes
another a glancing blow with a very short contact duration; also called a tap.
Examples include the standard pronunciation of rin very, or of the din the American
pronunciation of ladder. »>articulation.

flash card >sight vocabulary.

Flemish »>Dutch.

flexion >inflection.

fliting >flyting.

fluency Smooth, rapid, effortless, accurate use of language. The notion is chiefly
applied to oral fluency (speech), but is also used with reference to ability in writing,
reading, and signing. Curiously, the skill of listening is not usually considered in
terms of fluency. In foreign language teaching, the notion of fluency is sometimes
contrasted with that of accuracy: the laboured production of grammatically correct
sentences may be accurate but is not fluent. In this domain, also, somewhat different
criteria for the evaluation of fluency may be found — for example, speed of speech
is not so critical, and an imperfect command of sounds, grammar, and vocabulary
is common in foreign speakers who would none the less be considered fluent.
»>dysfluency.

flyting or fliting /‘flattiy/ An exchange of curses or personal abuse in verse form;

a war of words. It is found in Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, and other early or medieval epic
literature. There is a famous exchange between Anglo-Saxon and Viking leaders in
the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon (991). »»verbal duelling.

focus An elementin a sentence to which the speaker wishes to draw special attention.
For example, in It was the EXPLOSION which first told us that there was trouble, the
word order and intonational emphasis combine to draw our attention to explosion.
»>information structure; intonation; word order.

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 forensic linguistics

folk etymology >etymology.

font A complete set of type of a particular design and size (e.g. Times, Helvetica);
in Britain also spelled fount. It includes all the letters of the alphabet, along
with numerals, accents, punctuation marks, and several other symbols. »>sort;
typography.

foot Traditionally, a unit of rhythm in the metrical system of a language, described

in terms of a sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables; for example, the line The
curfew tolls the knell of parting day is said to consist of five unstressed + stressed units
(each called an iamb, or iambic foot). Other basic types include: the trochee, or
trochaic foot, a stressed + unstressed unit, as heard in the word David; a spondee,
or spondaic foot, for a unit consisting of two stresses, as in James Bond; a dactyl,
or dactylic foot, for a combination of one stressed syllable followed by two
unstressed syllables, as in Hilary; and an anapest, or anapestic foot, for a combi-
nation of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as in (middle) of
the night. The notion is no longer restricted to the analysis of poetic metre, but can
also be found as part of a general linguistic description of the rhythmical patterns
of words and phrases in speech. »>alexandrine; metrics; rhythm.

foregrounding Relative prominence in a discourse; being in the foreground of

the communication, as opposed to being in the background (backgrounding). It
often involves deviation from a linguistic norm, as when a line of poetry is given a
distinctive rhythm, or an author radically alters the word order of a sentence. In
advertising, a brand name might be foregrounded by being given a special spelling
(Krunchy Krakkers). In a narrative, events belonging to the story line are foregrounded,
whereas supporting or clarifying events are backgrounded. »>narrative; style.

foreigner talk A variety of speech used by native speakers when they talk to
foreigners who are not proficient in the use of their language. It adapts to the speech
of the outsider in various ways, such as by being slower, louder, more simplified,
more repetitive, and more formal. »>variety.

foreign language A language which is not the mother tongue of a speaker. The
term is often used to exclude cases where a language has a special status within a
country (such as English used as a second language in Nigeria). Although the second
language is not a mother tongue, there is reluctance to see it in the same terms as
other foreign languages which have no such status (e.g. German and Russian in the
UK). However, the distinction between ‘foreign’ and ‘second’ language came to be
less used in the early 1990s. »>first/second language; cartoon, p. 122.

forensic linguistics The use of linguistic techniques to investigate crimes in which

language data forms part of the evidence. The field of forensic phonetics is often
distinguished as a separate domain, dealing with such matters as accent and voice
identification. »>linguistics.

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foreword

he
Acces jererDiT

EXPERSMENTATIONS

‘No worries. If it can’t be said in English, it ain’t worth saying at all.’ (foreign
language)

foreword Introductory remarks about a book or its author, often written by

someone else. The notion contrasts with the preface, which is a personal note
by the author explaining how the book came to be written, and often including
acknowledgements and other incidental details.

form 1. The abstract structural character of language, as defined in terms of the

sound or writing system, grammar, and vocabulary. The term enters into two kinds
of contrast: on the one hand, it contrasts with the meaning or function of
language; on the other hand, it contrasts with the substance of linguistic expression
— the physical sounds or marks which language uses in order to build up a system
of communication. »>formalization; graphetics; phonetics; semantics. 2. A linguistic
unit established at a particular level of analysis, or the variations in that unit which
occur; for example, we might talk of the ‘forms’ of the verb go, by which we would
mean go, goes, going, gone, went. A set of forms which display similar or identical
grammatical features is a form class - a notion which includes not only word
classes (parts of speech) but also morpheme classes (such as types of affix). >>affix;
morpheme; word class.

formal grammar An approach to grammatical study which focuses on the forms

which make up the patterns of word and sentence structure; the implication is that
the analysis is carried out without relying on the meanings of these forms (a ‘notional’
approach). Notional grammar would analyse nouns, for example, as ‘names of
persons, places, and things’, whereas formal grammar would describe nouns in terms
of their location in sentences and the types of words which co-occur with them
(articles, determiners, etc.). »form 1; grammar 1; string; syntax.

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 form word

formalist Descriptive of an approach to stylistic analysis which looks at texts as

formal objects of study, comprising an internal structure which can be objectively
identified. The approach has been particularly associated with structural linguistics,
especially as practised in eastern Europe. »>form 1; structural; stylistics.

formality A dimension of social behaviour, ranging from the most strictly regulated
to the least regulated, and reflected in language by varied linguistic features. Highly
formal language involves carefully organized discourse, often with complex syntax
and vocabulary, which closely follows the standard language, and which is often
sensitive to prescriptive judgements. Highly informal language is very loosely struc-
tured, involving a high level of colloquial expression, and often departing from
standard norms (such as by using slang, regionalisms, neologisms, and code mixing).
»>code 3; diglossia; style; variety.

formalization A characteristic of formulations in linguistics, whereby rules, state-

ments, and other features of language are capable of being specified in a precise and
rigorous way, especially in logical or mathematical terms. A ‘formalized’ account
contrasts with an ‘informal’ one. Formalized accounts make use of formalisms
— artificial languages devised to make precise statements about the grammatical
properties of a language (whether natural or artificial). »>form 1; formalist; semantics.

formal semantics »semantics.

formal universal >universal.

formant A concentration of acoustic energy. The notion is important in acoustic

phonetics as part of the classification of vowels, vowel-like sounds, and the tran-
sitional features between vowels and adjacent sounds. »»acoustic phonetics; tran-
sition 2; vowel.

formative A formally identifiable, irreducible grammatical element which enters

into the construction of larger linguistic units, such as the affixes -ing and -ed in
English. The notion is especially used in generative grammar for the terminal
elements in a surface structure representation of a sentence. »>generative grammar;
morpheme; surface structure.

form class >form 2.

formula A fixed form of words serving a conventional purpose; examples include

greetings (Pleasedtomeet you), formal declarations (Not guilty), and letter-openings
(Dear Madam). Language which is characterized by many such fixed forms (or
routines) is called formulaic or prefabricated. A contrast is sometimes drawn
with free discourse, where there is a relatively wide choice over what to say and
how to say it. The term formula can also refer to any idiomatic word sequence or
set expression, such as spick and span. »»idiom; set expression.

form word »>grammatical word.

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fortis
ry

fortis Descriptive of sounds made with a relatively strong degree of muscular effort
and breath force, compared with other sounds (lenis sounds). Typically, voiceless
sounds are fortis; voiced sounds are lenis. The strengthening of the overall force of
a sound (e.g. a fricative becoming a stop) is called fortition, a process which occurs
in sound changes both historically and synchronically. This process contrasts with
lenition, which is a weakening in overall force (e.g. voiceless sounds becoming
voiced). >»>tension.

fossilized Descriptive of a construction which is no longer productive in a language,

but is still in use. Many constructions involving the subjunctive are fossilized, such
as Come what may and So be it. In foreign language learning, the term describes those
incorrect linguistic features which have become a permanent part of a learner’s
production — such as the features which identify a foreign accent. »»productivity;
subjunctive.

found poem A text which is identified as a poem though not intended to be one
by the author. Usually, the discovery takes the form of a rhyme scheme or metrical
pattern which is part of a piece of prose. Accidental poetry can easily be found in
the prose passages of great descriptive writers, such as Dickens (and the term prose |
poem has been suggested to cope with the result). Some authors consciously build
a poetic structure into their prose. A tongue-in-cheek example is Lewis Carroll’s
preface to his poem ‘Hiawatha’s photographing’ (1857), which incorporates Long-
fellow’s famous rhythm: In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight
attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. . . In everyday speech, inadvertent rhyme
can bring forth such a comment as I’m a poet and I don’t know it. »>verbal play.

fount >font.

fourth person >person.

frame The structural environment within which a class of items can be used; also
called a syntactic frame or a substitution frame. For example, I— cross provides
a frame for a particular class of verbs (e.g. am, become, feel) »»word class.

France (population in 1995 estimated at 58,333,000) The official language is French

(spoken by c.S3 million). Official regional language status has been given to Basque
(c.75,000), Breton (c.500,000), Catalan (c.250,000), and Corsican (c.280,000). There
are c.250,000 speakers of Occitan (Provengal). German (Alsatian, c.1.5 million) and
Dutch (¢.90,000) are used in the border areas of Alsace-Lorraine and Westhoek,
respectively. Immigrant languages include varieties of Arabic (c.1 million), Armenian
(c.70,000), Italian (c.1 million), Kabyle (c.500,000), Portuguese (c.750,000), Turkish
(c.135,000), and Wolof (c.35,000), and there are many (50,000-100,000) speakers
of Romani. »>Basque; Breton; Catalan; Corsican; French; Kabyle; Occitan.

Franglais A language variety which is a nonstandard mixture of French and English,

and recognized by both the French and the English. To the French, it generally refers

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 French

to any instance of the language using too many English words. To the English,
especially since Miles Kington began writing on the subject, it refers to a form of
French which has been distorted by the use of English grammar, vocabulary, and
idiom — a pastiche on the poor quality of French often heard by English learners.
>> Spanish.

free discourse >formula.

free form A minimal grammatical unit which can be used as a word without
additional elements; also called a free morpheme. Free forms used in the first
sentence of this entry include as, unit, which and word, but not, for example, additional,
which is not a minimal unit (as it is analysable into addition and -al). »bound form;
morpheme; word.

free translation >translation.

free variation The ability of one sound to be substituted for another within a
word, without this affecting the word’s meaning. For example, the vowels /e/ and
/d/ are in free variation in the first syllable of envelope. »>allo-; phoneme.

French A member of the Romance family of languages, spoken by c.72 million

people as a first language, by at least a further 50 million as a country’s second
language, and by many more as an international foreign language. First language
use is chiefly in France (c.53 million), Canada (c.6 million, primarily in Québec),
Belgium (4 million), Switzerland (1.3 million), and the USA (c.2.5 million), with
substantial numbers also in Réunion, Mauritius, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and other
former French colonies. French has official status in over 30 countries, and is spoken
by many as a second language, notably in Cameroon, Madagascar, Cote d’Ivoire,
Mali, Niger, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Haiti. Its written form (in the Roman alphabet)
can be traced back to the 9th century Ap, with a literature emerging in the 12th
century, in the form of the chansons de geste (‘songs of deeds’) and courtly romances.
The 17th century was the golden age of French literature, including the work of the
dramatists Corneille, Racine, and Moliére, and this century also saw the creation
of the Académie frangaise (1635), which has continued to exercise a far-reaching,
conservative influence on the language down to the present day. French developed
as the international language of culture, politics, and education during the 18th
century, and continued to play this role until largely supplanted by the growing
dominance of English since the 1950s. It none the less plays an important role,
being an official language of most international political bodies. In France, regional
dialects tend to be grouped into two broad types: in the north, there is the langue
doi (the name deriving from an old form of the word oui ‘yes’); in the south the
langue d’oc (from the Provengal word oc ‘yes’). There are several French-based creoles
in the former colonies. Standard French is based on the dialect of the Paris region,
recognized as such since the 16th century. »»Académie francaise; creole; France;
Occitan; Romance.

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French Guiana

French Guiana (population in 1995 estimated at 120,000) The official language

is French. A French-based creole (Patois) is used by c.75% of the population, by at
least 50,000 as a first language. There are a few Amerindian languages in use, as well
as some speakers of Chinese, Hindi, and an English-based creole (Aucaans). >»>French;
Patwa.

French Polynesia (population in 1995 estimated at 215,000) The official language

is French. Tahitian is an official regional language in Tahiti, and an important lingua
franca. A few other Austronesian languages are spoken on various islands (e.g.
Paumotu, Marquesan). Chinese (Hakka) is used by c.2% of the population. »»French;
Tahitian.

frequency In acoustics, the number of sound waves per second produced by a

source of vibration. Formerly expressed in ‘cycles per second’ (cps), itis now measured
in hertz (Hz). »fundamental frequency; hertz.

fricative /'frikattv/ Descriptive of a type of consonant where there is sufficient

articulatory constriction to produce friction as its main auditory feature; also some-
times called spirant. Fricatives may be voiceless (e.g. [f], [s]) or voiced (e.g. [Vv], [z]).
»>affricate; consonant; friction.

friction The auditory effect of air passing a constriction in the vocal tract. Friction
is part of the phonetic definition of consonants; the phonetic definition of vowels
requires that they be frictionless. However, from a phonological point of view
frictionless continuants do occur as consonants: these are sounds (such as nasals
or laterals) which function as a consonant in speech but which lack the closure or
friction that identifies most consonantal articulations. »»consonant; lateral; nasal;
phonology; vowel.

Frisian A West Germanic language spoken by c.700,000 people, 400,000 in The

Netherlands, mainly in the province of Friesland (population in 1995 estimated at
615,000), with some in north-west Germany. It is written in the Roman alphabet,
and is the language most closely related to English. Written remains in Old Frisian
date from the end of the 13th century. A 20th-century revival of interest in the
language has resulted in its being given official regional status in Friesland, and there
is now a Frisian Academy. >»>academy; Germanic.

Friulian /fri:'u:lian/ >Rhaetian.

fronting 1. The articulation of a sound further forward in the mouth than is

expected, such as when a child pronounces car as [ta:]. »front sound. 2. The moving
of a sentence element from the middle or end of a sentence to initial position; for
example, we can front the final element of We turned left at The Rose to get At The
Rose we turned left. »»transformation; word order. :

front matter >end matter.

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 functional

front sound A sound made in the front part of the mouth (e.g. [m]) or by the front
part of the tongue (e.g. [a]); contrasts with back sounds, made in the back part of
the mouth (e.g. [h]) or by the back part of the tongue (e.g. [k]). The term is most
commonly used with reference to vowel classification, where front vowels (e.g.
[i], [e]) are those produced with the highest point of the tongue as far forward as
possible. The contrast is with back vowels (e.g. [u], [o]), where the highest part of
the tongue is as far to the rear as possible. »»central sound; fronting.

frozen expression »>set expression.

FSP >functional.

Fula /'fu:la/ A West Atlantic language spoken by c.15 million people, in Nigeria (c.8
million), Guinea, Senegal, and other countries in the western part of the African
bulge; also called Ful, Fulfulde, or (after the name of the people) Fulani. It is a
lingua franca throughout the region, and also in the Central African Republic. It is
written in the Roman alphabet. »>lingua franca; West Atlantic.
Fulani /‘fu:loni:/ >Fula.
Fulfulde /fol'fuldi:/ >Fula.
full stop >period.
full verb >lexical verb.
full word »>grammatical word.
function 1. The relationship between a linguistic form and other parts of the
sentence (or other unit) in which it is used; for example, the functions of a noun
phrase include its use as the subject or object of a sentence. Any element which is
part of a system can be said to ‘function’ or ‘contrast’ within that system; for example,
vowels and consonants function within the sound system. The use made of a
linguistic contrast in a system is called its functional load or functional yield:
for example, a great deal of use is made in English of the contrast between /p/ and
/b/ (this has a heavy functional load), whereas the contrast between /{/ and /3/ (sh
and zh) is very little used. »form 1; phonology. 2. The relationship between a
linguistic form and the social or interpersonal setting in which it is used, as when
we refer to the various functions of language to communicate ideas, express attitudes,
generate rapport, and so on. Different kinds of utterance (e.g. questions, statements)
can also be described in this way, in terms of the interactive functions they perform.
»>functional; pragmatics; speech act.

functional Descriptive of any approach in which the notion of ‘function’ is central.

Functional grammar, for example, was devised as an alternative to the abstract
view of language presented by transformational grammar; based on a pragmatic
view of language as social interaction, it focuses on the rules governing the linguistic
expressions that are used as instruments of this.activity. In foreign language teaching,

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functional change

a functional syllabus is one where the syllabus content is organized in terms

of language functions, such as requesting, persuading, and inviting. Functional
sentence perspective (FSP) is a linguistic theory devised by Czech linguists which
analyses utterances in terms of the information they contain; the role of each
utterance part is evaluated for its semantic function in relation to the whole. »>con-
trast; distinctive; function 1, 2; Prague School.

functional change 1. The use of a word in different grammatical roles, such as

round being used as adjective (a round table), verb (we rounded the corner), and noun
(It’s your round). »conversion. 2. In historical linguistics, the alteration of the role
of a linguistic feature over time — especially, when a sound takes on or loses the
status of a phoneme. For example, in Old English, /s/ was heard as [z] only between
voiced sounds, but in modern English /z/ has become a phoneme in its own right,
as shown by such contrasts as Sue vs. zoo. »phoneme; sound change.

functional literacy >literacy.

functional load >function 1.

functional phonetics >function 1; phonology.

functional shift »>conversion.

functional yield >function 1.

function word »grammatical word.

functor >grammatical word.

fundamental frequency The lowest frequency component in a complex sound

wave, of particular importance in determining a sound’s pitch; also called the
fundamental or F nought, and symbolized as Fp. Multiples of this frequency are
called the harmonics; for example, if the fundamental is 200 Hz, the harmonics
are 400, 600, etc. A frequency which is twice the fundamental is the ‘second har-
monic’; one three times the fundamental is the ‘third harmonic’; and so on.
>> frequency; intonation.

Fur /fua/ A Nilo-Saharan language spoken by c.500,000 people in western Sudan,

largely in the province of Darfur. The language has no clear relationships with other
members of the family. It is written in the Roman alphabet. Arabic influence is
evident, as the people are now entirely Muslim. »>Nilo-Saharan.

fusion A type of assimilation in which two adjacent sounds influence each other,
losing their identities to emerge as a single different sound; for example, the final
/t/ of don’t and the initial /j/ of you readily fuse to produce the affricate /t{/. »>assim-
ilation.

fusional language »>typology of language.

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 future tense

futhork or futhark /'fad5:k/ >rune.

future temse A form of the verb which refers to future time, as in French J’irai ‘I'll
go’. English has no formal future tense, but has many ways of referring to future
time, such as through the use of the modal verbs will/shall, future-time adverbials
(e.g. tomorrow), and such verbs as be about to. The will/shall forms are usually called
‘future tenses’ in traditional grammar, but many linguists consider this to be mislead-
ing, as these forms express several other meanings than future time (such as timeless-
ness, as in Stones will sink in water). The use of will/shall followed by have is traditionally
called future perfect temse (or ‘future in the past’) in traditional grammar.
»>tense 1.

129
G
Gabon (population in 1995 estimated at 1,379,000) The official language is French.
There are c.35 local languages, including Fang (spoken by c.30% of the population),
Myene, and Punu. Several of these languages are spoken by very small numbers.
»>French.

Gaelic /'geiltk, 'galik/ >Celtic; Irish Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic.

Galatian /ga'lei{n/ >Celtic.

Galician /ga'li:{n/ >Portuguese.
galley >proof.

Gallinya /ga'linja/ >Oromo.

Gambia, The (population in 1995 estimated at 1,053,000) The official language
is English. There is an English-based creole (Krio) quite widely used as a lingua franca,
and a Portuguese-based creole (Crioulo). The chief language in the middle of the
country is Mandinka (Malinke), spoken by c.40% of the population. There are c.15
other local languages, including Ful and Wolof. »>creole; English; lingua franca.

gap The absence ofa linguistic unit at a place in a pattern of relationships where one
might have been expected. For example, because of the widespread use of the male/
female contrast in English kinship terms (mummy/daddy, brother/sister, uncle/aunt,
etc.), we might expect there to be words for male and female cousin, too — but there is
a lexical gap here. The same kind of notion, often referred to as gapping, is also used
in some approaches to grammatical analysis for the omission of an element from
certain types of sentence, such as Mary likes drawing and John driving, where there is a
gap between subject and object in the second clause. »>ellipsis; kinship terms.

Gaulish /'go:lif{/ >Celtic.

GB An abbreviation of government and binding theory.
Ge’ez >Ethiopia.

gender A grammatical category which displays such contrasts as masculine/femine/

neuter or animate/inanimate. A distinction is drawn between natural gender,
which involves reference to the sex of real-world entities, and grammatical gen-
der, which is associated with arbitrary word classes, and signals grammatical relation-
ships between words in a sentence. English has natural gender — words such as he

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 generic

and she are used only with reference to male and female entities (or entities which
can be personified in this way). French, by contrast, also has grammatical gender: a
word which is ‘feminine’ (signalled by the use of Ja and certain other words before
a noun) does not necessarily refer to a female, as in la gare ‘the station’, la discussion
‘discussion’, and thousands of other cases. »»animate; noun.

genealogical classification »>genetic classification.

generalization In psycholinguistics, the process whereby children extend their

initial use of a linguistic feature to a class of items, such as gradually coming to use
the -s ending to express noun plurals. Overgeneralization takes place when the
feature is extended beyond its limits in the adult grammar, such as when the -s
ending is used in mouses and mans. Overgeneralization is also found in foreign
language learning, when the rules of the foreign language are applied too liberally.
Forms such as mouses can be heard in the speech of adult foreigners too. »>acquisition;
language learning; psycholinguistics.

generalized phrase-structure grammar (GPSG) A framework for writing

fully explicit formal grammars for natural languages, developed in the 1980s as an
alternative to transformational accounts of language. It was originally formulated
as a notationally elaborated variant of context-free phrase-structure grammar. >»>con-
text 1; phrase-structure grammar.

general linguistics >linguistics.

general phonetics >phonetics.
general semantics, now officially general-semantics A philosophical move-
ment developed in the 1930s by a Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred
Korzybski (1879-1950), which aimed to make people aware of the conventional
relationships between words and things, as a means of improving systems of com-
munication and clear thinking. It attracted considerable popular interest in the
1930s and 1940s, and there is an Institute of General Semantics in Maryland, USA.
>>semantics.
generative grammar A grammar which defines the set of grammatical sentences
in a language: formal rules project a finite set of sentences upon the potentially
infinite set which constitutes the language as a whole. The term is also used as a
label for the theoretical approach, associated primarily with the thought of Noam
Chomsky, which developed the scope and aims of such a grammar. The two main
branches of generative grammar are generative phonology and generative
syntax. The word ‘grammar’ in this label thus has a much broader range than that
encountered in traditional language study, including phonology and semantics
alongside syntax. »Chomskyan grammar 1; innateness hypothesis; syntax; transfor-
mation; tree; universal.

generic /da'nertk/ Descriptive of a class of word which refers to a class of entities.

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genetic classification

Examples include certain uses of nouns (e.g. A lion is a fierce animal, where A lion
means ‘the class of all lions’), adjectival nouns (e.g. the Chinese, the rich), and general
semantic labels such as fruit (which subsumes apples, oranges, etc.). »hyponymy;
noun; sexist language.

genetic classification The classification of languages according to a hypothesis

of common origin; also called a genealogical classification. It typically produces
a family tree for a group of languages which displays their relative chronology. The
members of the family are brought together by a meticulous process of comparison
of individual linguistic forms. »»family of languages; phylum; typology of language.

*patér

Classical Sanskrit Latin Gothic Old Irish

Greek piter pater fadar athir
pater

Italian Spanish French Portuguese Catalan

padre padre pére pai pare
Genetic classification. Reconstruction of the Indo-European form *patér
by a comparison of cognate forms in attested languages. The families of
languages begin to emerge in the process.

Geneva School »Saussure, Ferdinand de.

genitive case One of the common ways in which an inflected language makes a
word change its form, in order to show a grammatical relationship with other parts
of the sentence. The genitive is used with nouns (or noun phrases) typically to
express a possessive relationship (e.g. the lady’s hand) or some other close semantic
connection (e.g. a summer’s day). The term is also used for constructions which are
formally related to the genitive case form, such as the postmodifying genitive,
using of, in English: the bottom of the page. The English group genitive is a construc-
tion where the genitive ending is added to the last element in a noun phrase
containing postmodification or coordination, as in the University of Bangor’s team or
the prince and princess’s opinion. »>case; inflection 1; subject.

genre /'3):nro/_ An identifiable category of artistic composition — in the literary

domain, subsuming such general notions as poetry, drama, and novel as well as
such lower-order notions as science fiction, crime, and romance. The term is also
used in a more abstract way, to refer to any formally distinguishable variety, whether
of speech or writing, such as a song, sermon, or conversation. »>variety.

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 German

geographical linguistics >dialectology; geolinguistics.

geolinguistics A branch of linguistics which studies the geographical distribution
of languages in the world, with reference to their political, economic, and cultural
status; also called geographical linguistics. More narrowly, the term is used for
an approach which relates dialect geography, urban dialect study, and human
geography within a sociolinguistic perspective. »>dialect; sociolinguistics.

Geordie /'&):di:/ The accent and dialect associated with the Tyneside area in the
north-east of England. The name is a diminutive form of George. »>accent 1.

Georgia (population in 1995 estimated at 5,481,000) The official languages are

Georgian, spoken by c.70% of the population, and Russian (c.7%). There are c.10 other
languages, notably Abkhaz, Armenian (c.8%), Azerbaijani, Chechen, and Ossetic.
»>Georgian; Russian.

Georgian The chief member of the Kartvelian group of Caucasian languages, spoken
by over 4 million people, chiefly in Georgia (where it is an official language), and
in nearby countries. There is a literary tradition dating from the 5th century ap,
when an alphabet was first devised to permit the translation of the Bible into
Georgian. This was followed by a period of Old Georgian which lasted as a literary
medium until the 11th century (continuing in religious use until the 19th century).
New Georgian developed as a secular literary medium in the 12th century. The
language is written in the Georgian alphabet (Mkhedruli), from left to right. »>Geor-
gia; Kartvelian.

Gé-Pano-Carib /'gei '‘panau ‘karib/ A group of c.200 Amerindian languages, spoken

east of the Andes along most of the length of South America, and along the Brazilian
Amazon basin. It has a very small number of speakers (perhaps a million) for such
a vast area. The group contains the Carib family, one of the largest in South America,
with over 80 languages spoken by tiny numbers throughout the whole northern
region. Only Carib itself has as many as 5000 speakers. Macro-Panoan, also within
this group, is a family of c.70 languages spoken from Peru and Bolivia eastward to
Brazil, and southward to Paraguay and Argentina. Mataco is the only language with
more than 10,000 speakers. The Macro-Gé family has c.30 languages, spoken mainly
in eastern Brazil. All these languages use the Roman alphabet when written down.
»> Amerindian.
German A West Germanic language spoken by c.100 million people, chiefly in
Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein, and spilling over into nearby
countries, notably France, Denmark, Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Poland, the Czech
and Slovak republics, Romania, and Kazakhstan. It is the official language of Germany
and Austria, and one of the official languages of Switzerland, and is used as a
lingua franca in much of eastern Europe by c.20 million people. Large numbers of
German-speaking immigrants are to be found in the USA, Brazil, and several other
countries. German is written in the Roman alphabet, sometimes in the form of

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Germanic

the traditional ‘Gothic’ script. Two main varieties are recognized. High German
(Hochdeutsch) is the language of the southern highlands, and the basis of the
modern written language. Low German (Plattdeutsch or Niederdeutsch) is the
spoken language of the northern lowlands. The period around 1100 is recognized
as the boundary between Old High German (in evidence from the 9th century)
and Middle High German, the latter preserved in many texts, such as the epic
Nibelungenlied and the many courtly poems of the troubadours (minnesingers).
Several important regional varieties of Modern High German exist, notably those of
Austria and Switzerland. Three varieties associated with emigrant religious settle-
ments are spoken in other countries (especially the Americas): Mennonite (intro-
duced bya 16th-century Anabaptist group, named after the reformer Menno Simons),
Hutterite (introduced by another Anabaptist group, named after Jakob Hutter),
and Pennsylvanian (introduced by later settlers in Pennsylvania), also known as
Pennsylvanian Dutch (a popular etymology from Deutsch ‘German’). »>black letter
writing; diglossia; etymology; Germanic; Yiddish.

Germanic An Indo-European family of languages, spoken by over 550 million

people as a first language (largely because of the worldwide distribution of English),
descended from the Germanic tribes who lived in northern Europe during the
first millennium Bc. Some Germanic words are recorded in Latin authors, and
Scandinavian inscriptions in the runic alphabet are recorded from the 3rd century
AD. The languages are usually classified into three groups. East Germanic is now
extinct, with only Gothic recorded in manuscript to any extent. North Germanic
includes the Scandinavian languages of Swedish and Danish (East Scandinavian),
and Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faeroese (West Scandinavian), along with the older
states of these languages (Old Norse), notably the literary variety of Old Icelandic.
Within West Germanic, English and Frisian are often grouped together as Anglo-
Frisian; German, Yiddish, Netherlandic (i.e. Dutch, including local Flemish dialects
in Belgium), and Afrikaans are often grouped together as Netherlandic-German.
»> Afrikaans; Dutch; English; Faeroese; Frisian; German; Gothic; rune; Scandinavian;
Yiddish.

Germany (population in 1995 estimated at 82,235,000) The official language is

German. There are c.20 languages spoken by various immigrant groups, notably
Arabic (c.70,000), Greek (c.318,000), Italian (c.550,000), Kurdish (c.500,000), and
Turkish (c.1.5 million). Sorbian in Lusatia (c.70,000) and Danish in South Slesvig
(c.50,000) have official regional status. Frisian is spoken in the coastal islands region.
There are c.240,000 Polish speakers near the eastern border, c.100,000 Dutch speakers
in the north-west, and an uncertain number of speakers of Romani. »German.

gerund /‘Gerand/ >participle.

gerundive /da'randiv/ >participle.

Ghana (population in 1995 estimated at 17,086,000) The official language is English,

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 glide

spoken by c.1 million as a second language. There are c.70 local languages, notably
Akan (spoken by c.45% of the population), More, Ewe, and Ga-Adangme (Ga is the
chief language used in the capital, Accra). Hausa is used asa lingua franca in the north.
Several of the languages have official literary status. »>English; lingua franca.
Gheg /geg/ >Albanian.

ghost form A word originating in error during the copying, analysing, or learning
of a language, which does not exist in the original language. An example is Dord,
printed in one dictionary as a headword, though it was a misinterpretation of a card
heading ‘D or d’.

Gibraltar (population in 1995 estimated at 30,700) The official language is English,

used by about a third of the population (by c.3000 as a first language). Spanish is
used by another third, and several other languages are spoken by small numbers,
notably Arabic (c.3000). »»English.

Gilyak /'giljak/ A language generally placed within the Paleosiberian grouping,

spoken by c.400 people around the Amur River estuary and in the north of Sakhalin
Island; also called Nivkhi. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The language has
no known relatives. »>isolate; Paleosiberian.

given Descriptive of one of the two main constituents comprising the information
structure of an utterance. Given information is that already supplied by the previous
linguistic context; also called the topic. It contrasts with mew information, which
has not been previously supplied; also called the comment. For example, following
the sentence Jane arrived in a taxi, the sentence The taxi had a bent bumper can be
analysed as containing a given constituent (the topic is the taxi) and anew constituent
(the comment is the rest of the sentence). Topicalization is the movement of a
constituent to the front of a sentence to act as topic, as in On the bumper was a big
scratch. »>information structure.

Glagolitic script /glaga'litik/ An early Slavic script, possibly invented by St Cyril

in the 9th century, but according to some views deriving from Greek cursive writing
current in the 7th or 8th centuries. Glagolitic became widely used alongside Cyrillic
in Bulgaria, Macedonia, and nearby regions, but was gradually replaced by Cyrillic,
though surviving in Croatia, especially in religious settings, until the beginning of
the 19th century. There was renewed interest in the script in the early 1990s.
»>Cyrillic; Slavic.

glide 1. A transitional sound produced as the vocal organs move towards or away
from an articulation (or a position of rest). A movement towards a target position
is called an on-glide; a movement away is called an off-glide. »>articulation. 2. A
vowel where there is an audible change of quality; diphthongs and triphthongs are
both types of glide. »vowel. 3. A tone involving a change of pice level; falling
tones and rising tones are both glides, in this sense. »>tone.

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 global aphasia

global aphasia >aphasia.

Glosa /'glpsa/ >Interglossa.
glossary An alphabetical list of the terms used in a special field, along with brief
_explanations (glosses). A word which provides a translation or explanation of
another word (such as one in a foreign language) is also known as a gloss. »>lexic-
ography.

glossogenetics /glosaud'netiks/ The study of the origins and development of

language, both in the child and in the race. It involves a wide range of contributing
sciences, including biology, anthropology, psychology, semiotics, neurology, and
primatology, as well as linguistics. »>origins of language.

glossographia »glossolalia.
glossolalia /glpsa‘leilia/ The religious practice of speaking in tongues —a widespread
phenomenon within the Pentecostal tradition of Protestantism and charismatic
Roman Catholicism. Many glossolalists believe they are speaking a real but unknown
language, but linguistic analysis has shown the utterance patterns to be quite unlike
ordinary language, being simpler and more repetitive. Glossolalic speech is inter-
preted in a general way, usually as a sign of a person’s belief or as evidence of
conversion. Its written equivalent is called glossographia. »>xenoglossia.

glottal Descriptive of sounds made in the larynx, due to closure or narrowing of

the glottis (the aperture between the vocal folds). The audible release of a complete
closure at the glottis is a glottal stop, symbolized as [?] — heard, for example, in a
Cockney or Cockney-influenced accent, where it replaces the [t] in such words as
bottle. Glottalization is a general term for any articulation involving a simultaneous
glottal constriction. »>glottalic.

glottalic /gla'talik/ Descriptive of the use of the glottis to initiate an airstream

capable of making consonant sounds. Ejective sounds result from an outward flow
of air; implosive consonants result from an inward flow. »>airstream; ejective; glottis;
implosive.

glottis >glottal.

glottochronology A controversial approach to language history in which a statisti-

cal technique (lexicostatistics) is used to quantify, in units of time, the extent to
which languages have diverged from a common source. A sample of vocabulary is
taken from two languages, using a basic word list, and the number of similar words
between the languages is counted. Glottochronologists assume that the lower the
number of vocabulary agreements between the two samples, the longer the languages
have been separated. »>diachronic linguistics.

goal In grammatical analysis, the entity that is affected by the action of the verb.
It is usually equivalent to the grammatical object (e.g. the balloon in The pin burst the —

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 gradability

balloon), but it may appear in other grammatical locations (e.g. as subject in the
Passive construction, The balloon was burst by the pin). »actor—action—goal; object.

gobbledegook »>Plain English Campaign.

Goidelic /goi'delik/ >Celtic.
Golden Bull Awards »>Plain English Campaign.

Gothic An East Germanic language, now extinct, spoken by the Goths, a people
who migrated from southern Scandinavia throughout eastern and south-eastern
Europe during the later 2nd century ap. There is evidence of two dialects, relating
to the two chief tribes: Ostrogothic, spoken chiefly in the east, and Visigothic, spoken
chiefly in the west. Gothic provides the earliest evidence of the Germanic language
family, and is largely attested in the remains of a translation of the Bible made by
Bishop Ulfilas (or Wulfilas) in the 4th century ap — the Codex Argenteus, so-called
from its gold and silver writing on purple-red parchment. In Spain and Italy, the
language died out in the 6th—-7th centuries, following the various defeats of the
Gothic tribes. In the Crimea, however, a variety of Gothic was still being recorded
in the 16th century (Crimean Gothic). The Gothic alphabet had 27 letters, chiefly
derived from Greek, with some Latin and runic symbols. This alphabet should be
carefully distinguished from Gothic script, which is a black-letter form of the
Roman alphabet. »>black letter writing; Germanic; Gothic script; rune.

Gothic script »>black letter writing.

government A type of syntactic linkage whereby one word (or word class) requires
that another word (or class) beina particular form. In Latin, forexample, a preposition
governs a noun in a specific case: cum ‘with’ takes the ablative case; ad ‘to’ takes the
accusative. »>case; concord; preposition; word class.

government and binding theory (GB) A model of generative grammar which

involves three main levels of structure (known as D-structure, S-structure, and Logical
Form) and a set of interacting sub-theories. The model takes its name from two of
these sub-theories: ‘binding’ deals with the conditions which formally relate (or
‘bind’) certain elements of a sentence; ‘government’ deals with the structural contexts
within which these binding relationships obtain. The approach is also described by
the phrase principles and parameters, for its view that the same principles of
syntax are operative in all languages, though they can take a slightly different form
in different languages. The approach is also described as modular, because of the
way its explanations may derive from different principles (or modules) of the
grammar. »>generative grammar; parameter.
GPSG An abbreviation of generalized phrase-structure grammar.

Grabar /gra'ba:/ »Armenian.

gradability Variability in degree, viewed grammatically or semantically. A word

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gradation

is gradable if it allows the possibility of comparison or intensification, using such

means as comparative/superlative form (e.g. slower, most interestingly) and adverbs
of degree (very big, especially small). If these possibilities are not available, the word
is ungradable (e.g. *most upstairs). »>antonymy.

gradation >ablaut.

grammar 1. A systematic analysis of the structure of a language. A contrast is often

drawn between a descriptive grammar, which provides a precise account of
actual usage, and a prescriptive grammar, which attempts to establish rules for
the correct use of language in society. A comprehensive practical description of the
structure of a language is a reference grammar. A theoretical grammar goes
beyond the study of individual languages, and uses linguistic data as a means of
developing insights into the nature of language as such, and into the categories and
processes needed for linguistic analysis. A performance grammar analyses the
structures found in a corpus of speech or writing; this contrasts with a competence
grammar, which is predictive of a speaker’s knowledge. A grammar of the latter
kind is usually thought of as a generative grammar, a device which gives a finite
specification of the sentences of a language. A grammar which tries to establish the
defining (universal) characteristics of human language is a universal grammar.
In so far as grammar concentrates on the study of linguistic forms, or analyses
language using the formalized techniques of logic or mathematics, it may be referred
to as formal grammar; this is often contrasted with notional grammar, which
assumes the existence of extralinguistic categories in order to define grammatical
units. Traditional grammar refers to the range of attitudes and methods found
in the prelinguistic era of grammatical study, and especially in the European school
grammars of the 18th and 19th centuries. »>case/finite state/formal/generalized
phrase - structure / generative /lexical-functional / phrase -structure/ relational / scale
and category/systemic grammar; clause; competence; corpus; prescriptivism. 2. A
level of structural organization which can be studied independently of phonology
and semantics, generally divided into the branches of syntax and morphology.
It is the study of the way in which words, and their component parts, combine to
form phrases, clauses, sentences, and other units. »>clause; morphology; parsing;
phrase; rule 1; syntax.

grammar-translation method A method of foreign language teaching in which

grammatical analysis and translation exercises have a dominant role. This was the
main way in which Latin and Greek were traditionally taught in European schools,
and the method was automatically introduced into the teaching of modern lan-
guages. The present-day emphasis on the need to teach the spoken language has
reduced the use of the grammar-translation method (which was based almost
exclusively on the study of reading and writing), but it is still widely practised.
»>direct method; language teaching; method.

grammatical Descriptive of a sentence (or part of a sentence) which conforms to

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 graphology

the rules defined by a specific grammar of a language; also called well-formed. A

preceding asterisk is commonly used to indicate that a sentence is incapable of being
accounted for in this way - in other words, it is ungrammatical or ill-formed
(e.g. *Sentence this is ill-formed). »»acceptable; semi-sentence.

grammatical gender »>gender.

grammatical word A word with no lexical meaning, whose function is solely to

express a grammatical relationship; also called a form word, function word,
structural word, functor, or empty word. English examples include the, of,
and to (as in I want to see). Far more frequent in a language are words which have a
statable lexical meaning (e.g. book, red, run); these are called lexical words, content
words, contentives, or full words.

graph The smallest separable segment in a stretch of writing or print. The notion
includes letters, punctuation marks, and special symbols such as & and *.
»> graphology 1.
grapheme The smallest contrastive unit in the writing system of a language — a
notion devised on analogy with that of the phoneme, used in the study of a
language’s sound system. In alphabetic languages, the chief graphemes are the
letters. Graphemes are usually transcribed within angle brackets: (e), (E), (,), ($), etc.
»> graphology 1; letter; phoneme.
graphetics The study of the graphic substance of written or printed language — a
term coined on analogy with phonetics. Graphic substance is the written or printed
form of language, seen as a set of physically definable marks on a surface. »>graph;
graphology 1; phonetics; phonic substance.

graphic substance »graphetics.

graphic translatability The conversion of graphic expression from a medium

with one range of resources into another in which the range is different. The problem
arises between any two mediums (e.g. handwriting and typescript), but has become
especially prominent in relation to the properties available in electronic displays,
where often a very limited range of characters is available. For example, consideration
needs to be given to the range of options available for the expression of emphasis
on the screen (e.g. underlining, capitalization, typeface change, spacing, flashing
lights, colour, movement), and to the implications of choosing one option rather
than another. »>typography.
graphology 1. The writing system of a language, or the linguistic study of that
system, using analogous techniques to those devised for phonology. The data
includes handwriting, print, and the forms displayed on computer screens. An
interesting question is the extent to which there is ‘graphic translatability’ between
these mediums: the range of options routinely available in print is rather different
from the range of options routinely available on a screen (e.g. typefaces, special

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i Top stroke roofing over the whole word Mounting stroke :
Aggressive, ambitious

ey
Spirit of protection, patronizing

; Cross at the top

Arcs extending to the left Longing to get to the top, bossiness
Fussiness, bad taste, vulgarity

Cross right over the top

Knotted Idealism, high-flying dreams,
Toughness, thoroughness neglect of realities

With large loop

Pride in own achievements SON Cross to the right
Quick thinking, thoughts running
before actions

Cross going down Cross to the left

Disappointed, sulky, resentful, Caution, procrastination
low opinion of others

Low crossing i
Subordination Missing cross
Weakness, carelessness, lack of
consideration

Cross broadening
Vigour, brutality Cross in wavy line form
Sense of fun

Cross sharpening
Malicious criticism Curved cross
Weak health

Hooks Cross going down and left

Sulkiness, persistence, pigheadedness Material greed,-rascal

Inverted, ending in an arc Cross going up and left

Quick, ready liar Egoism

ms
OK
SEN
SENSBSs
Se
Se
Pe
co
Loop
Veaniy,at packaaies
the top Down-strok
Egoism
Stroke A
going up and left

Twenty-two ways of writing t, and their interpretations - according to one

graphology manual.
 Grenada

symbols, spacing and layout conventions). »»alphabet; graphetics; graphic translat-

ability; orthography; script; writing. 2. The study of handwriting to obtain infor-
mation about a person’s character and personality. The analyst is called a
graphologist. Handwriting characteristics have been studied with reference to all
kinds of normal and pathological states — as encountered in samples obtained from
the famous (e.g. monarchs, criminals, authors, and politicians) or the ordinary (e.g.
determining someone’s employment suitability or marriage compatibility). The
subject is controversial, given the limited evidence concerning the accuracy or
reliability of its procedures and conclusions. »>chirography.

grave accent /gra:v/ The accent ~, used to distinguish the sound values of letters
in several languages, such as in French mere ‘mother’. It is sometimes used in English,
as in the word learnéd ‘scholarly’. The symbol can also be used to mark certain kinds
of pitch movement in a tone language or phonetic transcription. »»accent 3.

Greece (population in 1995 estimated at 10,513,000) The official language is Greek

(spoken by over 98% of the population). Other languages include Albanian, Arabic,
Armenian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Romanian, Romani, and Turkish. English is
increasingly used for international trade and tourism. »»Greek.
Greek An Indo-European language, spoken by c.12 million people in Greece, in
the Greek part of Cyprus, in nearby areas of adjacent countries, and as an immigrant
language in several countries of Europe and America. The modern language is
found in two main varieties: Dimotiki (‘popular language’) is based on the spoken
language, and is widely used in everyday communication; Katharévusa (‘pure
language’) reflects the classical language more closely, and is found in official docu-
ments, newspapers, and other formal contexts. It is written in the Greek alphabet.
The language is attested from around the 14th century Bc, the earliest evidence
coming from the inscriptions discovered on Crete, known as Linear B. The language
of this period is known as Mycenaean Greek, which needs to be distinguished
from the later Classical or Ancient Greek, dating from the 8th century Bc, when
texts came to be written in the Greek alphabet, notably the epic poems Iliad and
Odyssey. Several major dialect groups are in evidence at that time (e.g. Doric, Ionic,
Aeolic). The great period of classical drama, history, philosophy, and poetry lasted
until the 4th century sc. A later variety, known as Koiné (‘common’) or Hellenistic
Greek, was spoken throughout the eastern Mediterranean from the 4th century Bc
for c.800 years. In its written form, this was the language of the New Testament. A
period of Byzantine Greek followed, until the 15th century, after which the
language developed into Modern Greek, the foundation of the.varieties in use
today. »>demotic; diglossia; formality; Greece; Indo-European.

Greenland »>Denmark.

Greenlandic »>Eskimo.

Grenada (population in 1995 estimated at 91,900) The official language is English.

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grid game

Nearly half the population speak an English-based creole (Patwa) widely used
throughout the Lesser Antilles. »>creole; English.

grid game A visual word game which operates on the principle of building up words
on a predetermined grid. Familiar examples include crossword puzzles, Scrabble, and
a number of card or tile games in which letters have to be laid out according to
certain rules (e.g. the game of Lexicon). »crossword.

Grimm/’s law A sound law first worked out in 1822 by Jakob Grimm (1785-1863)
which shows the regular way in which the Germanic sound system diverged from
that of Indo-European. Nine sets of correspondences were shown, which fell into a
clear phonetic pattern. Voiced aspirates (a term which includes both aspirated
plosives and fricatives) in Indo-European became voiced plosives in Germanic; voiced
plosives became voiceless plosives; and voiceless plosives became voiceless aspirates.
These relationships explain, for example, why words which begin with /p/ in Latin,
Greek, or Sanskrit generally have /f/ in English (e.g. pater— father). Certain exceptions
to this law were explained by later philologists. »sound change; Verner’s law.

Grishun /'grifn/ >Rhaetian.

groove A slight hollowing along the central line of the tongue, used in producing
the type of fricative called a sibilant, in which the passage of air creates a sound with
a higher frequency than other fricatives (e.g. [s]). The notion contrasts with slit
fricatives (e.g. [f]), where there is no such groove. »>fricative; sibilant.

grounding >foregrounding.

group >phrase.

group genitive >genitive case.

Guadeloupe (population in 1995 estimated at 431,000) The official language is

French. Almost everyone speaks a French-based creole (Patois) widely used through-
out the Lesser Antilles. »»creole; French; Patwa.

Guam (population in 1995 estimated at 155,000) The official language is English,

spoken by c.28,000 people as a first language (mostly US military personnel and
their families). About half the population speak Chamorro, which is an important
lingua franca; about 20% speak Tagalog. »>English; lingua franca.

Guarani /gwara'ni:/ A member of the Tupian family of Andean-Equatorial lan-

guages, spoken by c.4.6 million people in Paraguay (where it is an official language,
along with Spanish), with some in nearby parts of Brazil. It is written in the Roman
alphabet, and there is a growing popular literature. Guarani is now the majority
language of Paraguay, spoken by c.95% of the population, the only Indian language
ever to achieve such a status. » Amerindian; Andean-Equatorial.

Guatemala (population in 1995 estimated at 10,557,000) The official language is

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 Gypsy

Spanish. There are c.20 Amerindian languages (several split into major dialects of
uncertain mutual intelligibility) spoken by about half the population, notably Quiché
(c.700,000), Cakchiquel, Quekchi (Kekchi), and Mam. English is increasingly used
along with Spanish for international purposes. »»Spanish.
Guinea (population in 1995 estimated at 6,543,000) The official language is French.
There are c.30 local languages, notably Fula (Fuuta Jalon, spoken by c.40% of the
population), Maninka (c.25%), and Susu (c.10%). »»French.

Guinea-Bissau (population in 1995 estimated at 1,070,000) The official language

is Portuguese. There are c.20 local languages, notably Balanta (spoken by c.30% of
the population), Fulfulde (Fulacunda, c.20%), Mandinka, and Mandyak. A Portu-
guese-based creole (Crioulo) is spoken by c.150,000 as a first language, and a further
600,000 as a second language. English is increasingly used along with Portuguese
for international purposes. »>creole; Portuguese.
Gujarati /gudea'ra:ti:/ A language belonging to the western group of Indo-Aryan
languages, spoken by c.43 million people chiefly in the state of Gujarat, western
India (where it is an official regional language), with some 400,000 in Pakistan. It is
written in the Gujarati alphabet, a variant of Devanagari. Literary texts date from
the 12th century. Gujarati was the mother-tongue of M.K. Gandhi, who was born
in Porbandar, Gujarat. A variety of the language is used in the Parsi religion. »Devana-
gari; Indo-Aryan.

Gullah /'gala/ »>Sea Islands Creole English.

Gur /gua/ >Voltaic.

Gurkhali /g3:‘kali:/ >Nepaili.

guttural A popular impressionistic label for a consonant sound made towards the
back of the mouth, or for a low-pitched, throaty voice quality. It is not used in
phonetic description, which instead uses such terms as velar, uvular, and pharyngeal
— notions capable of more precise articulatory location. »>articulation; pharyngeal;
uvular; velar.

Guyana (population in 1995 estimated at 750,000) The official language is English.

An English-based creole (Guyanese) is spoken by over 85% of the population. Several
Indian languages are represented, notably Hindi. There are some speakers of creole
Dutch, and c.10 Amerindian languages spoken by a few thousand. »>creole; English.

Gypsy >Romani.

143
H
H >diglossia.

habitual Descriptive of a form (typically, a verb or adverb) which expresses the

repetition of an action. English makes use of a wide range of adverbials which convey
habitual meaning (e.g. often, regularly, three times a week). »>adverb; verb.

Haida /‘haida/ >Na-Dene.

Haiti (population in 1995 estimated at 6,472,000) The official languages are French
and Haitian. Haitian, a French-based creole, is the first language of almost the whole
population. »creole; French.

half-close/half-open vowel >high vowel.

half-rhyme »>pararhyme.
half-uncial >uncial.
Halliday, Michael >Firthian linguistics.
Hamito-Semitic /‘hamitav sa'mitik/ >Afro-Asiatic.

hanging indention >indention.

hapax legomenon /‘hapaks li'gomanan/ A word which occurs only once in a text,
author, or extant corpus of a language; often shortened to hapax. The expression
is from Greek, ‘something said only once’. The word following hapax in the headword
of this entry is itself a hapax in the present book. »>corpus.
haplography /hap'logroafi:/ An omission made in a sequence of identical letters,
as when occurrence is spelled ocurrence or occurence. It is one of the commonest kinds
of spelling mistake. »>spelling.
haplology /hap'loladi:/ The omission of one or more sounds occurring in a
sequence of similar articulations, as takes place in the common colloquial pronunci-
ation of such words as library /"larbri:/ and probably /‘probli:/. The process is common
in the study of historical sound change; for example, Old English Englalond became
Modern English England. »>elision; sound change.
hard palate >palate.
hard sign A symbol (t) used in the Cyrillic alphabet to show that the preceding
sound is ‘hard’ — that is, not palatalized. In modern transcriptions of Russian, it is

144
 headline

often replaced by an apostrophe. It contrasts with the soft sigm (b), which shows
that the preceding sound is ‘soft’ — palatalized. »»Cyrillic; palate.
hare lip >cleft palate speech.
harmonic >fundamental frequency.
harmony A type of assimilation which takes place when sounds of a particular
class (consonants or vowels) come to share certain features with other sounds of
the same class, elsewhere in a word or phrase; usually classified into consonant
harmony and vowel harmony. The sounds are not adjacent to each other, but
are often within the same word — for example, a front vowel in the first syllable
might require the presence of a front vowel in the second syllable, or the occurrence
of one consonant with lip rounding might require that other consonants in the
word are also lip rounded. Languages which display harmony as a systematic feature
of their sound system include Turkish and Hungarian. When young children are
learning to talk, their early efforts often display harmony — as can be seen from one
English child’s version of window, /wawa/, which displays both vowel and consonant
harmony. »>assimilation; consonant; front sound; rounding; vowel.

Hausa /‘hauso, 'havza/ A member of the Chadic family of languages, spoken by

c.22 million people as a first language, and a further 15 million as a second language,
chiefly in Nigeria (c.19 million), Niger, and nearby parts of Cameroon, Chad, and
Ghana. It is an official regional language in northern Nigeria, and widely used as a
lingua franca throughout West Africa. It has the largest number of speakers of any
language in Africa below the Sahara. Literary Hausa, based on the Kano dialect, was
written in the Arabic alphabet from the 16th century, but this has been largely
replaced by the Roman alphabet in the present century. It is the only Chadic language
to have a written form. »»Chadic.
Hawaiian Islands (population in 1990 estimated at 1,243,000) The official
language is English. About half the population speak an English-based creole, which
is receiving increased official and literary recognition. Hawaiian (an Austronesian
language) is spoken as a first language by c.1000 people in the state of Hawaii, where
it has some official status, and by a further c.8000 as a second language. »>creole;
English.

head >endocentric construction; headline.

header >headline.

headline A heading which indicates in summary form the subject-matter of a piece

of text, often set in larger type than the rest of the text; in typography, also called
the head or header. The notion is well-known in the context of newspapers. In
book publishing, it refers to the heading set at the top of most pages (but not over
chapter openings); when this heading is the same throughout a chapter or section,
it is usually called a running head. »typography.

145
headword

headword The item which occurs at the beginning of a dictionary entry. It is

essentially an abstract representation, or lemma, subsuming all the formal variations
which may occur: walk, for example, subsumes walks, walking, and walked. In the
present entry, the headword is headword (and, by implication, headwords). »>lexic-
ography.

hearing loss >deafness.

Hebrew A Semitic language spoken by c.4.5 million people in Israel (where it is

the official language), and used with varying levels of fluency, often only in religious
contexts, by Jewish people all over the world (c.14 million in 1997). It is written
from right to left in a 22-letter alphabet. Hebrew was spoken throughout ancient
Palestine until about the 3rd century Bc (when it gave way to Aramaic), but continued
in use as the liturgical and literary language of Judaism. The classical written form
was revived as a spoken language in the 19th century, associated with the Zionist
movement —- Modern Hebrew, a unique linguistic development. Written records
date from the 2nd century Bc, and the period of Classical (or Biblical) Hebrew
continues until around the 3rd century Bc. Mishnaic Hebrew is a later form of
the language used in the collection of rabbinical writings (the Mishna) compiled c.
AD 200, and later expanded (as the Gemara), the whole set of commentaries compris-
ing the Talmud. Medieval Hebrew is the form of the written language as it developed
in religion and scholarship between the 6th and 13th centuries, when it was much
in contact with other languages in Europe and the Middle East. Several varieties and
mixed forms of the language have since developed (e.g. Yiddish), along with the
spread of Judaism around the world. »>Israel; Semitic; Yiddish.

hermeneutics /h3:man'ju:tiks/, The study of the principles and methodology

involved in textual interpretation. The subject developed as a branch of theology,
studying the principles of biblical exegesis, but it later broadened to include literary
and other texts. The term is also used in sociolinguistics, where it refers to the task
of interpreting specific instances of discourse. »>exegesis; cartoon, p. 147.

hertz The unit for measuring sound vibration; abbreviated as Hz. It has replaced
an earlier measure, which used the notion of ‘cycles per second’. The name derives
from German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857-94), the discoverer of radio waves.
»» frequency; intonation.

hesitation A pause or meaningless noise (typically, er or erm in English) which

breaks up the flow of speech. Hesitations have a variety of functions: some indicate
that the speaker is thinking what to say next; some express an attitude, such as
doubt or uncertainty. >»>pause.

heterography /heto'rografi:/ >homography 1.

heteronyms /‘hetaranimz/ Words which display partial homonymy, differing in

meaning, but identical in form in one medium only (speech or writing). Threw and

146
 hieroglyphic

=
ae

‘You mean that’s it— this one went to market

and this one didn’t?’ (hermeneutics)

through are heteronyms, identical in sound but not in spelling, as are tear (in clothing)
and tear (from the eye), identical in spelling but not in sound. »homonyms.

heterophemy /heta'rpfemi:/ An unintentional error in spoken or written language;

the term derives from Greek words meaning ‘other’ and ‘speech’. Such errors may
occur in everyday speech (as when we have a slip of the tongue) or in clinical
conditions (such as aphasia). »malapropism.
heterotopy /heta'rvtapi:/ A misplaced sound during speech, especially when some-
one is speaking very quickly; the term derives from Greek words meaning ‘other’
and ‘place’. It may occur both in everyday speech and in certain clinical conditions
(notably, cluttering). »>cluttering.
hexameter >metrics.

hierarchy A classification of linguistic units which recognizes a series of successively

subordinate levels. An example is the analysis of a sentence into constituents, or the
relationship between different linguistic levels, such as sentence, clause, phrase,
word, and morpheme. »level 3; morpheme.

hieratic /hato'ratik/ »demotic.

hieroglyphic /hatara'glifik/ A writing system which uses mainly pictorial symbols;

also called hieroglyphics. The name comes from the Greek, meaning ‘sacred
carving’, so called because of its prominent use in temples, tombs, and other special

147
high tone

Hieroglyphic Hieratic
Hiero-
glyphic
bookscript

ENE
.
if

ps
Evee
mt Fy fp»
2900- | 2700-
2800 | 2600
BC BC tease
Ne
1500 |c1900 |<1300.|
BC BC BC

Egyptian hieroglyphs, and their later hieratic and demotic forms.

<200 | 700°
BC
BC

places. It is especially applied to the form of pictography developed in Egypt c.3000

BC, though other systems can be found in China, the Indus Valley, Central America,
and elsewhere. The units of the writing system are called hieroglyphs. >»>Egyptian;
Mayan; pictogram; Rosetta Stone.
high tone >tone.

high variety >diglossia.

high vowel A vowel produced in the upper region of the mouth, with the tongue
close to the palate or velum, such as [i] or [ul]; also called a close vowel. It contrasts
with a low vowel, which is produced with the body of the tongue relatively low
in the mouth, such as [a]; also called an open vowel. A further distinction is
sometimes made with a mid or medial vowel, such as [e], which is articulated
between these two extremes. Another classification recognizes two intermediate
qualities, called mid-close or half-close, such as [e], and mid-open or half-open,
such as [¢]. This dimension of vowel classification is strongly related to the close/
open position of the lower jaw. >»>central sound; tongue; vowel.

148
 hoiograph

Hindi /‘hindi:/ A member of the Midland group of Indo-Aryan languages, spoken

as a first language by c.180 million people throughout India, and by a similar number
as a second language in India. It is also used by significant numbers in South
Africa (c.890,000), Mauritius (c.685,000), Bangladesh (c.346,000), and many other
countries, so that the total for all first and second language users worldwide is now
c.420 million. It is a union language, along with English, in the Republic of India
(1995 population, 944 million), the official language of a number of Indian states,
and a lingua franca in India for about half the population. There is little structural
difference between Hindi and Urdu, and the two varieties are often grouped together
under the single label Hindi/Urdu, sometimes abbreviated to Hirdu, and formerly
often called Hindustani. However, there is a considerable cultural distance, Hindi
being the variety in use by Hindus (Urdu by Muslims), and displaying the marked
influence of Sanskrit in its vocabulary. A literary language dates from the 7th century
AD. The variety known as Braj Bhasa was the chief literary medium between the 15th
and 18th centuries, but the modern literary language is based on a different variety,
known as Khari Boli. It is written in the Devanagari alphabet. »»Devanagari; India;
Indo-Aryan; lingua franca; Urdu.

Hindustani /hindv'sta:ni:/ >Hindi; Urdu.

hiragana /hire'ga:na/ >kana.

Hirdu /‘hiedu:/ >Hindi; Urdu.
Hiri Motu /‘hiri: 'mavtu:/ >Motu.
historical linguistics >diachronic linguistics; philology.
historic(al) present The use of a present tense form while narrating events which
happened in the past; for example, Three weeks ago I’m walking down this road, when
I see Smithers coming towards me. ..This usage is common in contexts where the
speaker wishes to convey a sense of drama, immediacy, or urgency. >>tense 1.

Hittite /‘hitait/ >Anatolian; ideogram; p. 156.

Hokan /‘havkn/ A group of c.20 Amerindian languages spoken by small numbers
in parts of western and south-western USA, and eastern Mexico. It includes some
North American and some Meso-American families of languages, and thus forms
part of a linguistic continuity between the Americas. Tlapanec is the only language
with over 20,000 speakers. Several Hokan languages have become extinct in recent
times. When written down, they use the Roman alphabet. »»Amerindian.

Holland >Netherlands, The.

holograph /‘hvlagraf/ A document which is entirely written in the handwriting of

its author. Informal letters are the commonest examples of holographic writing, but
certain formal documents may also be produced in this way, notably wills (in some
legal systems). »>paleography.

149
holophrase

holophrase /‘hvlafreiz/ A word which expresses the meaning of a whole sentence.

It is a grammatically unstructured utterance, characteristic of the earliest stage of
language learning in children, typically appearing between 12 and 18 months. For
example, a child saying more might mean ‘I want some more’. Holophrastic utterances
sometimes contain several elements which would be separate words in the adult
language, such as allgone. »>acquisition; sentence.

homographs /‘homagrafs/ Words which have the same spelling but different
meanings, as in wind (‘which blows’ vs. ‘a clock’). Homography is one of the main
types of homonymy. »>homonyms.

homography /ha'mpgrofi:/ 1. An orthographic system where there is a one-to-one

correspondence between symbols and sounds, as in some alphabets. It contrasts
with heterography, where the system lacks this correspondence. The clearest
example of a homographic system is the International Phonetic Alphabet. »>Inter-
national Phonetic Association; orthography. 2. »homographs.

homonyms /‘homanimz/ Words which have the same form but different meanings,
as in ear (‘of a body’ or ‘of corn’). Partial homonymy (heteronymy) takes place
when the identity is within a single medium, as in homophony (for sounds) and
homography (for spellings). When there is ambiguity between homonyms, a
homonymic clash is said to have occurred. »heteronyms; homographs; homo-
phenes; homophones; polysemy.

homophenes /‘homoafi:nz/ Words which are visually identical, when seen on the
lips; examples are fan and van. The notion has developed chiefly in relation to the
study of deaf communication. »homonyms; speech reading.

homophones /‘homofaunz/ Words which have the same pronunciation but differ-
ent meanings, as in rode and rowed. Homophony is one of the main types of hom-
onymy. »homonyms.

Honduras (population in 1995 estimated at 5,628,000) The official language is

Spanish, used by most of the population. There are a few Amerindian languages
spoken by perhaps 90,000 people, and a few thousand speak an English-based creole.
English is used along with Spanish for international purposes. »»Spanish.

Hong Kong (population at the time of the change of rule in 1997 estimated at
6,083,000) The official languages are English and Chinese. Yue Chinese (Cantonese)
is spoken by c.98% of the population. A few thousand speak a Portuguese-based
creole (Macanese), derived from Macao, and there are several immigrant languages,
notably Vietnamese and Philippines languages. »»Chinese; creole; English.

honorific /ona'rifik/ A grammatical form used to express a level of politeness or

respect, related to the social status of the participants in a conversation. Many
languages of the Far East, such as Japanese, have a well-developed honorific system,

150
 hypercorrection

containing several levels of politeness, and often distinguishing between male and
female participants. »Japanese; politeness phenomena.
hortative /‘ho:tativ/ >mood.

Hottentot >Khoisan.

humanistic Descriptive of approaches to foreign language teaching which empha-

size the need for the student to develop self-awareness, sensitivity to the feelings of
others, and a sense of human values. Such approaches require students to be actively
involved in understanding the processes of learning, as they work with a foreign
language. »community language learning; silent way; suggestopedia.
Hungarian The chief language of the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric family,
spoken by c.14.5 million people, chiefly in Hungary (c.10 million), Romania (c.2
million), the Czech and Slovak republics, Yugoslavia (in Voivodina, where it has
official status), and Ukraine; also called Magyar. It is written in the Roman alphabet,
modified with certain diacritics (notably, the use of the acute accent to mark long
vowels, as in 6, and the double acute accent to mark front long rounded vowels, as
in 6). A characteristic feature of the sound system is vowel harmony. A literary
tradition dates from the early 13th century, but a standard orthography did not
emerge until the 16th century. »»Finno-Ugric; Hungary; vowel.
Hungary (population in 1995 estimated at 10,220,000) The official language is
Hungarian, spoken by c.98% of the population. Other languages include German,
Romani, varieties of Serbo-Croatian, and Slovene. English and German are used for
international purposes. »»Hungarian.

Hutterite German >German.

hybrid A word composed of elements from different languages; for example,

television comprises elements from both Latin and Greek. »neologism.
hydronymy /har'dronami:/ The study of the names of rivers, lakes, and other
bodies of water. It is a domain within onomastics. »onomastics.
hyperbole /har'p3:bali:/ A figure of speech which involves emphatic exaggeration.
Often recognized in literature (as in Hamlet’s forty thousand brothers could not, with
all their quantity of love, make up my sum), it is far more often encountered in everyday
conversation (where there are millions of examples). »>figurative language.
hypercorrection The use of a linguistic form which goes beyond the norm of a
target variety, because of the speaker’s desire to be correct, and thus results in a form
which is not part of the target variety; also called hyperurbanism or overcorrec-
tion. This usually happens when a nonstandard speaker tries to use the standard
language or a prestige accent. An example is the first vowel of butcher, which is
sometimes pronounced with an open unrounded articulation (using the vowel of
cup, /A/) instead of with a close rounded articulation (using the vowel of put, /u/) by

1S1
hypernasality

speakers who have noticed the distinctive quality of the /a/ vowel in Received
Pronunciation and are trying to reproduce it. RP speakers, however, use /u/ in butcher.
»>Received Pronunciation; standard.

hypernasality Excessive nasal resonance in speech, usually the result of a clinical

condition. It contrasts with hyponasality, which is the lack of normal nasal
resonance in speech. Cleft palate speech, for example, is typically hypernasal. The
speech of someone suffering from a bad cold is typically hyponasal. »>nasal.

hypernym /‘haipanim/ >hyponymy.

hyperurbanism »>hypercorrection.

hyphen A punctuation mark which. indicates a division within a word. Such

divisions take place at the end of a line of print, where a word will not fit without a
break (exclam- ation), and to mark the parts of a complex word, such as a compound
(mother-in-law) or certain prefixed forms (ex-husband). The conventions governing
use are not clear-cut, however, in either function. Some dictionaries print guidelines
for word division, but there is often disagreement about what counts as a ‘natural’
dividing point for a word (to continue the above example, should it be excla- mation
or exclama- tion?), and different practices will be encountered between the UK and
USA, and between publishers. Similarly, there is widespread divergence over the use
of the hyphen within compound words: one will find all three possibilities — flowerpot
(written solid), flower-pot, and flower pot (written open). Consistency is important
in formal work, and publishing houses make recommendations about how to handle
such forms in their style guides. »punctuation.

hypocoristic /haipako'ristik/ A pet name, such as Willie or honey. Ingenious and

bizarre coinages may be encountered, as seen in the love messages published in
some British national newspapers on St Valentine’s Day. >»>Valentine. r

hyponasality >hypernasality; nasal.

hyponymy /hal'ppnemi:/ A semantic relationship between specific and general

lexical items, such that the former is included in the latter; for example, dog is a
hyponym of animal, and animal is a hypermym of dog. The lexical items which
are included within the same superordinate term are said to be co-hyponyms —
dog, cat, cow, etc., with reference to animal. »»incompatibility; lexeme; sense.

hypostatize /hai'ppstataiz/ »>personification.

hypotactic /hatpa'taktik/ Descriptive of a dependent grammatical relationship,

especially one where the constituents are linked by subordinating conjunctions.
A contrast is drawn with paratactic constructions, where the linkage, between
constituents of equal status, is conveyed solely by juxtaposition and punctuation/
intonation. The butcher, whose name is Mr Jones, has got married illustrates hypotaxis;

152
 Hz

The butcher, Mr Jones, has got married illustrates parataxis. »coordination; subordi-
nation.

hypothetical >conditional.
Hz An abbreviation of hertz.

153
iamb /‘atam/ >foot.

Iberian /ar'biarian/ A non-Indo-European language spoken in parts of southern

and south-eastern Spain, especially around the Ebro River, in pre-Roman times. It
may formerly have been used throughout a much wider area of western Europe. It
is known mainly through inscriptions on stones and artefacts, few of which have
been interpreted. Its 28-letter script showed the influence of both the Greek and the
Phoenician alphabets. Some scholars have argued that Basque is a descendant of
Iberian, but the limited evidence is not strong. »»Basque; Indo-European; Isolate.

Ibibio /tba'bi:au/ >Efik.

Ibo >Igbo.

IC An abbreviation of immediate constituent.

ICAME /‘atkerm/ An abbreviation of International Computer Archive of

Modern English.

ICE >International Corpus of English.

Iceland (population in 1995 estimated at 268,000) The official language is Icelandic,

spoken by the whole population. English is the language used for international
purposes. »>Icelandic.

Icelandic A North Germanic language, a member of the West Scandinavian group,

spoken by over 260,000 people in Iceland, where it is the official language, with a
further c.15,000 in Canada and the USA. Old Icelandic (the literary language of
medieval Iceland) came from Norway in the 9th century, and is best known as the
language of the medieval sagas, and of the two 13th century poetry and prose
compilations called the Edda. The modern language has retained many of the features
of the older period, so that Icelanders today can still read the ancient sagas with
little difficulty (unlike the situation in English, where special training is needed to
read the texts of early Middle or Old English). It is written in the Roman alphabet.
»>Iceland; Scandinavian.

iconicity /atko'nisiti:/ A close physical relationship between a linguistic sign (typi-

cally, a word) and the entity or process in the world to which it refers. A particularly
clear example is a map, where the signs represent real-world features in a one-to-one
way. Iconicity is not a central feature of speech or writing, though instances of iconic

154
 Igbo

relationships do occur, as in the case of sound symbolism. »onomatopoeia; sign 1;

sound symbolism.

ictus /'‘Iktus/ The stressed syllable in a metrical unit. In The curfew tolls the knell... ,
there is an ictus on cur, tolls, and knell. »>foot; metrics.

ideation /aidi:'ei{n/ The cognitive process of forming ideas and relationships of

meaning, prior to their formulation in language. Ideational meaning is often
contrasted with other types of meaning (e.g. emotive meaning), in semantic analysis.
»>referential language.

ideogram /‘idi:augram/ A symbol used in a writing system to represent a whole word

or concept; also called an ideograph. Ideographic writing is usually distinguished as
a later development from pictographic. Ideograms have an abstract or conventional
meaning, no longer displaying a clear pictorial link with external reality. Examples
include a foot shape representing ‘go’ or a sun symbol representing ‘wisdom’.
»>logogram; pictogram; p. 156.

ideograph /‘idi:sugraf/ >ideogram.

idioglossia /idi:au'glosia/ An invented form of speech whose meaning is known

only to the inventor(s); also called autonomous speech or cryptophasia. An
example is the idiosyncratic form of communication which sometimes emerges
spontaneously between twins - though ‘twin language’ is not usually consciously
invented, being generally only a deviant form of the local mother-tongue. »>glos-
solalia.

idiolect /‘Idi:oulekt/ The linguistic system of an individual speaker. Idiolects are

‘personal dialects’, arising from the way people have learned slightly different usages
in pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, and style. »»dialect; lect.

idiom A sequence of words which is semantically and often syntactically restricted,

so that it functions as a single unit. The meanings of the individual words cannot
be combined to-produce the meaning of the idiomatic expression as a whole. For
example, the meanings of go, fly, and kite cannot account for the use of the sentence
Go fly a kite!, in its sense of ‘Go away’ or Don’t be silly’. »>lexeme; set expression;
stereotype 1.

Ido /‘i:dau/ An artificial language created in 1907 by either French Esperantist Louis
de Beaufront or French philosopher Louis Couturat. It is a modified version of
Esperanto; its name means ‘derived from’ in Esperanto. »>artificial language.

Igbo /‘i:bau/ A language spoken by c.17 million people in south-east Nigeria; also
spelled Ibo. It has official status in the area, and is written with the Roman alphabet.
Since the 1970s it has been increasingly used as a second language. Recent research
has proposed that, along with other former Eastern Kwa languages, it be placed
within the Benue-Congo group. »»Benue-Congo; Kwa; Nigeria.

155
Ijaw

city Ox

conqueror (?) ax

god stool

importance (?) sacrifice

king calf

Y¥
wm
®©
@¥1 palace RaPery
«SS vase

pringe
B
warrior
river Q
sovereign (?) goat

fi
>=$ to speak =4 vine

») great i land

Ideographic symbols in Hittite. Uncertain interpretations are marked with a

question-mark. »>ideogram.

Ijaw >ljo.

Ijo /‘i:dgo:/ A language spoken by c.1.7 million people in south-east Nigeria, in the
area of the Niger River delta; also spelled Ijaw. It has official status in the region,
and is written in the Roman alphabet. Formerly classified as a Kwa language, it is
now considered to be a separate cluster of languages, Ijoid, within the Niger-Congo
family. »Kwa; Niger-Congo.

Ijoid >Ijo.

156
 impediment

ill-formed »>grammatical.
illiteracy >literacy.

illocutionary act A speech act which is performed by a speaker by virtue of the

utterance having been made; for example, promising, commanding, or arresting.
As soon as someone says I promise . . ., apromise has been made. As soon as someone
with the right kind of status says I baptize you . . ., a person is baptized. The illocu-
tionary force of such acts contrasts with the function of locutionary acts, where
there is no such consequence ~ as in the sentences of the present entry, which are
simply meaningful utterances. A further contrast can be drawn with perloc-
utionary acts, where the acts are defined with reference to the effects they have
on the hearer. A perlocutionary effect can be seen in the example of an utterance
intended simply to state a fact (e.g. There have been a lot of burglaries round here
recently), which actually results in the listener becoming frightened. »>performative;
speech act.

Ilocano or MoKano /tla'ka:nau/ An Austronesian language spoken by c.8 million

people in the Philippines, with a few in the USA; also called Moko. It is written in
the Roman alphabet, and has some use as a lingua franca in the north of the country.
»> Austronesian; Philippines.

imagery Words or sentences which produce clear or vivid mental pictures; concrete
nouns, for example, are highly imageable, whereas abstract nouns are not. In the
context of language teaching, high imageability may be a desirable feature of sen-
tences being presented to the learner, as there is some evidence that they are easier
to remember. In the context of literature, the term generally has a much more
restricted meaning, referring to the use of metaphors, similes, and other figures of
speech. »>figurative language.

imitation In the context of language, the copying of a linguistic form or pattern

while learning a language. The notion is important both in first language acquisition
by children and in learning a foreign language, where the ability to imitate is seen
to be rather different from the ability to use the language spontaneously. »>language
learning.

immediate constituent >constituent.

immersion Descriptive of a bilingual programme where children who speak only

one language enter a school in which the foreign language is the only medium of
instruction. The children are ‘immersed’ in the new language for a particular period
of time — total immersion, if the language is used throughout the school day,
partial immersion if it is for only part of the day. The advantages of this method
have often been claimed (such as in French-speaking Canada), but the approach has
its critics. »>bilingualism.
impediment (of speech) >speech defect.

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imperative

imperative A grammatical mood recognized in languages where the verb is

inflected, used in the expression of commands. Different sets of endings distinguished
imperative from indicative and subjunctive moods in Latin, for example. In English,
the imperative form of the verb, as in Look!, contrasts with the indicative form,
which permits an -s ending in the 3rd person singular (Jooks). The term is used in
the description of sentence and clause types as well as of verb forms. »mood.
imperfect In some languages, a tense form which expresses such meanings as
duration or continuity in past time. Latin had an imperfect tense: amabam ‘I was
loving/used to love’. »>past tense; perfect.

imperfective »>perfect.
impersonal Descriptive of a construction or verb with an unspecified agent, such
as It’s raining. The notion was prominent in Latin grammar, which recognized such
constructions as Miseret me (literally, ‘it pities me’ — that is, ‘I pity’) and Eis licet hoc
facere (literally, ‘To them it is pleasing this to do’ - that is, ‘They are pleased to do
this’). Impersonal verbs could be used only in the 3rd person singular and in the
infinitive, and never with a personal subject. »»agent; verb.

implicational universal >universal.

implicature An implication or suggestion deduced from the form of an utterance.
A conversational implicature uses the cooperative principles which govern the
efficiency of conversations; for example, if someone says Look, the train!, while
approaching a railway station, the implication is ‘We must hurry’, and not, say,
‘What a lovely colour it has’. A conventional implicature is simply attached by
convention to particular expressions, as when What’s yours?, said at a bar, implies
‘I'm buying you a drink’. »cooperative principle.
implosive Descriptive of a type of consonant produced with the glottalic airstream
mechanism. A closure is made in the vocal tract while the vocal folds are brought
together. The glottis is then lowered, reducing air pressure in the tract. When the
closure is released, an ingressive airstream results, producing a range of sounds,
typically voiced, which can be heard for example in Ibo and several other African
languages. »>glottalic.
impressionistic transcription >transcription.

inanimate >animate.

inceptive /in'septiv/ A type of aspect, referring to a verb in which an inflection is

used to express the meaning of ‘beginning of an action’, ‘be on the point of’. Latin,
for example, had a verb ending -escere which expressed this meaning. »>>aspect.
inclusive Descriptive of a first person dual or plural pronoun where the addressee,
as well as the speaker, is included (e.g. we, meaning ‘I and you’). An exclusive
pronoun does not include the person being addressed. The contrast can be seen

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 indexical features

- Clearly in the pidgin language, Tok Pisin, where yumi (‘you + me’) is inclusive and
mipela (‘me + fellow’) is exclusive. »>disjunction; pidgin; pronoun.
inclusive language Language which attempts to avoid a bias towards a particular
sex, race, or other section of society in its forms of expression. The notion has been
especially found in relation to the modern concern to avoid sexual stereotypes,
where it is often referred to as nonsexist language. For example, since the 1970s
many speakers and writers of English have tried to find alternatives for the generic
use of him in such contexts as If there’s a doctor in the village, would you ask him to
call? — perhaps by using him/her or her/him, or by rephrasing the whole construction
to avoid the issue. Inclusive lexical items (e.g. salesman becoming sales assistant) are
now commonplace, and often legally obligatory — in advertisements, for example,
where equality of opportunity is critical. New publications using inclusive language
have continued to appear in the 1990s, though often accompanied by controversy
(notably when traditional prayers or forms of worship are reinterpreted). Although
not all the proposals for a new inclusive language have met with acceptance (e.g.
the invention of new sex-neutral 3rd-person pronouns, such as hesh or sho), a genuine
sensitivity about the issue is now evident, at least in educated usage, in many
countries. »>sexist language.
inclusive or >disjunction.
incompatibility A sense relation between a set of lexical items, where the choice
of one item excludes the use of all the other items from that set; for example, This
piece of fruit is a banana excludes apple, orange, plum, and other items from the class
of fruit. We may not say This piece of fruit is a banana and an apple. The items in the
set are incompatible with each other. On the other hand, we may say This piece of
fruit is a banana and a gift — the items gift and banana are compatible. »hyponymy.
incorporating language >typology of language.
indefinite >definiteness.
indefinite vowel >shwa.
indentation >indention.
indention /m'denjn/ Beginning a line of writing or print further in from the margin
than the rest of the passage; also called indentation. It is an important device for
showing the beginning of a paragraph. In some page designs, reverse or hanging
indention is employed, where most of the passage is indented — a common device
in dictionaries and encyclopedias, where there is a need to make the headwords
stand out. »>paragraph. 3

independent clause >clause.

indexical features A feature of speech or writing which reveals the personal
characteristics of a language user, such as age, personality, or sex; examples include

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indexicality

voice quality and handwriting. In a more general sense, the term refers to any
membership-identifying characteristic of a social group, such as a distinctive tone
of voice or set of lexical expressions. »>idiolect.

indexicality >deixis.
India (population in 1995 estimated at 944,157,000) The official union languages
are Hindi (spoken as a first or second language by nearly half the population) and
English (spoken as a second language by c.3%). English is used for international
purposes. Fourteen other languages have official status in certain regions (states in
parentheses): Assamese (c.14.5 million, Assam), Bengali (c.67 million, West Bengal),
Gujarati (c.43 million, Gujarat), Kannada (c.34 million, Karnataka), Kashmiri (c.4
million, Kashmir), Malayalam (c.34 million, Kerala), Marathi (c.65 million, Mahar-
ashtra), Oriya (c.30 million, Orissa), Panjabi (West and East, c.60 million, Panjab),
Sindhi (c.2.7 million), Tamil (c.60 million, Tamil Nadu), Telugu (c.67 million, Andhra
Pradesh), Urdu (c.46 million), and Sanskrit. Over 1600 languages are officially recog-
nized as being spoken in India, though only about half of these are in regular daily
use, and only c.400 are native to India. The language families represented are
mainly Indo-European (c.500 million) and Dravidian (c.160 million), with some .
Tibeto-Burman, Mon-Khmer, and Munda languages. With such linguistic diversity,
Hindi/Urdu has come to be widely used as a lingua franca. »»Devanagari; English;
Hindi; lingua franca; Sanskrit.

Indic >Indo-Aryan.
indicative A type of mood recognized in languages where the verb is inflected,
used in the expression of statements and questions; for example, the indicative
mood in Latin contrasts with the imperative and the subjunctive. The term may be
used with reference to verb forms or to clause and sentence types. »>mood.
indirect object >object.
indirect speech »>direct speech.

indirect speech act An utterance whose linguistic form does not directly reflect
its communicative purpose. In a classroom, for example, the utterance addressed by
a teacher to a child There’s a book on the floor, which is in the form of a statement,
would normally need to be interpreted as a command or request to pick the book
up. >»>speech act.

Indo-Aryan A group of over 200 Indo-European languages, forming a branch of

the Indo-Iranian family, spoken by c.825 million people in the northern and central
parts of the Indian subcontinent; also called Indic. On a geographical basis, they
may be divided into a Midland group, including Hindi/Urdu, Bihari, and Rajasthani’
(sometimes classed as a separate group); an Eastern group, which includes Assamese,
Bengali, and Oriya; Western and South-western groups, which include Konkani,
Maldivian, Marathi, and Sinhalese; and a North-western group, which includes

160
 Indo-Pacific

Panjabi, Sindhi, Lahnda, the Dardic languages (sometimes classified as a separate

group), and the Pahari languages. Romani is also a member of this family. The early
forms of Indo-Aryan, dating from c.1000 Bc, are collectively referred to as Sanskrit.
Later forms, the Prakrits, were the medium of Buddhist and Jain literature for a
thousand years. »»Assamese; Bengali; Bihari; Dardic; Hindi; Indo-Iranian; Konkani;
Lahnda; Maldivian; Marathi; Oriya; Pahari; Panjabi; Prakrit; Rajasthani; Romani;
Sanskrit; Sindhi; Sinhalese; Urdu.

Indo-European A major family of nearly 400 languages which spread throughout

Europe and southern Asia in the fourth millennium Bc, and which is now found, as
a result of colonialism, all over the world. The parent language, Proto-Indo-
European, is traditionally thought to have been spoken in many dialects by a
seminomadic population living in the steppe region to the north of the Black Sea.
These people moved west to Europe, and east to Iran and India, around the beginning
of the Bronze Age, the different daughter languages being well established by 1000
Bc, when Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Iranian languages are in evidence. The family
has 10 branches, though in the case of Albanian, Armenian, Greek, and Tocharian,
the branches are represented by a single language. The total number of speakers is
over 2500 million. The existence of Proto-Indo-European was postulated at the end
of the 18th century, following a comparison of Sanskrit and European languages.
In the 1980s, a controversial alternative view about the Indo-European homeland
was proposed by British archeologist Colin Renfrew, who argued for a much earlier
point of origin (c.7000 Bc) in Anatolia (Asia Minor). >»»Albanian; Anatolian;
Armenian; Balto-Slavic; Celtic; Germanic; Greek; Indo-Iranian; Italic; Tocharian.

Indo-Iranian A group of languages which make up the easternmost branch of

the Indo-European language family. It comprises two smaller groups, known as
Indo-Aryan (or Indic) and Iranian. »Indo-Aryan; Indo-European; Iranian.

Indonesia (population in 1995 estimated at 194,956,000) The official language is

Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), spoken by over 20 million as a first language, but
by c.70% of the population as a second language. Over 700 languages are found,
most with very small numbers; many, moreover, are of uncertain status (as languages
or dialects). Among the major languages of the country are Achinese, Balinese,
Batak, Buginese, Chinese, Javanese, Madurese, Malay, and Sundanese. In such a
linguistically diverse region, lingua francas are critical, Indonesian and Malay being
the most widely used in this function. English is the chief language for international
purposes. »>lingua franca; Malay.

- Indonesian >Malay.

Indo-Pacific A family of c.750 languages spoken by c.3.5 million people in the

island of New Guinea and the islands to the immediate east and west; also called
Papuan. Two other small groups of languages are sometimes included within this
family, despite their geographical distance from the main group: Andamanese,

161
 infelicitous utterance

spoken by a few hundred people in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and
Tasmanian, formerly spoken in the island of Tasmania to the south of Australia,
which died out towards the end of the 19th century. There is still a great deal of
ignorance about the number and type of languages in this family, as little is known
about the many tribes who live in the more inaccessible areas of New Guinea. There
. is nowhere to compare with the multilingual diversity of this island, which has a
geographical area of only c.300,000 square miles, yet contains between 700 and 800
languages from this and the Austronesian family. »Austronesian.

infelicitous utterance >felicity conditions.

inferior >subscript.

infinitive The nonfinite form of the verb which in many languages is cited as the
verb’s basic form (e.g. go, walk). In English, this form may be used alone (the bare
or zero infinitive) or with the particle to (the to-infinitive). Different verbs make
use of these alternatives: compare The policeman saw the man leave and The policeman
told the man to leave. Inserting an adverb between to and the infinitive (the split
infinitive) is frowned upon by purists, though this construction has a long history
in written English, and is often the most acceptable rhythmical alternative in speech
(as in the famous fo boldly go example from the TV series Star Trek). »>finite; purism;
verb.

infix >affix.

inflected/inflecting/inflectional language >typology of language.

inflection 1. An affix whose function is to signal a grammatical relationship, such

as plural, past tense, or 3rd person; in European languages, typically encountered as
word endings. It does not alter the word class of the stem to which it is attached.
The study of inflections is a major branch of the study of word structure (inflectional
morphology). »>affix; case; derivation 1; morphology; typology of language; word
class. 2. A popular term for the melody of speech, in linguistics generally referred
to as intonation. »>intonation.

informality >formality.

informant A native speaker of a language who acts as a source of linguistic data.

It is now often replaced by the term consultant, which suggests greater equality
of status between native speaker and researcher. »>elicitation; intuition.

information structure A proposed analysis of sentences into information units.

In speech these units are usually distinguished by intonational criteria, the infor-
mation focus being conveyed by nuclear tone. For example, in the sentence
Mary bought a RED car, the intonational emphasis on red conveys that this is new
information in the sentence, while Mary, bought and car are part of the ‘given’

162
 instrumental case

information. A different information structure would be suggested by MARY bought

a red car. »>focus; given; intonation; theme.

-ing form In English grammar, the form of the verb ending in -ing, such as running,
jumping. The term has proved to be a popular alternative to the use of Latinate
expressions, which do not work comfortably in the description of English. The same
verb form is used in I am running, I was running and I shall be running, for example,
which makes it difficult to use a term such as ‘present participle’ for all three.
»> participle.

ingressive /1n'gresiv/ >egressive.

initial >medial 1.

initialism >acronym.

Initial Teaching Alphabet »>i.t.a.

initiator The vocal organs which are the source of an airstream for speech. The
usual initiator is the lungs — a pulmonic initiation. »>glottalic; velaric.

innateness hypothesis The view that a child is born with a biological predis-
position to learn language, anda knowledge of at least some of the universal structural
principles which characterize language; also called the nativist hypothesis. The
view emerged as part of the mentalistic approach to language espoused by generative
linguistics in the 1960s, and has proved controversial, with scholars arguing over
exactly which principles might plausibly be said to be innate, and what evidence
might bear on the matter. »generative grammar; Language Acquisition Device;
universal.

inner speech The mental use of words to express a sequence of thoughts — according
to some psychologists, an essential characteristic of the ability to think at all. The
notion is particularly associated with the views of the Russian psychologist, Lev
Semenovich Vygotsky (1896-1934). It contrasts with external speech — the use
of normal speech (or its written form). »>psycholinguistics.

institutional linguistics A developing branch of linguistics which studies the

use of language in professional contexts — in such ‘institutions’ as law, medicine,
education, and business. It also includes such topics as language planning, where
policies governing the use of languages need to be worked out at national level.
»> language planning; linguistics.

instrumental case One of the ways in which an inflected language makes a word
(typically a single noun or pronoun) change its form, expressing the meaning ‘by
means of ’. For example, in the sentence I opened the door with the key, the key might
be said to have an instrumental function, and in some languages (e.g. Russian,
Kannada) this function would be expressed with an inflection. »>case; inflection 1.

163
instrumental phonetics

‘Bob will be taking notes. He’s doing an anthology of cocktail party chit-chat.’
(interactional sociolinguistics)

instrumental phonetics »>experimental phonetics.

intensifier A word (adverbial or adjectival in function) which has a typically

heightening effect on the meaning of another elementina sentence; forexample, very
increases the strength of the meaning of the following word in The book was very
interesting. The term is also sometimes used to refer to words which intensify ‘down-
wards’, reducing the meaning of the associated element; for example, hardly decreases
the force of the following word in The food was hardly sufficient. »>adjective; adverb.
intensity >loudness.

intensive >extensive.

164
 internal evidence

interactional sociolinguistics The study of the role of language in mediating

face-to-face interaction. It examines the way social factors influence how people speak
to each other in particular types of communication — for example, how they take
their leave of each other. Particular attention is paid to the transcription of recorded
interactions. »>address, forms of; sociolinguistics; T/V forms; cartoon, p. 164.

interchangeability A suggested defining property of human language, which

refers to the system’s ability to be mutually transmitted and received by members
of the same species. This situation does not always obtain in the animal kingdom,
for example, where male and female members of a species may use different kinds
of call. »>language 1; zodsemiotics.

interdental »>dental.

interference The introduction of errors into one language as a result of contact

with another language; also called negative transfer. It typically occurs while
people are learning a foreign language or living in a multilingual situation. Foreigners
who say I live here since three years are probably displaying interference from their
mother-tongue. »>contrastive analysis; error analysis; transfer.

Interglossa A language invented by Lancelot Hogben in 1943, but published only

in draft form. A modified version was later developed (1981) by Wendy Ashby and
Ross Clark, called Glosa. Glosa contains a basic 1000-word vocabulary, derived from
Latin and Greek roots. »>artificial language.

interjection In the traditional classification of parts of speech, an item whose

function is purely emotive, such as Gosh!, Phew, or Tut tut. Such items do not enter
into syntactic relationships with other word classes. »>word class.

interlanguage A language system created by someone who is in the process of

learning a foreign language. This intermediate state contains properties of both the
first and the second language, and varies according to the learner’s evolving system
of rules. »>foreign language; language learning.

Interlingua A language devised in 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language

Association (a body formed in New York in 1924). It uses a Romance-based grammar,
with a standardized vocabulary based on the main western European languages.
»artificial language.

interlocutor Someone who is actively engaged in a conversation, as opposed to

those who are passive observers. A dialogue normally consists of two interlocutors,
but several people may be simultaneously active in a conversation. >»>conversation
analysis; turn.

internal evidence Linguistic features in a text which indicate when or where the
work was written, or who the author was. Handwriting, idiosyncratic spellings, and
other graphic features play an important role, as do favourite patterns of vocabulary

165
internalization

and grammar. A contrast is intended with external evidence, such as might come
from historical records or archeological findings. »paleography; philology.
internalization In generative linguistics, the acquiring of knowledge about the
structure of a language, primarily in the context of child language acquisition. A
child who learns a grammatical rule, such as the addition of -s to make a plural in
English, is said to have ‘internalized’ that rule. » acquisition; generative grammar.

internal reconstruction >reconstruction.

internal rhyme >rhyme.

International Computer Archive of Modern English (ICAME) A clearing
centre for storing and distributing information on corpus studies in English, based
at Bergen University, Norway. Its aims are to compile an archive of English-language
material available for computer processing, and to collect and distribute information
on research that uses this material. »corpus. j

International Corpus of English (ICE) A computer corpus being compiled from

samples of spoken and written English in countries where English is a first or official
second language, with the aim of facilitating comparative study of national varieties.
Proposed in 1988, the project is based at University College London. Each regional
component aims to be a million running words. In addition, there is a specialized
corpus being developed, dealing with writing by advanced learners of English.
»>corpus; Survey of English Usage.

international language A language which is in widespread use as a medium of

communication among different countries. English is the world’s chief international
language, but French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Chinese are also found in this
role in various parts of the world. »>lingua franca.
International Phonetic Alphabet »>International Phonetic Association.
International Phonetic Association An organization founded in 1886 by a
group of European phoneticians to promote the study of phonetics. It devised the
International Phonetic Alphabet, first published in 1889, and last revised in
1989, which has become the most widely used system for transcribing the sounds
ofalanguage. Both organization and alphabet use the abbreviation IPA. »>phonetics;
p. 167.

interpersonal function The use of language to establish and maintain social

relationships. The notion takes its place as part of a classification of language func-
tions, along with aesthetic, scientific, and other uses. »»address, forms of; phatic
communion; pragmatics.

interpreting The process of oral translation. In consecutive interpreting,

the interpreter translates a speaker in short stretches while the speaker pauses. In
simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter typically works in front of a micro-

166
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interrogation mark

phone in a sound-proofed booth, and carries on a continuous translation while the

person is talking; the translation is then passed on to listeners through headsets.
The former method is commonly used in person-to-person translation (such as
between individual politicians) or with small groups of business people or tourists.
The latter method is normal at large international gatherings. »> translatology.

interrogation mark »punctuation; question.

interrogative Descriptive of a grammatical category found in verb forms or sen-

tence and clause types, used in the expression of questions; contrasts with declara-
tive. Words which mark interrogative constructions are interrogative words,
often sub-classified as interrogative adjectives (e.g. which), adverbs (e.g. why), and
pronouns (e.g. who). »»declarative; question.

imtervocalic Descriptive of a consonant used between two vowels, such as the

/h/ of aha or the /b/ of about. »consonant.

intonation The linguistic functioning of pitch at sentence level, generally analysed

in terms of intonation contours or tone units. The notion contrasts with tone,
the use of pitch in words or syllables. Sometimes loudness, rhythm, and other tones
of voice are considered to be part of intonation. The study of intonation (often
called intonology) deals with such matters as the types of pitch pattern which can
occur in a language (e.g. falling, rising, rising-falling) and the types of meaning which
these patterns convey. An intonation pattern can signal an emotional meaning, such
as anger, delight, or sarcasm. It can signal a grammatical meaning, as in the case of
statement vs. question (compare It’s ready vs. It’s ready?). And it can signal a social
meaning, such as the identity of a profession (e.g. sergeant major, preacher, football
commentator) or type of interaction (e.g. formal speech, informal chat). »»contour;
pitch; tone.

intransitive >transitivity.

intrusion The addition of sounds in connected speech which are not heard when
words or syllables are said in isolation. Acommon example in English is the use of
intrusive /r/ as a linking sound between vowels in Received Pronunciation when
there is no r in the spelling, as in Africa(r) and Asia or law(r) and order. Though
intrusive sounds are a natural means of increasing the smoothness of utterance flow,
they are strongly criticized in English by those with a purist attitude towards language
use. The term contrasts with elision, and is often classified into different types
(e.g. epenthesis, prothesis), depending on where in a word the intrusion occurs.
»>epenthesis; linking; purism.

intuition In the context of linguistic enquiry, the judgement of speakers about

their language; also called tacit knowledge or Sprachgefiihl. People appeal to
their intuition when they have to decide whether a sentence is acceptable or not,

168
 Irish Gaelic

or what relationship of meaning exists between a pair of sentences (such as active

and passive). »>informant.

Inuit /‘inju:tt/ >Eskimo.

Inupiag or Inupik /1'nu:prek, I'nu:pik/ >Eskimo.

invariable word A type of word which never undergoes change in its internal
structure, such as under and the; also called an invariant word. A contrast is
intended with variable words, such as house and go, which can be inflected.
>> inflection 1; morphology.

inversion The process or result of a syntactic change in which a particular sequence

of constituents is seen as the reverse of another. In English, for example, the subject
and auxiliary verb invert in order to make questions from statements: It is
ready becomes Is it ready?. Inversion also follows such words as hardly and scarcely
at the beginning of a sentence: Hardly had I left when the taxi arrived. »>syntax; word
order.

inverted commas >quotation marks.

IPA >International Phonetic Association.

Iran (population in 1995 estimated at 65,127,000) The official language is Persian

(Farsi), spoken by about half the population. There are c.60 other languages, including
Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani (c.20% of the population), Baluchi, Kurdish, and Luri.
English is widely used for international purposes. »>Persian.

Iranian A group of c.70 Indo-European languages, forming a branch of the Indo-

Iranian family, spoken by over 75 million people in Iran, Afghanistan, and parts of
nearby countries. The oldest forms are Old Persian and Avestan (used for the Avesta,
the sacred text of the Zoroastrians), both of which have texts dating from the 6th
century Bc. The modern languages include Persian, Tadzhik, Pashto, Ossetic, Kurdish,
and Baluchi. »»Baluchi; Indo-Iranian; Kurdish; Ossetic; Pashto; Persian; Tadzhik.

Iraq (population in 1995 estimated at 20,645,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken in several varieties by c.90% of the population. There are c.20 other languages,
including Armenian, Assyrian, Azerbaijani, and Persian. Kurdish (c.18% of the popu-
lation) has official regional status in Kurdistan. English is widely used for inter-
national purposes. »>Arabic.

Ireland (population in 1995 estimated at 3,500,000) The official languages are

Irish Gaelic and English. Irish is used as a first language chiefly in the west of the
country, but its use is more widespread, according to census returns, with up to a
third of the population claiming some knowledge of the language. English is used
for international purposes. »>English; Irish Gaelic; Sheldru.

Irish Gaelic /'geiltk, 'galtk/ A member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic family

169
irony

of languages, spoken by c.30,000 people as a first language, chiefly in western coastal

Ireland in an area known as the Gaeltacht; also called simply Irish or Gaelic, and
also Erse. It is an official language in the Irish Republic (along with English), used
in government publications, and has been taught in schools since 1922. There has
also been a movement to reform the complex spelling system. Irish is written in the
Roman alphabet, sometimes using a traditional semi-uncial form of medieval writing
(‘Gaelic script’). Written evidence dates from the ogham inscriptions of the Sth
century, with literary remains from the 8th century, by which time Irish had come
to be widely used as a religious medium. There is an extensive medieval literature,
and an active literary renaissance is found at the end of the 19th century. Ireland
was wholly Gaelic-speaking until the 17th century, but the dominance of English
and the effects of 19th century emigration led to a sharp decline, which continued
in the 20th century. There is a strong revivalist movement, and c.1 million people
now make some use of it. »>Celtic; Ireland; ogham; uncial.

iromy Language which expresses a meaning other than that literally conveyed by
the words, usually for humorous or dramatic effect. A contrast is often drawn
with sarcasm, where the intention is to ridicule or wound. Everyday conversation
provides many examples of ironic speech - such as the enthusiastic comment
following a bad pun. >>figurative language.

Iroquoian /irakw51en/ >Macro-Siouan.

irregular Descriptive of a linguistic form which is an exception to the pattern

stated by a rule; opposed to regular. In English, took is an irregular verb because it
fails to conform to the rule which forms past tense by adding -ed. The irregular verbs
of European languages have long been the bane of foreign language learners’ lives.
There are far fewer irregular nouns and adjectives. In English there are over 300
irregular verbs, but only a few dozen irregular nouns. »normative; rule 1.

isochrony /al'spkrani:/ A type of linguistic rhythm where the stressed syllables fall
at roughly regular intervals throughout an utterance; English is an example of an
isochronous language. It contrasts with a rhythm where all syllables occur at regular
intervals of time (isosyllabicity), French (which to English ears gives the impression
of a ‘machine-gun-like’ rhythm) is an isosyllabic language. Isochronous languages
are often called stress-timed; isosyllabic languages syllable-timed. The languages
of the world do not fall neatly into these two types of rhythm, however. Both English
and German would be called stress-timed languages, but their rhythms are by no
means the same. »>rhythm; stress; syllable.

isogloss /‘aisaglvs/ A line on a map showing the boundary of an area in which a

linguistic feature (e.g. a sound, word, or grammatical form) is used. The iso- prefix
is used throughout dialect study as part of the labelling of the types of information
which can be displayed on maps; for example, an isophone shows the distribution
of a sound; an isolex shows the distribution of a lexical item. »>dialect.

170
 isolate

e Birmingham

London

100 miles

Isoglosses marking those parts of England and Wales which pronounce the /r/ in
such words as car — the rhotic areas. The information is based on the relatively
conservative speech of rural people, collected by the English Dialect Survey.

isolate A language with little or no structural or historical relationship to any other

language; also called an isolated language or a language isolate. Many such
cases have been noted. They include languages which remain undeciphered, lan-
guages where there is insufficient material available to establish a family relationship,
and languages where, despite a great deal of data, the relationship is undetermined.
>> Ainu; Basque; Burushaski; Elamite; Etruscan; family of languages; Gilyak; Iberian;
Japanese; Korean; Mohenjo-Daro; Salish; Sumerian.

171
isolating language

isolating language »>typology of language.

isosyllabicity /aisausila'bisiti:/ >isochrony.
Israel (population in 1995 estimated at 5,843,000) The official language is Hebrew,
spoken by over 60% of the population, with English an auxiliary official language,
and Arabic (c.25%) also holding official status. There are c.20 other languages in use,
such as Bulgarian, Russian, Ladino, and Yiddish (c.5%). Many immigrants still use
the language of their country of origin. English is used for international purposes.
»> Arabic; English; Hebrew.

i.t.a An abbreviation of Initial Teaching Alphabet, a scheme devised in 1959

by James Pitman (1901-85) as a means of helping children in their first encounter
with reading. It is a system of 44 lower-case letters, each corresponding to a single
phoneme. Extra symbols are introduced to handle contrasts not systematically
represented by traditional orthography—hence its characterization as an ‘augmented’
Roman alphabet. Capitals are larger versions of the lower-case letters. It is not a
system of spelling reform, and after a while children transfer to reading materials in
normal spelling. Popular in the 1960s and 1970s, its use declined in the 1980s.
»>alphabet; spelling.

Italian A member of the Romance family of languages, spoken by c.57 million in

Italy, in several dialects, some of which differ so much from standard Italian that
they are often taken to be separate languages; speakers of standard Italian in Italy
number c.30 million. Italian is also spoken in Switzerland (c.200,000), and by the
populations of San Marino and Vatican City. It is also an important immigrant
language in many countries, especially the USA, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Argentina,
and several countries in north and east Africa, resulting in a worldwide total for
Italian of c.63 million. It is written in the Roman alphabet. Written materials date
from the 10th century, with a literature emerging from the late 12th century, and
rapidly reaching a peak of excellence in the 14th century in the writing of Dante,
Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The standard language is based on the Tuscan dialect of
the Florence region. The varieties used in Sardinia and Corsica are closely related to
the dialects of mainland Italian, though for cultural reasons they are often considered
to be separate languages. »>Corsican; Italy; Romance; San Marino; Sardinian; Vatican
City.
Italic A family of Indo-European languages, preserved in inscriptions from the 6th
century BC, and chiefly known through Latin. Other languages of the group include
Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, and Venetic, spoken in an area corresponding roughly
to modern Italy. From the spoken form of Latin developed the Romance languages.
»>Indo-European; Latin; Romance.

italic A form of sloped cursive lettering, developed by the Italian scribe Niccold
Niccoli in the early 15th century. It eventually led to the development of italic letters
(italics) in printing. The italic typeface is used in print for a wide range of functions,

72
 Ivory Coast

such as titles of works, emphasis, cited forms, and foreign words. In traditional
typewritten materials, italics have to be replaced by underlining; and in certain types
’ of software the contrast cannot be shown directly on the screen, but needs to be
signalled using codes. »>letter; typography.
Italy (population in 1995 estimated at 57,333,000) The official language is Italian,
though perhaps as many as half the population do not speak the standard language,
but one or other of the major regional varieties, some of which are mutually unintelli-
gible - Aquilano, Lombard, Molisano, Neapolitan, Piemontese, Pugliese, Sardinian,
Sicilian, Venetian. German is an official regional language in Trentino-Alto Adige,
and French in the Aosta Valley. There are c.15 other languages in use, such as
Albanian, Friulian, Greek, Occitan (Provencal), Romani, and Slovene. Italian, French,
and English are all used for international trade and tourism. »>Italian.
iterative /‘Iterativ/ Descriptive of a form which expresses the meaning of ‘repeated
action’. Iterative meaning may be expressed through verb constructions, as part of
the system of aspect, or through other word classes, especially adverbs (frequently,
regularly). »>adverb; aspect.
Ivory Coast >Coéte d'Ivoire.

173
J
Jamaica (population in 1995 estimated at 2,519,000) The official language is
English. Over 90% of the population speak an English-based creole (Jamaican
Creole, or Patwa), which is gaining in prestige. »>creole; English; Patwa.

Japan (population in 1995 estimated at 124,641,000) The official language is

Japanese, spoken by c.98% of the population. There are a few other languages, such
as Korean (c.670,000), and the Ryukyuan languages used in the Ryukyu Islands
(c.900,000), which are historically related to Japanese. English is used for inter-
national purposes. »>Ainu; Japanese.

Japanese A language spoken by c.122 million people in Japan, and by many

immigrants (c.3 million) in Brazil, the USA, Peru, and several other countries. There
is no clear relationship with other languages, though some linguists consider it to
be a member of the Altaic family, and some relate it to Korean. There are major
dialect differences, the southern dialects of the Ryukyu Islands being markedly
different from the standard language based on the Tokyo dialect, and often con-
sidered to be separate languages. Written records date from the 8th century, using
Chinese characters (Kanji). In addition, Japanese makes use of three other writing
systems — two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana) and a romanized script (Romaji).
Old Japanese (used before the 8th century) is followed by a period of Late Old
Japanese (9th-11th centuries), Middle Japanese (12th-16th centuries), and Modern
Japanese thereafter. There are many Chinese loan words, and in modern times
English borrowings are much in evidence. The language is noted for its careful
representation of social structure, with distinctive male and female varieties, and
several hierarchical levels of honorific style. »»Altaic; honorific; Japan; kana; kanji;
Korean; Romaji; Roman alphabet.

jargon 1. Technical terms and expressions used by a group of specialists, which

are not known or understood by the speech community as a whole. Every subject
has its jargon, which can contribute to economy of communication and precision
of thought among those who belong to the group. Objections arise when practitioners
use jargon unthinkingly or excessively, in contexts where outsiders feel they have
a right to comprehension, such as in relation to medicine, law, and the civil service.
»>slang; terminology. 2. The unintelligible word creations which accompany certain
kinds of language breakdown, notably in aphasia. »»aphasia. 3. In the normal
development of young children, the unintelligible continuous stretches of babbling,

174
 justification

with sentence-like intonation, heard in many children around the end of the first
year. »>babbling.

Javanese A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken by c.75 million

people chiefly in Java and nearby islands in Indonesia, with some in Malaysia. It
has many more speakers than any other Austronesian language. It is traditionally
written in the Javanese alphabet, derived from southern India, but the Roman
alphabet is now much in use. It has a strong literary tradition, with records dating
from the 8th century, but this hasbeen largely eclipsed in recent years because of
the dominance of the standard language, Bahasa Indonesia. »»Austronesian; Malay.
Jonesian Adjective derived from Daniel Jones (1881-1967), the leading British
phonetician in the first half of the century. He was professor of phonetics at the
University of London from 1921 to 1949. »»cardinal vowels; phonetics.

Jordan (population in 1995 estimated at 4,565,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken by most of the population. A few other languages are found, such as Adygey
and Armenian. English is used for international purposes. »»Arabic.
Judaeo-German »>Yiddish.

Judaeo-Spanish »>Ladino 1.

Jugoslavia >Yugoslavia.
Jula >Dyula.

juncture A feature of a language’s sound system which demarcates grammatical

units, signalled by silence, pitch, stress, length, or a variety of phonetic features.
Different junctural features need to be recognized when considering the ways in
which syllable boundaries can be identified within words, word boundaries within
phrases, and clause boundaries within sentences. Several classifications of juncture
types have been proposed, and a great deal of effort has been devoted to investigating
whether such written contrasts as ice-cream and I scream are acoustically real.
>> prosody.
justification The spacing of words and letters within a line of printed text so that
all full lines in a column have an even margin to both left and right; justified text
contrasts with unjustified text. The present book uses a justified setting (though
the blurb on the back cover does not). »>typography.

175
K
Kabardian /ka'ba:dian/ A member of the Abkhazo-Adyghian group of Caucasian
languages, spoken by c.350,000 people, chiefly in the Kabardino-Balkar region of
Russia, in the northern part of the Greater Caucasus Mountains; also called Circas-
sian. At first written in the Roman alphabet, the language has used Cyrillic since
1936. »»Abkhazo-Adyghian.
Kabyle /ka'batl/ A member of the Berber branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of
languages, spoken chiefly by c.2.5 million people in Algeria, and by a further half a
million or more in France. The name comes from the Arabic word for ‘tribesman’.
It is written in the Arabic alphabet. >»>Berber.

Kaffiir /‘kafia/ > Xhosa.

KAL An abbreviation of knowledge about language.

Kalenjin >Nandi.
Kampuchea »>Cambodia.
kana /'kamna/ A writing system in use in Japan, in which each graphic symbol
represents a syllable. Historically derived from the 6th century ap from the Chinese
kanji characters used in Japan, two kana systems developed in due course. The system
known as hiragana (‘common kana’) was a simplification of the cursive style of
writing kanji used chiefly by women in the imperial court. The katakana (‘partial
kana’) system developed as a method of shorthand used by priests to aid the reading
of Chinese texts (by marking Japanese affixes and particles, which had no equivalent
in Chinese grammar). The two systems came to be used for different purposes, with
hiragana becoming the medium of everyday use and of literature, and katakana the
medium of scholarship. A distinction is still present in modern Japanese, where the
writing system in common use is a mixture of kanji and hiragana, katakana being
restricted to the transcription of foreign words and a few specialized contexts. Each
kana contains 75 graphemes representing such syllables as /ka/, /ga/, /shi/, /ji/, /so/,
and /go/, some of which enter into further combinations (e.g. /byo/, /pyo/). Kana
spellings are now based on modern word pronunciations. »»Chinese; Japanese;
kanji; syllabary.
Kanarese /kKana'ri:z/ >Kannada.

kanji /‘kandi:/ A graphic symbol used in the writing of Japanese — a Japanese word
meaning ‘Chinese characters’. Kanji are usually used for writing lexical words;

176
 Kashmiri

NF] &
Rn 4 a
i]t]F
hit Y4F\9
tu

© feel ee As] [ak] 75te] LE] SET {FN}A

MIE
“e
A (A\A\44 Splitbe
s}.JS.A
CAL LID| Alealt 174°] © |7
abatere‘a
rae
ae ae
ho he hu hi ha no ne nu _ ni na tu. ti ta

The development of kama symbols from Chinese characters: (a) katakana, (b)
hiragana. The top line shows the Chinese characters relating to the 15 kana
symbols shown in the bottom line. The middle line(s) show earlier forms in
Japanese.

grammatical elements and indications of pronunciation are shown by the use of

hiragana symbols. »»Chinese; grammatical word; Japanese; kana.

Kannada /‘kaneda/ A member of the Dravidian family of languages, spoken by

c.34 million people as a first language in south-west India, chiefly in the state of
Karnataka (where it is the official state language), and by a further 10 million as a
second language; also called Kanarese. It is written in the Kannada alphabet, with
inscriptions dating from the late 6th century ap, and a literary tradition from
the 9th century. The language has two main varieties, which are in a diglossic
relationship. »>diglossia; Dravidian.

Kanuri /ka'nuri:/ A Saharan language spoken by over 3 million people mainly in

north-east Nigeria, with some speakers in south-east Niger and Chad. It is written
in the Roman alphabet. »>Saharan.
Kartvelian /ka:t'vi:lian/ A group of Caucasian languages found in the south of the
Caucasus region; also called South Caucasian. They include Georgian (the chief
language of the region), Zan, Mingrelian, Laz, and Svan, though there is some dispute
as to whether these are all distinct languages. Only Georgian has a written form.
»> Caucasian; Georgian.
Kashmiri /kafmi:ri:/ A member of the Dardic group of Indo-Iranian languages,
spoken by c.4 million people in Kashmir, India (where it is an official regional
language), and in nearby parts of Pakistan. It is written by Muslims in the Arabic
alphabet, while Hindus use a special system (the Sarada alphabet), dating from the

177
katakana

8th century ap. This alphabet is a close relative of Devanagari, which is used for
published literature in Kashmiri. »»Dardic; Devanagari; Indo-Iranian.

katakana /‘kataka:no/ >kana.

Kazakh or Kazak /ka'zak/ A member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic family of
languages, spoken by c.8 million people, chiefly in Kazakhstan (where it is an official
language), with some in China, Mongolia, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Germany.
Formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, it now uses Cyrillic in Kazakhstan, and the
Roman alphabet elsewhere. »»Kazakhstan; Turkic.

Kazakhstan (population in 1995 estimated at 17,155,000) The official languages

are Kazakh (spoken by c.40% of the population), and Russian (spoken by c.40%).
Other languages include Chinese, Chechen, German, Romani, Uighur, and Ukrain-
ian. »>Kazakh; Russian.

Kenya (population in 1995 estimated at 29,520,000) The official language is Swahili,

widely used (by c.12 million) as a lingua franca. There are c.50 local languages, notably
Kikuyu (Gikuyu, spoken by c.20% of the population), Luo (c.12%), Luya (c.12%), and
Kamba (c.10%). English was the official language after independence, and still retains
considerable status as a second language. »>English; lingua franca; Swahili.

kernel A basic type of sentence structure, as used in early generative grammar. It

referred to a simple, active, declarative, indicative sentence (e.g. The cat chased the
mouse), which could be transformed into other kinds of sentence (such as negative,
question, passive) through the use of a basic set of transformational rules. »>gener-
ative grammar.

key The tone, manner, or spirit in which a speech act is carried out (e.g. mock vs.
serious). The term is also used with reference to levels of formality, such as intimate,
casual, and formal. »>formality; speech act; style.

key words Terms which capture the semantic identity of a text, group, or period.
An abstract of an article, for example, may conclude with a list of key words which
summarize what the article is about, and these may be used for the compilation of an
index or other reference work. Key words for the present book would include language,
linguistics, communication, and a few others. Rather more difficult is to identify the key
words for a social group or time period, such as ‘advertisers’ or ‘the 1990s’. »>abstract 1.

Khalkha /‘kalka/ >Mongol.

Khanty /‘kanti:/ Amember of the Ugric group of the Finno-Ugric family of languages,
spoken by c.13,000 people in the Khanty-Mansi region of western Siberia, Russia,
where it has official regional status; previously known as Ostyak. It is written in
the Cyrillic alphabet. »>Finno-Ugric.

Khmer /kmea/ A member of the Mon-Khmer family of languages, spoken by c.7

million people, chiefly in Cambodia (where it is the official language), Vietnam, and

178
 Kirghiz or Kyrgyz

Thailand; also called Cambodian. It is written in the Khmer alphabet, and records
date from the 7th century AD. »Cambodia; Mon-Khmer.

Khoisan /‘kouisan/ A group of less than 40 languages spoken in the southern part
of Africa by c.300,000 people, mainly in an area around the Kalahari Desert from
Angola to South Africa. The smallest of the four main language families of Africa, it
is famous for its use of click consonants. The name is a compound deriving from
the name of the largest Hottentot group (the Khoi-Khoin) and that of the Bushmen
in the Nama region of Namibia (the San). Few of these languages have more than
1000 speakers, and numbers everywhere are diminishing. Only Kwadi (Angola,
c.10,000) and Sandawe (Tanzania, c.50,000) have substantial numbers. About half
of the languages have been written down, mainly by missionaries. Several languages
of the family have become extinct in recent years. »»Africa; click.

Kikongo /ki:‘kongau/ >Kongo.

kinesics /kal'ni:ziks/ The systematic use of facial expression and body gesture to
communicate meaning. The notion relates especially to the way language is used —
for example, a shrug of the shoulders to replace or accompany the utterance ‘I’ve
no idea’. Kinesic analysis is carried out using a linguistic frame of reference, recogniz-
ing such units as kimemes (on analogy with phonemes) - minimal units of meaning-
ful visual expression. »>body language; phoneme; paralanguage; semiotics; p. 180.

kinesthetic feedback, also spelled kinaesthetic /kinas'@etik/ The internal pro-

cess which enables speakers to be aware of the movements and positions of their
vocal organs during speech; also called kin(a)esthesia or kin(a)esthesis. People
sense movement or strain in their muscles, tendons, and joints, and unconsciously
use this information to monitor what takes place when they speak. Interference
with this process (following a dental anesthetic, for example) can severely hinder a
person’s ability to talk normally. »»articulation.

Kingman Report >knowledge about language.

kinship terms The system of lexical items used in a language to express personal
relationships within the family (whether in a narrow or an extended sense). This
semantic topic has attracted particular interest among linguists because of the way
languages make different lexical distinctions within what is a clearly defined biologi-
cal domain. Unlike English, other languages may have separate lexical items for
male and female cousins, or for maternal and paternal aunts, or there may be
no lexical contrast between brothers and cousins, or between father and uncles.
»>componential analysis; gap; semantics.

Kirghiz, Kirgiz or Kyrgyz /‘kiagiz/ A member of the Turkish branch of the Altaic
family of languages, spoken by c.2.5 million people, chiefly in Kyrgyzstan (where it
is an official language) and also in nearby parts of Afghanistan, Turkey, and China.

179
 Out of the side of
— ©— Blank faced the mouth (left)
_-o Single raised brow Out of the side of
indicates brow raised the mouth (right)
Lowered brow Set jaw
Medial brow contraction C420Smile
4D
Medial brow nods tight — loose o
Raised brows I Mouth in repose
Wide eyed lax © tense —
— © Wink Droopy mouth
Lateral squint Tongue in cheek

aN \/ MeN
Viiv YN Full squint Pout
Shut eyes (with Clenched teeth
A-closed pause 2 count, Toothy smile
am Or Blink Square smile
B-closed pause 5 plus count) :) off€
iw)Open mouth
Sidewise look sur Slow lick—lips
VD Focus on auditor Quick lick—lips
@@e Stare Moistening lips
Rolled eyes
486
©© Lip biting
$$ Slitted eyes Whistle
(a —) Eyes upward \ Pursed lips
-© e-
Shifty eyes Retreating lips
AeNl7
le
‘@ o”
Glare fo)\\e(>
OfL Peck
om Inferior lateral orbit oC)
tyXv!'7 Smack
contraction Lax mouth
Db Ww Curled nostril Chin protruding
Flaring nostrils ‘Dropped’ jaw
Db Pinched nostrils Chewing
Stach
v A

Bunny nose Temples tightened

Nose wrinkle taal jw Ear ‘wiggie’

PaRight
Left sneer
sneer
Ik Total scalp
movement

Kinesics. Some of the symbols, or kinegraphs, which have been used in order
to transcribe the various movements of face and body. Different sets of symbols
have been devised for different areas of the body, such as the arms, fingers,
and head. The symbols above illustrate the set of facial activities.
 Korea, South

Formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, it now uses Cyrillic in Kyrgyzstan and
Roman elsewhere. »>Kyrgyzstan; Turkic.

Kiribati (population in 1995 estimated at 79,700) The official language is English.

About 97% of the population speak Ikiribati (Gilbertese), an Austronesian language.
>> English.
Kituba /ki'tu:ba/ >Kongo.
knowledge about language (KAL) A goal of educational linguistic strategy in
the UK since the late 1980s. It involves the fostering of an increased awareness of
the structure and function of spoken and written language by children as they
move through the school curriculum. Although an essential element in linguistic
approaches to language study for many years, the contemporary popularity of the
notion (and the new acronym) came from the report published by the Committee
of Inquiry into English Language Teaching (known as the Kingman Report) in 1988,
and the subsequent development of the country’s National Curriculum in English, in
which arange of targets for developing language awareness is specified. »>educational
linguistics; language awareness; Language in the National Curriculum.

koine /‘koinei/ The spoken language of a locality which has become a standard
language or lingua franca. The term is specifically used for the Greek language used
throughout the eastern Mediterranean countries during the Hellenistic and Roman
periods. »>Greek; lingua franca; standard.
Koman /'kauman/ A small group of Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in adjoining
regions of Ethiopia and Sudan. It includes Gumuz, Koma, and Mao. »>Nilo-Saharan.

Komi /‘koumi:/ Amember of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric family of languages,
spoken by c.400,000 people, in two main varieties, chiefly in the Komi region of
north European Russia (where it has official status); formerly called Zyryan. It is
written in the Cyrillic alphabet. »»Finno-Ugric.

Kongo /'kongav/ A Bantu language spoken by c.3 million people, mainly in the
Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola, with some in Congo; also called Congo
or Kikongo. It is written in the Roman alphabet, and there is a well-developed oral
literature. Many people (c.4 million) use a creolized form of the language, known as
Kituba. »Bantu; creole.

Konkani /'koykani:/ A language belonging to the Western group of Indo-Aryan

languages, spoken by c.2 million people in Goa, western India, and nearby. It is
written in both the Devanagari and Roman alphabets. »Indo-Aryan.
Korea, North (population in 1995 estimated at 23,518,000) The official language
is Korean, spoken by nearly the whole population. English is used for international
purposes. >»>Korean.

Korea, South (population in 1995 estimated at 44,853,000) The official language

: S31
Korean

is Korean, spoken by nearly the whole population. English is used for international
purposes. »>Korean.
Korean A language spoken by c.75 million people, chiefly in South Korea (c.44
million) and North Korea (c.25 million), by others in China (c.2 million), Japan
(c.670,000), Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, and by immigrants in several countries
(notably the USA). Its genetic relationship to other languages is unclear, though
some linguists place it within the Altaic family, and some relate it to Japanese. It
has been much influenced by Chinese, with more than half its vocabulary of Chinese
origin. The earliest records of the language, dating from before the 12th century,
are in Chinese characters. A native Korean alphabet of 28 letters was introduced in
the 15th century, and is still used in modified form (known as Hankul). A mixed
style of writing is also in use, in which Chinese loan words are written in their
original characters. »»Altaic; Chinese; Japanese; Korea, North/South.

Krio /‘krizau/ An English-based creole language spoken by c.470,000 people as a

first language in and around Freetown, Sierra Leone (where c.4 million use it as a
lingua franca), and in nearby parts of Gambia and Equatorial Guinea. Another variety
is also found in Liberia. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »>creole; lingua franca.
Kurdish A member of the Iranian group of languages, spoken by an uncertain
number of people (perhaps as many as 10 million), chiefly in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq,
with others in nearby parts of adjoining countries; also called Kurdi (southern) and
Kurmanji (northern). There are northern, central, and southern dialect groupings,
the central dialects being the basis of the modern literary language, which developed
only in the 20th century. Its writing system depends on the locality — Arabic, Cyrillic,
and (to a lesser extent) Roman are all found. »>Iranian.

Kurmanji >Kurdish.

Kuwait (population in 1995 estimated at 1,019,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken by most of the population. Several languages are in use by groups of immigrant
workers (e.g. English, Hindi). English is used for international purposes. >»Arabic.

Kwa A group of c.75 Niger-Congo languages spoken by c.14 million people along
the Atlantic coast in the southern part of the bulge of West Africa. In such a complex
linguistic area, several pidgin and creole languages have developed, as an aid to
inter-group communication; also, English or French are official languages in the
area. Languages formerly classified as Eastern Kwa (e.g. Igbo) are now placed within
the Benue-Congo family, with Ijo and related languages recognized as a separate
branch. »»Akan; creole; Ewe; Niger-Congo; pidgin.

kymograph >electrokymograph.
Kyrgyzstan (population in 1995 estimated at 4,694,000) The official languages
are Kirghiz (spoken by over half of the population) and Russian (c.16%). Other
languages include Uzbek (c.10%), Chinese, Mongol, and Uighur. »»Kirghiz; Russian.

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iS
L >diglossia.

labial Descriptive of a speech sound made with the active use of one or both lips.
In labio-dental sounds (such as [f]), the lower lip is in contact with (or approaches
very close to) the upper teeth. In labio-velar sounds (such as [w]), a sound made
at the velum is accompanied by simultaneous lip-rounding. Sounds which involve
both lips include the bilabial consonants (e.g. [b], [m]) and rounded vowels (e.g.
{u]). Labialization occurs when a sound which is not normally rounded is articu-
lated with some degree of lip rounding, such as happens to the [s] in Sue (because
of the influence of the following [u]). »>rounding; velar.

labio-dental >labial.

LAD An abbreviation of Language Acquisition Device.

Ladino /la'di:nav/ 1. A variety of Romance, spoken by an uncertain number of

Sephardic Jews (perhaps over 150,000) in the Balkans, Turkey, Israel, and parts of
the Middle East, and through immigration in a few other countries, especially the
USA; also called Judaeo-Spanish. It began in Spain in the Middle Ages, and was
spread by the Jews who were exiled from that country in 1492. It is usually written
in the Hebrew alphabet, though the Roman alphabet is used in Turkey. There is a
substantial body of literature in the language. »Romance. 2. A name sometimes
given to Rhaetian, or to one of its dialects; also called Ladin. »»Rhaetian.

Lahnda /‘la:nda/ »>Panjabi.

la-la theory The name of one of the speculative theories about the origins of
language (also called the sing-song theory): it argues that speech originated in
song, play, and other aspects of the romantic side of life. The intonation system
provides some evidence, but the gap between the emotional and the rational aspects
of speech expression remains to be explained. >>origins of language.

laminal /‘lamml/ Descriptive of a consonant made by the blade (or lamina) of

the tongue articulating with the upper incisor teeth or alveolar ridge. Examples
include [f] and [t{]. »blade; tongue.

Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English (LOB) A corpus compiled

by linguists at the Universities of Lancaster and Oslo, and prepared for computer
analysis at the Norwegian Computing Centre for the Humanities in Bergen. It is the

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Landsmal

British equivalent of the Brown Corpus. »»Brown University Corpus of American

English; corpus.
Landsmal /‘lantsm9:1/ >Norwegian.
langage /1G'ga:3/ A French term introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure to refer to
the human biological faculty of speech. It is distinguished in his approach from
langue, the language system ofa speech community. » language 1; langue; Saussure,
Ferdinand de.
Lango /‘langau/ A Nilotic language spoken by nearly a million people in north
Uganda; closely related to Acholi. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »Acholi;
Nilotic.

language 1. The systematic, conventional use of sounds, signs, or written symbols

in a human society for communication and self-expression. Within this broad
definition, it is possible to distinguish several uses, operating at different levels of
abstraction. In particular, linguists distinguish between language viewed as an act
of speaking, writing, or signing, in a given situation (often referred to by the French
term parole, or as linguistic performance), the linguistic system underlying an
individual's use of speech, writing, or sign (often referred to as competence), and
the abstract system underlying the spoken, written, or signed behaviour of a whole
community (often referred to by the French term Jangue). Particular levels of speech,
writing, or sign may also be described as ‘language’ (e.g. ‘scientific language’, ‘bad
language’). And the term may be used in a still more general way, to characterize
one of the defining features of human behaviour — the biological faculty which
enables individuals to learn and use speech, writing, or sign (sometimes referred to
by the French term langage). Estimates of the number of languages (in the everyday
sense) in the world vary greatly — chiefly because of the difficulty of distinguishing
languages from dialects — but are usually between 5000 and 7000. »competence;
dialect; displacement; duality of structure; endangered languages; interchange-
ability; langue; linguistics; productivity; typology of language; Universal Declaration
of Linguistic Rights; variety. 2. An artificially constructed system used to expound
a conceptual area or to facilitate communication; contrasts with natural language.
This sense includes the notion of a computer language, a specially devised system
of symbols and rules for programming and interacting with computers. It also
includes the idea of an artificial language, such as Esperanto, or those sign
languages which have been invented for use with deaf people. »»artificial/natural/
sign language. 3. In the traditional study of speech pathology, the meaningful or
symbolic aspect of language, to be distinguished from the sounds which convey
that meaning. In this sense, therapists often talk about disorders of ‘speech and
language’. The distinction is controversial, with many professionals now preferring
to use the more general term ‘language’ to subsume all disorders of speaking, listening,
reading and writing (i.e. including the phonetic kinds). »language pathology.
4. The means animals use to communicate, more precisely referred to as ‘animal

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 Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure (LARSP)

communication’. This is one of several figurative applications of the term ‘language’

to aspects of behaviour which, because they lack the creativity and complexity of
structure that can be found in speech, writing, and sign, are more properly described
as types of ‘communication’. Other loose or metaphorical applications include such
expressions as ‘body language’ and ‘the language of music’. »communication;
semiotics; zodsemiotics.

language acquisition >acquisition.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD) A model of first language learning, encoun-

tered especially in generative linguistics, in which the infant is credited with an
innate predisposition to acquire linguistic structure. The notion has proved contro-
versial, with debate focusing on the extent to which the LAD can be given a
specifically linguistic (as opposed to a cognitive) definition, and on the kinds of
linguistic evidence (in particular, universals of early language behaviour) which can
be adduced in its support. »»innateness hypothesis; universal.

language aptitude Natural ability to learn a language. The concept is independent

of such other notions as intelligence, motivation, and opportunity. Various specific
factors seem to be involved, such as the ability to infer grammatical rules from
samples of data, to remember vocabulary, to distinguish sound qualities, and to
imitate prosodic patterns. A language aptitude test (also called a prognostic
test) aims to measure this ability, and to identify those who are most likely to
succeed in learning a language. »>language learning.
language areas The areas of the brain which seem to be most closely implicated
in speaking, listening, reading, writing, and signing, mainly located at or around
the Sylvian and Rolandic fissures; also called the language centres. For example,
an area in the lower back part of the frontal lobe is primarily involved in the encoding
of speech (Broca’s area); an area in the upper back part of the temporal lobe, extending
upwards into the parietal lobe, is important in the comprehension of speech (Wer-
nicke’s area). Other areas are involved in speech perception, visual perception, and
the motor control of speaking, writing, and signing. »>Broca’s aphasia; neurolinguist-
ics; Wernicke’s aphasia; p. 186.
language arts The areas of an educational curriculum which involve the mastery
of skills related to language — chiefly speaking, listening, reading, and writing, as
well as related notions such as spelling and nonverbal communication. The notion
is often encountered in mother-tongue education, where the emphasis is on an
integrated programme of linguistic development, and not on the acquisition of
separate skills. »»educational linguistics; language learning.
Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure (LARSP) A
profile of grammatical development used in the study of language disability. It was
devised in the 1970s by a group of linguists at the University of Reading, based on
a synthesis of findings from the study of normal language acquisition. It was the

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language attitudes

Central sulcus
Motor control area (of Rolando)
Sensory
processing
area
Wernicke’s
centre area
Angular
gyrus
Broca’s
area

Visual
Lateral (Sylvian) processing
sulcus area
Heschl’s
gyri

The areas of the brain most involved in the production and reception of lan-
guage. © 1979 Scientific American Inc. All rights reserved. Jamguage areas)

first in a series of linguistic profiles which then emerged, investigating a number of

areas of language structure within a clinical perspective. »>clinical linguistics; profile.

language attitudes The feelings people have about their own language or the
language(s) of others. These may be positive or negative: someone may particularly
value a foreign language (e.g. because of its literary history) or think that a language
is especially difficult to learn (e.g. because the script is off-putting); rural accents
generally receive a positive evaluation, whereas urban accents are thought of in
negative terms. Knowing about attitudes is an important aspect of evaluating the
likely success of a language teaching programme or a piece of language planning.
»> language learning/planning; peace linguistics.

language attrition >language death.

language awareness An informed, sensitive, and critical response to the use of

language by oneself and others. Although the promotion of language awareness has
always been a goal of linguistics (and specifically of educational linguistics), a
particular impetus was given to this process at the end of the 1980s in Britain,
following the publication of government reports on the teaching of the English
language in schools, and the development of a new National Curriculum in English.
»> ecolinguistics; educational linguistics; knowledge about language; metalanguage.

language barrier The difficulties faced by people who do not have the same
mother tongue when they attempt to communicate with each other. Many ways of
breaking down this barrier have been proposed, such as translation and interpreting,

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 language dominance

foreign language teaching, and the use of various artificial and auxiliary languages.
The phrase is also sometimes used to refer to the difficulties of communication
faced by people who do have the same language background. »»artificial/auxiliary
language; language teaching; miscommunication; translatology.
language centres (UK) or centers (US) »>language areas.

language change Change within a language over a period of time — a universal

and unstoppable process. The phenomenon was first systematically investigated by
comparative philologists at the end of the 18th century, and in the present century
by historical linguists and sociolinguists. All aspects of language are involved, though
most attention has been paid to the areas of pronunciation and vocabulary, where
change is most noticeable and frequent. »analogy 2; archaism; convergence 2;
language shift; overt prestige; philology; purism; sound change; variable; vowel shift.

language contact A situation of geographical continuity or close social proximity

between languages or dialects, so that a degree of bilingualism comes to exist within
a community. The languages (also called contact vernaculars) then begin to
influence each other, such as by introducing loan words or making changes in
pronunciation. The most dramatic examples of new languages arising out of contact
situations are pidgins. »>bilingualism; pidgin; substrate.

language death The situation which arises when a language ceases to be used by
acommunity; also called language loss or obsolescence, especially when referring
to the loss of language ability in an individual. The term language attrition is
sometimes used when the loss is gradual rather than sudden. »>dead language;
endangered languages; language revitalization programme.

language delay The failure of a child to learn language (or an aspect of language)
at a normal rate. The concept is most commonly applied to speech, and especially
to the slow learning of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. The extent of the
delay may be mild (a few months), moderate, or severe (several years). In most
cases, the problem has no clear physical cause. Children with delayed language are
sometimes called aphasic or dysphasic — though this label is controversial, being
used historically to describe the linguistic symptoms of people with known brain
damage. »>aphasia; language disorder/pathology.
language diffusion >diffusion.
language disorder A serious abnormality in the system underlying the use of
spoken, written, or signed language. Many language disorders are the consequence
of damage to an area of the brain responsible for linguistic processing (notably,
aphasia), but some have no clear physical cause. Most cases of child language delay
involve an element of disordered language, though the reason for the condition is
often unclear. »>aphasia; deviance; language areas/delay/pathology; speech therapy.

language dominance A situation in a multilingual community where one lan-

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language engineering

guage is held to be more important than others. This situation may arise because
the language has more speakers, has a more prestigious history, or has been given
an influential role by the government. Similarly, within a bilingual individual, we
may speak of one language being the dominant language — the person knows it
better or uses it more often. This is usually a person’s mother-tongue, but it need
not always be so: many of the people who left continental Europe for the USA
in the 1930s ended up with English as their dominant language. »>bilingualism;
ecolinguistics.

language engineering >language planning.

language experience approach A method used in teaching a child to read which

emphasizes the recent experience of the child as an essential part of the learning
process. For example, a recent excursion may become the focus of a lesson, and the
sentences produced by the child in talking about it are written down and read.
Reading materials are based on the child’s own level of language ability. »reading.

language family >family of languages.

Language(s) for Special Purposes, also Language(s) for Specific Purposes

(LSP) An area of enquiry and practice in the development of language teaching
programmes for people who need a language (or a variety of a language) to meet a
predictable range of communicative needs. Examples include courses for scientists,
doctors, lawyers, and air traffic controllers. »»English for Special Purposes (ESP).

language game »>play language.

language generation The production of spoken, written, or signed messages by

people or computers. The term is chiefly used for the computational composition
of printed text. »computational linguistics; natural language.

Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) A three-year in-service project

in the UK, whose aim was to acquaint teachers with the model of language presented
in the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into English Language Teaching (the
Kingman Report, 1988). The training took place between 1989 and 1992, and was
funded (at a cost of £21 million) by the Department of Education and Science and
the local education authorities of England and Wales. A wide range of materials was
produced to assist teachers directly. Controversy surfaced in mid-1991 when it was
announced that ministers would not permit official HMSO publication of the LINC
training materials nor waive Crown Copyright (thus precluding their publication
elsewhere). Criticisms included the claims that much of the illustrative children’s
work was of questionable quality, that there was bias in the way controversial topics
were discussed (such as the relationship between language and power), that much
of the linguistic terminology was excessively complex, and that dialect forms were
being emphasized at the expense of the standard language. There was no restriction
on the use of the materials in in-service training courses. A vigorous defence of the

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 language maintenance

project's policy and practice was presented, but the ban remained. However, despite
(or perhaps because of) the ban there was widespread circulation of the materials
in unpublished form. »bidialectism; knowledge about language; language arts/
awareness.

language in use An approach to the development of a child’s linguistic awareness

and skills which focuses on the way spoken and written language is used in real
situations. The aim is to find contexts which are meaningful and motivating (e.g.
advertising, news reporting, operating instructions), so that children can develop
their awareness of what language is and how it is used. Popular in the 1970s as an
alternative to the parsing techniques previously widespread, the approach tends now
to be part of a broader approach which includes a descriptive structural apparatus.
»> educational linguistics; knowledge about language; parsing.

language isolate >isolate.

language laboratory or language lab A classroom which uses booths containing

audio or video recorders which enable students to listen and respond to foreign
utterances through an individual headset. The recorders have listening, recording,
and playback facilities. A teacher sitting at a control desk can monitor or talk to
individual students. Students work intensively at their own rate. »audiolingual
method; language teaching.

language learning The process of internalizing a language - either a mother

tongue or a foreign language. The factors which affect this process (such as the
individual’s intelligence, memory, and motivation to learn) are seen as separate
from those involved in the task of language teaching. »»acquisition; contrastive
analysis (CA); expansion 2; interlanguage; language aptitude/teaching; monitor
model; natural order hypothesis; reading; Washoe.

language loss 1. The loss of language by an individual as a result of some trauma,

such as brain damage or shock. The loss may be permanent or temporary, and varies
in the severity with which it affects different aspects of language structure. Some
forms of loss respond well to treatment; others do not. »>aphasia; apraxia; dysarthria;
dysphonia; language pathology. 2. »language death.

language loyalty A concern to preserve the use of a language or the traditional

form of a language, when that language is perceived to be under threat. For example,
many first-generation immigrants to a country are extremely loyal to their first
language, but attitudes vary in the second generation. >»>language attitudes/death/
maintenance/shift.

language maintenance The extent to which people continue to use a language,

once they are part of a multilingual area. For example, immigrant groups may
continue with their language, out of a sense of loyalty, despite the dominance of
the language of their host country (as has often happened in the USA); or a com-

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language minority

munity may try to maintain its language successfully in the face of a conquering
nation (as happened with English after the Norman Conquest). »endangered lan-
guages; language dominance/loyalty/shift.
language minority »>minority.

language pathology The study of all forms of involuntary, abnormal linguistic

behaviour, especially when associated with medical conditions; a practitioner is a
language pathologist, commonly known as a speech therapist (UK) or speech
pathologist (US), with speech and language therapist now the official name
in the UK. The subject includes disorders of speaking, listening, reading, and writing,
and applies both to developmental abnormalities in children and to acquired abnor-
malities in children or adults. Any recognized area of linguistic structure and use is
covered by the term, especially disorders of grammar, semantics, phonology, and
pragmatics. The term is broader in its implications than the analogous term speech
pathology, though in practice the subject-matter and professional expertise referred
to by the two domains are similar. However, disorders of a primarily phonetic nature
(such as dysarthria and dysphonia) are traditionally described as being disorders of
‘speech’ (in a narrow sense) as opposed to ‘language’, on the grounds that they lack
any meaningful or symbolic function; and disorders of reading and writing are often
excluded or marginalized in the study of speech pathology. The term ‘pathology’ is
itself controversial, because of its medical connotations: therapists are often unhappy
about using it to refer to disorders (e.g. stuttering) which lack a clear medical cause.
»> acquired language disorder; agnosia; aphasia; communication disorder; dysarthria;
dysfluency; dyslexia; dysphonia; dysprosody; language 3; mutism; speech defect/
therapy.

language pedagogy »>educational linguistics.

language planning A deliberate, systematic, and theory-based attempt to solve
the communication problems of a community by studying its various languages or
dialects, and developing an official language policy concerning their selection
and use; also sometimes called language engineering or language treatment.
Corpus planning deals with the selection and codification of norms, as in the
writing of grammars and the standardization of spelling. Status planning deals
with the initial choice of language, including attitudes towards alternative languages
and the political implications of various choices. »»ecolinguistics; sociolinguistics;
standard.

language policy >language planning.

language revitalization programme A programme of support or teaching

designed to improve the use of a language which is in danger of dying out. Several
such programmes are to be found around the world, generally focusing on minority
languages, as in the case of various American Indian languages, Irish Gaelic, and
Welsh. »>language death; minority.

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 Laos

language rights >Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights.

language shift The gradual or sudden move from the use of one language to
another, either by an individual or by a group. It is particularly found among second-
and third-generation immigrants, who often lose their attachment to their ancestral
language, faced with the pressure to communicate in the language of the host
country. Language shift may also be actively encouraged by the government policy
of the host country. »endangered languages; language loyalty/planning.

language socialization The gradual development in children of patterns of

language use which reproduce the adult system of social order. For example, adult
expectations of politeness (e.g. ‘Say please’, ‘Don’t say she’) are explicitly introduced
into conversations with children from around age 3. »»acquisition.

language teaching The process of instructing students in a language — either their

mother tongue (e.g. the teaching of reading, speech therapy) or a foreign language.
The way in which this is best done is highly controversial, and many teaching
methods and theories have been proposed. »communicative approach; computer-
assisted language learning; direct method; drill; grammar-translation method;
immersion; Language for Special Purposes; language laboratory/learning; Linguapax;
look-and-say; natural approach; notional syllabus; phonics; remedial language
teaching.

language therapist >speech therapy.

language treatment >language planning; speech therapy.

language universal >universal.

langue /iag/ The language system shared by a community of speakers; contrasts
with parole /pa'rvl/, the act of speaking in actual situations by an individual. Both
terms were introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and came to exercise considerable
influence on the development of linguistic thought. »competence; language 1;
performance 1; Saussurian.

Languedoc /ld'dvk/ >Occitan.

langue d’oil/d’oc /14 ‘dol, 'dvk/ >French.

Lao /lav/ A member of the Tai family of languages, spoken by over 3 million people
chiefly in Thailand and Laos (where it is the official language); also called Laotian.
It is written in the Laotian alphabet, a derivative of Cambodian. Its literature is
closely linked to both Buddhist and Hindu traditions. There is a dialect continuum
linking Lao to Northeastern Tai, yielding a combined total of over 20 million speakers.
»>dialect continuum; Laos; Tai.

Laos (population in 1995 estimated at 4,791,000) The official language is Lao

(Laotian), spoken by c.65% of the population. There are c.80 local languages, includ-

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Laotian

ing Miao, Vietnamese, and several varieties of Thai. French is used for international
purposes. >>Lao.

Laotian /‘lavf{n/ >Lao.

Lapp(ish) >Same.

LARSP An abbreviation of Language Assessment, Remediation and Screen-

ing Procedure.

laryngealization »>creaky voice.

laryngectomy /larin'dektoami:/ The surgical removal of some or all of the larynx,

usually following an irreversible laryngeal cancer; the patient is a laryngectomee.
The pathway from the pharynx to the lungs is surgically closed, and breathing takes
place through an alternative opening made at the front of the neck. Many people
learn to use the upper part of their pharynx and esophagus to initiate vibration,
resulting in an esophageal voice quality. Alternatively they may use an artificial
larynx to provide a source of vibration. »>artificial larynx; esophageal; vocal tract.

laryngology /larin'gpladi:/ The study of the anatomy, physiology, and diseases

of the larynx. Its practitioners laryngologists) are doctors who have specialized
in ENT (ear, nose, and throat) medicine. »larynx.

larynx The interconnecting cartilages in the throat which enclose the vocal folds;

Hyoid
hehe Epiglottis

Epiglottic Glottis
cartilage

Cricoid

cartilage Cartilage
Thyroid Vocal folds
cartilage Trachea

(a) (b)
(a) A front view of the structure of the larynx. The vocal folds lie behind the
thyroid cartilage (or ‘Adam’s apple’). (b) A view of the larynx from above, as
seen with a laryngoscope.

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 Latvia

known popularly as the ‘voice box’. Sounds made in the larynx are sometimes called
laryngeals, especially in studies of language pre-history. Laryngealization refers
to variations in the mode of vibration of the vocal folds, such as creaky voice. The
laryngograph (or electrolaryngograph) is a device for recording vocal-fold
vibrations visually on a cathode-ray screen, using electrodes placed against the
appropriate part of the neck. A laryngoscope is a long-handled small mirror inserted
into the mouth to enable the doctor to see the larynx. »>creaky voice; vocal folds.

lateral Descriptive of a type of consonant where there is an obstruction to the

airstream in the middle of the vocal tract, so that air passes through an incomplete
closure at one or both sides. The different kinds of | sound are all laterals. »>clear 1;
consonant.

Latin The parent language of the Romance family, spoken during the first millen-
nium Bc in Rome and the surrounding provinces, then rising and declining in
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa along with the fortunes of the Roman Empire.
It is preserved in inscriptions from the 6th century Bc, and in literature from the 3rd
century Bc (Classical Latin). Major figures include the poet Virgil, the orator Cicero,
and the historian Livy, all active in or around the 1st century Bc. The Vulgar Latin
used from around the 3rd century aD in everyday speech throughout the Roman
Empire gave rise to the Romance family of languages. A Christian Latin style also
emerged, culminating in St Jerome’s translation of the Bible (the Vulgate). This
proved to be highly influential in the Middle Ages, with Latin the official language
of the Roman Catholic Church (a status it retains today) as well as the language of
administration, scholarship, education, science, and literature for most of Europe.
A Renaissance Latin is associated with Dante, Petrarch, and others in the 14th
century. As the chief language of education, Latin later exercised considerable influ-
ence on the way grammar was taught in schools; Latin grammatical categories came
to be routinely used in the description of modern European languages, resulting in
a frame of reference whose artificiality has come to be appreciated only in the 20th
century. »>Italic; Latinate; prescriptivism; Romance.

Latin alphabet >Roman alphabet.

Latinate Descriptive of any grammar based on the terms and categories used in
Classical Latin grammar. Examples include the use of a case system (nominative,
vocative, accusative, etc.) to describe the properties of nouns, or the use of an array
of tenses (future, future perfect, pluperfect, etc.) to describe verbs. The term usually
carries a pejorative implication, especially when it refers to languages where linguists
consider the use of Latin-based categories to be inappropriate. »»case; Latin; pre-
scriptivism; tense 1.

Latvia (population in 1995 estimated at 2,620,000) The official languages are

Latvian (spoken by c.56% of the population) and Russian (c.34%). Romani and
Yiddish are also important. »>Latvian; Russian.

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Latvian

Latvian A Baltic language spoken by over 1.5 million people, chiefly in Latvia
(c.1.4 million), and also in Lithuania, Ukraine, Estonia, and Belarus, and through
emigration in the USA, Australia, anda few other countries; also known as Lettish.
Its earliest texts (in Gothic script) date from the 16th century. A Roman alphabet
was adopted in 1922, with the addition of diacritics to represent palatal consonants.
»> Baltic; Latvia.

law An abbreviated statement of the predictable relationships between different

languages or the states of a language. The notion has been primarily used with
reference to the development of pronunciation (sound laws), especially as studied
in the 19th-century, where the laws are named after the people who thought them
up (e.g. Grimm, Verner). »Grimm’s law; Neogrammarians; philology; sound change;
Verner’s law.

lax >tension.

leading /‘ledin/ The white space between lines of type on a page. The term derives
from the thin strips of lead, less than the height of the surrounding type, which
were formerly used to separate lines of type when typesetting text. Placing a number
of these strips side by side would increase the amount of space between lines.
Different methods are used in modern typesetting, but the term continues in use.
>> typography.

Lebanon (population in 1995 estimated at 2,919,000) The official language is

Arabic, spoken by c.93% of the population. Other languages are Armenian, Kurdish,
and Aramaic. French is used for international purposes. »»Arabic.

lect Any variety of a language which can be identified in a speech community. The
term was introduced as a general notion under which could be subsumed regional,
social, personal, occupational, and other kinds of linguistic variation. Grammars
which take lectal variation into account are said to be polylectal or panlectal.
»>creole; dialect; idiolect; variety.

Lekhitic /le'kitik/ A name sometimes given to a group of West Slavic languages

originally spoken along the Baltic between the Vistula and the Oder. It included
Polish, Kashubian, Polabian (which died out in the 18th century), and Slovincian.
»> Polish; Slavic.

lemma »>headword.

length In phonetics, the physical duration of a sound or utterance, measured in

seconds or fractions of a second. In phonology, the term has a less obvious meaning,
as it refers to the relative duration of sounds and syllables when these are linguistically
contrastive; also called quantity, and contrasting with quality, which is the kind
of articulation involved in a sound, regardless of its duration. A language may have
‘long’ vs. ‘short’ vowels, or ‘long’ vs. ‘short’ consonants. Long vowels in English

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 level

include /i:/ (as in see) and /u:/ (as in shoe); short vowels include /1/ (as in sit) and
/o/ (as in put). »consonant; duration; Estonian; mora; vowel.

lenis /‘li:nts/ >fortis.

lenition >fortis.

lento Descriptive of speech produced slowly or with careful articulation; contrasts

with allegro, where the speech is faster than usual. Several other music-derived
terms have been appropriated for the study of speech prosody, such as crescendo.
>> prosody.

Lesotho (population in 1995 estimated at 2,017,000) The official languages are

English and Sotho (Sesotho). Sotho is spoken by c.85% of the population, the
other local language being Zulu (c.15%). English is used for international purposes.
»>English; Sotho.

letter A symbol used in an alphabetic system of writing to represent one or more

speech sounds. In many modern writing systems, a distinction is drawn between
large letters all the same height (capital letters or upper-case letters) and smaller
letters whose height varies (lower-case letters). Capitals have several functions,
marking the beginning of a sentence, proper nouns, and abbreviations, and also
being used in cases of general emphasis (HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME) and special
emphasis (She Who Must Be Obeyed). Small capitals (of a similar height to lower-case
letters) may be distinguished from large (‘full’) capitals in certain typefaces (e.g.
CAPITAL vs. CAPITAL), though this contrast is not available in typewriter setting.
The relationship between letters and sounds is the basis of a language’s spelling
system. »>alphabet; black letter writing; cursive; italic; ligature; majuscule; spelling;
uncial; writing.

Létzebuergesch /‘letsabuage{/ A West Germanic language, spoken by c.350,000

people, chiefly in Luxembourg (where it is widespread as a language of local identity),
with some in Belgium and Germany, and through immigration in the USA; also
known as Luxemb(o)urgish or Luxembourgeois. It is written in the Roman
alphabet. »»Germanic; Luxembourg.

level 1. A major dimension of the structural organization of language, which can

be independently studied. The major levels are phonology, grammar, and semantics,
but certain other domains have also been called ‘levels’, such as phonetics, mor-
phology, and pragmatics. »>duality of structure. 2. In generative linguistics, a type
of representation encountered within the derivation of a sentence. An influential
case is the distinction between deep and surface levels of structure. »>deep structure.
3. A structural layer within a hierarchy, such as clause, phrase, or word; also called
rank. A particular syntactic process might be said to operate ‘at clause level’, for
example. »hierarchy. 4. A degree of pitch height or loudness; syllables might be
pronounced at high, mid, or low levels. A pitch height which does not vary can also

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level tone

be called ‘level’ (e.g. a ‘level tone’), as can a stress pattern where the constituents are
equal (a ‘level stress’). »»prosody. 5. A model of expression felt to be appropriate to
a type of social situation (a stylistic level), such as formal or intimate. This sense can
be illustrated from the way people sometimes talk about ‘lowering the level of the
conversation’. »>stylistics.

level tone »>falling tone.

lexeme /'leksi:m/ The smallest distinctive unit in the lexicon of a language; also
called a lexical item. The term was introduced to avoid the ambiguity in the term
‘word’, when discussing vocabulary. A lexeme may consist of a single word (e.g.
table) or more than one word (e.g. phrasal verbs, such as switch off). Also, a lexeme
is an abstract notion, subsuming a range of variant forms (each of which is a word):
go, for example, subsumes gone, went, going, and goes. »»idiom; lexicon.

lexical density A measure of the difficulty of a text, using the ratio of the number
of different words in a text (the ‘word types’) to the total number of words in the
text (the ‘word tokens’); also called the type-token ratio (TTR). It is calculated
by dividing the number of different words by the total number of words and
multiplying by 100. The result is given as a percentage. The assumption is that
increasing the number of different words (i.e. a higher TTR) increases textual diffi-
culty. »»statistical linguistics.

lexical field >semantic field theory.

lexical-functional grammar (LFG) A grammatical theory in which the role of

the lexicon is seen as central, and syntactic functions (such as subject and object)
are seen as basic notions (‘primitive terms’) within the grammar. This approach
developed in the 1980s as an alternative to earlier models of generative grammar,
which emphasized syntactic forms rather than functions, and whete syntactic struc-
ture was thought to be central. »>form 1; function 1; generative grammar.

lexical item »lexeme; lexicon.

lexical morphology >morphology.

lexical phonology A theory about the organization of grammar in which all

morphological rules, and many phonological ones, are placed in the lexicon. The
phonological rules are divided into lexical rules, which may interact with morpho-
logical rules, and postlexical rules, which may not. »lexicon; morphology; pho-
nology; rule 1.

lexical verb A verb which expresses an action, event, or state; also called a main
verb or full verb. The contrast is with the auxiliary verb system, which expresses
attitudinal and grammatical contrasts. »>verb.

lexical word »grammatical word.

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lexicography The art and science of dictionary making. A dictionary is a reference

book which lists the words of one or more languages, usually in alphabetical order,
along with information about their spelling, pronunciation, grammatical status,
meaning, history, and use. Dictionaries vary greatly in size, from unabridged works
of several thousand pages to the small concise or pocket books of just a few hundred
pages. These days, a strictly linguistic approach, in which information is given
only about the properties of the lexical items (the traditional approach in British
lexicography), is being replaced by one which adds certain kinds of encyclopedic
information (traditional in American and many Continental dictionaries). As a
consequence, new ways of describing language reference works are now being devised
—as illustrated by the title of the present book. »>citation form; defining vocabulary;
glossary; headword; lexicon; term bank; thesaurus.

lexicology »>lexicon.

lexicon The vocabulary of a language (technically, its lexical items or lexemes),

especially when these are listed in a dictionary as a set of lexical entries; also called
lexis. The study of a language’s lexicon is lexicology. A network of semantically
related lexical items, such as the words for colour or fruit, is a lexical field (or
semantic field). In generative grammar, the lexicon is the component containing
all the information about the structural properties of lexical items. Lexical syntax

‘Big hairy thing with horns overboard!’

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lexicostatistics

is an approach which incorporates syntactic rules within the lexicon; lexical pho-
nology is an approach where some of the phonological rules are transferred to the
lexicon. In psycholinguistics, the stored mental representation of what people know
about their language is called the mental lexicon, and the study of the psychology
of word meanings is sometimes called psycholexicology. »>component 2; lexeme;
lexicography; semantic field theory; semantics.

lexicostatistics >glottochronology.

Lezghian or Lezgian /‘lezgian/ A member of the Dagestanian group of Caucasian

languages, spoken by c.450,000 people, chiefly in the Dagestan region of Russia and
in Azerbaijan. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The name is also used for a group
of related languages spoken in this area. »Nakho-Dagestanian.

LFG An abbreviation of lexical-functional grammar.

liaison The introduction of a sound at the end of a word in certain phonological

contexts. For example, a final consonant may be introduced before a following
vowel, as in French nous avons, where the -s of nous is pronounced (compare nous
voulons, where it is not). »>linking; transition 1.

Liberia (population in 1995 estimated at 3,029,000) The official language is English.

An English-based pidgin (Liberian English) is used by over half the population. There
are in addition c.30 local languages, notably Kru and Kpelle. »>English; pidgin.

Libya (population in 1995 estimated at 4,848,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken by most of the population. There are a few other local languages, such as
Tamashek and Teda. English is used for international purposes. »»Arabic.

Liechtenstein (population in 1995 estimated at 31,000) The official language is

German, which is used by the whole population. English is also used for international
purposes. »>German.

ligature /‘ligatfue/ A written or printed symbol in which two or more letters have
been joined together; examples include £ and ce. The term is also used for a stroke
or bar which connects two or more letters, as in fi. »>graphology 1.

LINC An abbreviation of Language in the National Curriculum.

linear In the history of writing systems, descriptive of scripts which use a sequence
of simply drawn characters instead of pictorial writing. The earliest examples are
known as Linear A and Linear B. Linearity is a feature of most modern writing,
though direction varies (e.g. left-right, right—-left, downwards), and the physical
limitations of the page force an interrupted linearity on to the text, in the form of
line-breaks. »>Linear A; writing.

Linear A A script used in Crete in the middle of the 2nd millennium sc. It has not
been deciphered, though some scholars believe the language it represents to be

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Minoan. The name refers to the way the script is written in lines, probably from
right to left—a contrast with previous hieroglyphic writing. The label ‘A’ distinguishes
the script from Linear B, which was used to write Greek on the island later in the
same millennium. »Greek; hieroglyphic.
Linear B »>Greek; Linear A.

line-break »>linear.

lingua franca An auxiliary language used to permit routine communication

between groups of people who speak different native languages. The term means
‘Frankish tongue’, which was used as a common language in the Mediterranean area
in the Middle Ages. Lingua francas are very common in heavily multilingual regions,
such as West and East Africa. »>auxiliary language; Bislama; Hausa; Hindi; koine;
Krio; Malay; Russian; Sango; Swahili.

lingual/linguo- Descriptive of a sound made with the tongue. For example, a

lingual trill is the trilled [r], heard in many Welsh and Scots speakers, made with
the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge. »>tongue.

Linguapax An international programme, initiated by UNESCO in 1987, whose

aim is to use language education in general, and language teaching in particular, as
a means of promoting increased understanding between nations — ‘peace through
language diversity and plurilingualism’. First languages, national languages, and
foreign languages are all viewed as ways through which a specifically linguistic
contribution can be made to foster peace, democracy, and human rights — for
example, by introducing materials to do with peace and cultural diversity into
language teaching syllabuses. »»>peace linguistics.
linguist A term used in two related senses: (1) a student or practitioner of linguistics,
sometimes also called a linguistician (but not usually by people working in linguis-
tics); (2) a person proficient in more than one language. It is usually necessary to clarify
which sense is intended, when describing someone as ‘a linguist’. »>bilingualism;
linguistics.
linguistic An ambiguous term, which therefore needs to be used with care: (1)
descriptive of language, or a feature of language, in such phrases as linguistic minority;
(2) descriptive of linguistics, referring to an approach or concept which derives from
this field, as in This point is of linguistic importance. >>linguistics.

linguistic anthropology »>anthropological linguistics.

linguistic atlas >dialect atlas.
linguistic change >language change.
linguistic determinism >Sapir—Whorf hypothesis.
linguistic geography »>geolinguistics.

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linguistician

linguistician >linguist.
linguistic method An approach to the teaching of reading which claimed to be
based on the principles of linguistics, especially on those espoused by structuralist
linguists of the 1940s and 1950s (such as Leonard Bloomfield). The approach empha-
sized the relationship between spoken and written language, the importance of
identifying regular patterns, and the need to attack spelling problems in a systematic
way. Given the enormous variety of modern linguistic theories and models, the
term is no longer appropriate or fashionable. »Bloomfieldian; reading; structural.

linguistic minority >minority.

linguistic philosophy »>philosophical linguistics.

linguistic relativity »Sapir—Whorf hypothesis.

linguistic rights »>Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights.
linguistics The scientific study of language; also called linguistic science — or,
when phonetics is seen as a distinct area of study, linguistic sciences. Several
branches of the subject have been recognized. The study of a language at any given
point in time is known as synchronic or descriptive linguistics; diachronic or
historical linguistics is the study of language change. Comparative linguistics
studies language history by investigating languages thought to be related. General
or theoretical linguistics aims to establish universal principles for the study of
languages, and to determine the characteristics of human language as a phenomenon.
Contrastive linguistics focuses on the differences between languages, especially
in the context of language teaching. Typological linguistics aims to identify the
common characteristics of different languages or language families. Structural
linguistics refers to any approach which focuses on the patterned characteristics
of language, but is especially used for the approaches to syntax and phonology
which were current in the 1940s and 1950s, with their emphasis on providing
discovery procedures for the analysis of surface structure. Linguistics is sometimes
contrasted with philology, a more specifically historical field. »»anthropological/
applied / bio-/ clinical /comparative / computational / critical /educational / ethno-/
mathematical/neuro-/philosophical/psycho-/socio-/statistical linguistics; language
1; philology; structural; typology of language.

linguistic science(s) >linguistics.

linguistic variable >variable.

linking Descriptive of a sound which is introduced between linguistic units, usually

for ease of pronunciation; for example, French il a ‘he has’ becomes a-t-il ‘has he’.
Sounds which have no correlation in spelling can attract the criticism of purist lan-
guage commentators, as in the case of law(r) and order. »>intrusion; liaison; purism.
linking verb >copula; extensive.

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 literary stylistics

lipogram /‘lipavgram/ A text from which a specific letter has been omitted through-
out. An early master of the genre was the Sth-century Bc poet Tryphiodorus, who
wrote an epic of 24 books, each omitting a different letter of the Greek alphabet.
The difficulty comes in attempting to write a text which leaves out the most frequent
letters of the alphabet, such as (in English) e or t.»>univocalic; word game.

lip reading »speech reading.

lip rounding >labial; rounding.

liquid Descriptive of sonorant consonants other than nasals and approximants. It

typically includes sounds made with the apex of the tongue against the alveolar
ridge, notably /1/ and /r/. »sonorant.

lisp An abnormal articulation of a sibilant consonant, especially [s]. The commonest

problem is that the tongue tip is placed against or between the teeth (a frontal,
lingual or interdental lisp), but several auditory qualities of lisp can be heard,
depending on exactly how the tongue is configured. »>sibilant; speech defect.

literacy The ability to read and write; contrasts with illiteracy, the two poles now
being seen to demarcate a continuum of ability. Discussion of the problem, either
within a country or on a world scale, is complicated by the difficulty of measuring
the extent of illiteracy in individuals. The notion of functional literacy was
introduced in the 1940s, in an attempt to identify minimal levels of reading/writing
efficiency in a society, such as being able to write one’s name; but defining even mini-
mal levels is difficult, especially today, with increasing demands being madeon people
to be literate in a wider range of contexts. Current world estimates suggest that about
900 million adults are illiterate to some extent. In the UK, figures were being cited in
the 1990s of about 2 million illiterate people (3.5% of the population). In the USA,
estimates have varied between 10% and 20%. In some Third World countries, the
figure may be as high as 80%. National literacy campaigns in several countries have
taised public awareness, and standards are slowly rising. Biliteracy is the ability to
read and write in more than one language. The term ‘literacy’ is also now often used
in a broader sense, referring to the ability to understand a technical or cultural
domain, as in computer literacy and graphic literacy. »»dyslexia; reading; writing.

literal >figurative language; typo.

literary pragmatics The study of the relationship of the production and reception
of literary texts to their use of linguistic forms. The area of research involves an
interaction between linguistics, literary theory, and the philosophy of language.
Topics which can be studied from this point of view include the use of regional
dialect, obscenity, or blasphemy in drama, especially viewed in relation to their effect
on the attitudes and sensibilities of a reader or audience. »>narrative; pragmatics.

literary stylistics >stylistics.

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Lithuania

Lithuania (population in 1995 estimated at 3,775,000) The official languages

are Lithuanian (spoken by c.80% of the population) and Russian (c.9%). Polish,
Ukrainian, and Romani are among the other languages spoken. »Lithuanian.

Lithuanian A Baltic language spoken by c.4 million people, chiefly in Lithuania,

with many immigrants in several other countries (e.g. USA, Russia, Brazil, Argentina).
Written texts date from the 16th century. The modern language is written in a
32-letter Latin alphabet. »»>Baltic; Lithuania.

litotes /lar'tauti:z, ‘lattati:z/ A figure of speech where something is understated; the

word comes from Greek ‘simple, meagre’. An everyday example is Not bad, said of
something which the speaker feels to be very good. »>figurative language; hyperbole.

living language >dead language.

loan blend/shift/word >borrowing.

loan translation >calque.

LOB corpus >Lancaster—Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English.

locative case One of the common ways in which inflected languages make a word
(usually a noun or pronoun) change its form, in order to show a grammatical
relationship with other parts of the sentence. The locative case typically expresses
the idea of a place of a state or action. Structures which express locational meaning
may also be referred to as locative; for example, in the street could be called a locative
phrase. »>inflection 1.

locutionary act >illocutionary act.

logical subject >subject.

logocentrism A language- or word-centred view of literature or other behaviour.

In literary stylistics, the notion is associated with the structuralist approach to
analysis, which focused on the study of the language of a text to the exclusion of the
author’s individuality, the social context, and the historical situation. A reaction to
this view in the late 1960s came to be called post-structuralism. Here, language is
seen as a system whose values shift in response to nonlinguistic factors. A range of
viewpoints drew attention to the multiple meanings of words, stressing the role of
- mental processes in interpreting linguistic relationships, and denying the possibility
of objectivity in textual interpretation. In particular, the methods of deconstruc-
tion, developed by Jacques Derrida (1930-_ ), aimed to show the inherent contradic-
tions and paradoxes in logocentric approaches. »>structural; stylistics.

logogram A written or printed symbol which represents a word (or morpheme) in

a language; alsocalledalogographor (in thecase of Orientallanguages)acharacter.
The best-known examples ofalogographicsystem are Chinese andits derivative script,
Japanese kanji. The term must be used with care, as it suggests that only words are

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represented by the symbols, whereas meaningful parts of words (e.g. affixes, roots) are
also included in the notion. Several thousand graphemes are used in a logographic
system, thoughin modern languages basic literacy requires a command of only c.2000.
Logograms in European languages include the numerals (1, 2, etc.) and many math-
ematical and scientific symbols. »>ideogram; morpheme; pasigraphy; writing.

eee sts ynAe coin

a
=
Ve one
%o £
$ On ”"

& eeL
\
&@ a eNhy
Examples of modern logograms.

logograph >logogram.

logogriph A word puzzle using anagrams; the term derives from Greek ‘word +
reed basket, riddle’. The clues are often given in verse form. »»anagram.

logopedics or logopaedics /logav'pi:diks/ A term used primarily on the European

mainland for the study of language (especially speech) disorders in children; its
practitioners are logopedists. »>language pathology.

logorrhoea /lpgea'ti:a/ Excessive, uncontrolled, incoherent speech. The term is

often used in an insulting way about anyone who (in the opinion of the listener) is
talking too much. It does not have technical status in linguistics.

London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English A corpus of educated spoken British

English, consisting of the spoken material collected as part of the Survey of English
Usage in London. The texts (of 5000 words each) were transferred to computer tape
in the 1970s at the Survey of Spoken English, University of Lund, and are also partly
available in printed form. A lexical concordance has also been compiled. »>corpus;
Survey of English Usage.

Longman-Lancaster English Language Corpus A corpus of spoken and writ-

ten English being compiled by Longman Group UK, under the direction of Della
Summers, in collaboration with Geoffrey Leech of Lancaster University. Established
in 1991, it aims to provide a corpus of between 30 and 50 million words of 20th-
century spoken and written English —- predominantly British (S0%) and American
(40%), with some inclusion of other varieties. »»corpus.

long sound »>length.

look-and-say A method of teaching reading which focuses on the recognition of

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loudness

whole words; also called the whole word approach. It assumes that readers can
make use of their language knowledge and general experience to identify critical
letters or words in a section of text, and thus begin building up a basic sight
vocabulary. This initial sampling gives them an expectation about the way a text
should be read, and they use their background awareness to ‘guess’ the remainder
of the text and fill in the gaps, gradually increasing the range of their reading
vocabulary. »phonics; reading; sight vocabulary.

loudness The attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a sound may be

ordered on a scale from low to high volume. It corresponds to some degree with the
acoustic feature of intensity, reflecting the size of the vibrations of the vocal folds.
The linguistic use of loudness is studied under the heading of a language’s prosodic
features. »>prosody; stress.

lower case >letter; majuscule.

low tone >tone.

low variety >diglossia.

low vowel >high vowel.

LSP An abbreviation of Language for Specific Purposes.

ludic language /‘lu:dik/ Language whose primary function is to be part of play,

as in the nonsense, repetitive rhythms, and rhymes heard in children’s games all
over the world. Adults, too, may play with language, such as by adopting silly tones
of voice or by twisting words into unorthodox shapes to create a humorous effect.
>> figurative/play/referential language; verbal play; word game.
Luo /la'wau/ A Nilotic language spoken by c.3 million people, mainly in Kenya,
with some speakers in Uganda and Tanzania. It is written in the Roman alphabet.
»>Nilotic.

Luorawetlan /lawore'wetln/ A family of languages generally placed within the

Paleosiberian grouping, spoken in north-eastern Siberia. It includes Chukchi and
Koryak, both with several thousand speakers, and Kamchadal, Aliutor, and Kerek,
which have only a few hundred. »>Chukchi.

Lusatian /lu:'se1{n/ >Sorbian.

Luxembourg (population in 1995 estimated at 402,000) The official language is

French, with German widely used as a lingua franca, and Létzebuergesch being the
first language of most people. The language of government administration and in
general professional use is French, with both French and German (and increasingly,
Létzebuergesch) being used in literature. English is also used for international trade
and tourism. »>French; German; Létzebuergesch.

Luxembourgish >Létzebuergesch.

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M
Maban /'maban/ A small group of Nilo-Saharan languages, spoken in the Central
African Republic, Chad, and Sudan. It includes Masalit, Mimi, and Maba. »>Nilo-
Saharan.

Macao (population in 1995 estimated at 470,000) The official language (pending

the return to Chinese rule in 1999) is Portuguese. Yue Chinese (Cantonese) is the
first language of most of the population. The indigenous Portuguese-based creole,
Macanese, is no longer found in the province. English is used for international
purposes. »>Portuguese.

macaronic /maka'tpvnik/ Descriptive of a type of speech or writing which mixes

two languages — the term is, indeed, from macaroni. The label is usually applied to
a kind of language (often a verse form) where Latin is mixed with vernacular words,
which are sometimes given Latin endings — but any mixture of languages can be so
described. Comez over ici, if you plait. Lots of goodorum gruborum in the fridgibus. The
genre has been known since the 15th century, and will still be encountered both in
public-school humour and in literature (e.g. the character of Salvatore in Umberto
Eco’s The Name of the Rose, 1980). A related effect is obtained by constructing a
sentence in a foreign language using words which sound like the words in a different
language, and which make sense only in that other language. A long-standing
schoolboy example is Caesar adsum jam forte, read aloud as ‘Caesar had some jam
for tea’. »>verbal play.

Macedonia (Former Yugoslav Republic of ) (population in 1995 estimated at

1,950,000) Macedonian is spoken by c.75% of the population. There are also
several speakers of Albanian (c.250,000), Romanian, Turkish, Romani, and varieties
of Serbo-Croatian. »Macedonian.

Macedonian A member of the South Slavic group of languages, spoken by c.2

million people chiefly in the republic of Macedonia, where it is the official language,
and also in nearby parts of Bulgaria, Greece, and Albania. It is written in the Cyrillic
alphabet. Texts with Macedonian features date from the 10th century, but a literature
reflecting modern standard Macedonian is found only from the late 18th century.
»>Bulgarian; Slavic.

machine translation (MT) The automatic production of a translation using a

computer; also called automatic translation. The main aim has been to produce
systems of analysis which allow for grammatical and semantic complexity. Automatic

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Macro-Algonkian

procedures (algorithms) have been developed for parsing syntactic structure, and
artificial intelligence techniques are beginning to simulate human processes of
thought and interaction. Increasing use is being made of interactive systems of
MT, in which humans pre-edit or post-edit a text processed by the computer. In
pre-editing, a natural language source text is rewritten, using a controlled syntax
and vocabulary, to produce a version which the computer can handle with relative
ease. In post-editing, raw machine-produced data in the target language is edited
into an error-free text. Also emerging is the field of machine-aided translation,
which introduces the use of peripheral hardware (e.g. word-processors) and software
(e.g. spelling-checkers), as well as the availability of on-line access to technical term
banks to speed up the search for the best lexical equivalents. »»computational
linguistics; morphology; parsing; syntax; term bank.

Macro-Algonkian »Algonkian.

Macro-Chibchan /makrav'tfibtjan/ A widespread group of c.50 Amerindian lan-

guages, spoken in Central America, Colombia, and Venezuela, and south into Bolivia
and Brazil. Only a few —- Guaymi, Cuna (Kuna), Epera (Catio), Paez — have substantial
numbers of speakers, in the tens of thousands, and several are on the verge of
extinction. Several of the languages have been written down (using the Roman
alphabet) as a part of missionary activity in the region. »Amerindian.

Macro-Gé »>Gé-Pano-Carib.

macrolinguistics An extremely broad conception of linguistic enquiry, promoted

especially in the 1950s; language is seen in its overall relation to extralinguistic
experience and to physical phonetic/graphetic properties. A contrast is drawn with
microlinguistics, the analysis of linguistic data involving maximum depth of
detail. >»linguistics.

macron A diacritic which typically indicates syllable or vowel length, as in Latin

favere ‘to favour’. It will often be seen in a dictionary transcription of pronunciation:
a, for example, might be used for a ‘long a’, as in car. »>diacritic; length.

Macro-Panoan »>Gé-Pano-Carib.

Macro-Penutian »>Penutian.

Macro-Siouan /makroav'su:an/ A group of 26 Amerindian languages spoken in a

broad swathe from Canada down through central USA, and in two areas further
east. They are usually classified into five families: Siouan (12 languages), Catawba,
Iroquoian (8 languages), Caddoan, and Yuchi. The best-known members are Chero-
kee and Dakota (Sioux), both with c.20,000 speakers, Crow and Mohawk, both with
less than S000. The languages use the Roman alphabet when written down. An
interesting early exception was the 85-symbol Cherokee syllabary, devised by a
half-Cherokee Indian named Sequoya in 1821. »Amerindian.

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 Malagasy

Madagascar (population in 1995 estimated at 13,456,000) The official languages

are Malagasy and French. Malagasy, in several varieties, is the first language of almost
the whole population. French is used for international purposes. »»French; Malagasy.
Madeira (population in 1995 estimated at 260,000) The official language is Portu-
guese, spoken by almost everyone. English is also used for international trade and
tourism. »>Portuguese.

Madura »>Madurese.

Madurese /mada'ti:z/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken

in Indonesia by c.10 million people in the island of Madura, along the coast of
northern Java, and in other nearby islands; also called Madura. It is written in both
the Roman and Javanese alphabets. »»Austronesian.

Magahi /‘magehi:/ >Bihari.

Magyar /‘magja:, 'modg3:/ >Hungarian.

main clause >clause.

main verb >lexical verb.

Maithili /‘maidali:/ >Bihari.

majority >minority.

major sentence A type of sentence which is highly productive in a language, such

as subject + predicate; contrasts with minor sentence, where there is limited
productivity, or where the structure lacks some of the constituents found in the
major type. The sentence you are reading now is a major sentence type. The next
one is not. No way. »>productivity; sentence.

majuscule /‘madaskju:l/ A form of writing consisting of letters broadly contained

within a single pair of horizontal lines; usually called capital letters. The Greek and
Latin alphabets were originally written in this way. The contrast is with minuscule
/‘minaskju:l/, where the writing consists of letters whose parts may extend above
and below a pair of horizontal lines; usually called ‘small’ (or lower-case) letters.
Minuscule writing was a gradual development, in regular use for Greek by the 7th-8th
centuries AD. The use of both kinds of letters in a single system is known as the dual
alphabet, which dates from the time of Emperor Charlemagne (742-814). »>letter;
writing; p. 208.

Makua /ma'kwa:/ A Bantu language spoken in the northern part of Mozambique

by c.6 million people, and also in nearby parts of Malawi and Tanzania by over a
million; sometimes listed as Kua. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »>Bantu.

Malagasy /malo'gasi:,mala'gaf/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages,

spoken in several varieties by over 13 million people in Madagascar, where it is an

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malapropism

(
'-ABCDEFG
ESS)

° abcdefghijklm
(Qa

TIILMNOPQRSTUXY
[ELICESOPERUMQUILN
(d) oxuberib:caprarum -AuTtTOU:

corum manupradifif- Long

Majuscule and minuscule. (a) A modern majuscule. (b) A modern minus-
cule. (c) Roman rustic capitals - an early majuscule. (d) Late eighth-century
Carolingian minuscule.

official language (along with French). It is written in the Roman alphabet. Brought
to the island by Indonesian traders during the 1st millennium AD, various dialects
are now used on the islands in the surrounding area. The standard language is based
on the dialect of the largest ethnic group, the Merina, a plateau people who were
the dominant kingdom in the 19th century. There is a large written literature, as
well as a strong oral tradition, notable for its proverbs and ritual speech-making.
»> Austronesian; Madagascar.

malapropism /'malaprapizm/ The inappropriate replacement of a word or phrase

by other words with a similar sound but wrong meaning; also called catachresis.
The user of a malapropism has not fully understood a long word, but makes a shot
at it, substituting a word which ‘sounds right’. The term comes from the name of
Mrs Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals — the name itself
comes from French, mal a propos (‘not to the purpose’). Illiterate him, I say, quite from
your memory, is one of Mrs Malaprop’s substitutions (for obliterate). »»slip of the
tongue.

Malawi /mo'la:wi:/ (population in 1995 estimated at 10,753,000) The official

languages are Nyanja (Chewa) and English. Nyanja is spoken as a first language by
about a third of the population, and is widely used as a lingua franca. There are c.10
other languages, including Makua (Lomwe), Yao, and Zulu. English is used for
international purposes. »>English; lingua franca; Nyanja.

Malay /mo'le1/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken by c.18

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 Mali

million people as a first language chiefly in Indonesia (c.10 million) and Malaysia
(c.7 million), and also in Singapore and Brunei. It is an official language in Malaysia,
Singapore, and Brunei, and is widely used throughout Indonesia as a lingua franca.
The dialect of the south Malay Peninsula has become the standard language, under
the name of Bahasa Indonesia, official in Indonesia since 1949, and often referred
to simply as Indonesian. It is written in both the Roman and (among Islamic
communities) Arabic alphabets. A pidginized variety, Bazaar Malay is widely used
as a lingua franca throughout the Indonesian archipelago. Another form, known as
Baba Malay, is used by Chinese communities in Malaysia. Other varieties of Malay
are found in the region, notably in Thailand (Pattani Malay, c.2.4 million). Written
records date from the 7th century AD, with a literary tradition dating from the arrival
of Islam in the 15th century. The modern written language is now somewhat different
from Classical Malay, following the introduction of spelling reforms earlier this
century. »»Austronesian; Indonesia; Malaysia.

Malayalam /mala'ja:lam/ A member of the Dravidian family of languages, spoken

by c.34 million people in south-west India, chiefly in Kerala (where it is the official
state language). It is written in the Malayalam alphabet, with records dating from
the 9th century, and a literary tradition from the 13th century. The language has
two main varieties, in a diglossic relationship. »>diglossia; Dravidian.

Malayo-Polynesian »>Austronesian.

Malaysia (population in 1995 estimated at 20,000,000) The official language is

Malay, which is a first language for nearly half the people. English is the chief
language of instruction in secondary education, and is widespread as a lingua franca;
it is also used for international purposes. There are c.130 other languages, including
several varieties of Chinese (c.4.5 million total), Buginese, Dayak, Javanese, and
Tamil. Bazaar Malay is widely used as a contact language, and is a lingua franca in
Sabah. »>lingua franca; Malay.
Maldives (population in 1995 estimated at 251,000) The official language is
Maldivian, spoken by most people on the islands. There are also some speakers of
Sinhalese, Arabic, and various Indian languages. English is used for international
trade and tourism. »»Maldivian.
Maldivian A language belonging to the Western group of Indo-Aryan languages,
spoken by about 90% of the people living in the Maldive Islands, south-west of
India; known locally as Divehi or Dhivehi. There are also a few thousand speakers
in India. It is written in the Maldivian alphabet (Thaana), written from right to left,
the orthography showing the influence of both South Asian and Arabic scripts.
»> Indo-Aryan; Maldives.
Mali (population in 1995 estimated at 10,173,000) The official language is French.
Bambara (c.2.7 million) is used as a lingua franca by most of the people, and is
important in education and the media. There are c.30 other languages, notably

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Malinke

Arabic, Fulfulde, Malinke, Senufo, Songhai, Soninke, and Tamashek. French is used
for international purposes. »»Bambara; French; lingua franca.

Malinke /ma'linker/ A Mande language spoken by c.3 million people in Guinea,

Mali, and several other areas in the west of the West African bulge; also known
by other names, in different parts of the region, such as Maninka (sometimes
distinguished as a separate language) and Mandingo. It is an important lingua
franca, and is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Mande.
Malta (population in 1995 estimated at 370,000) The official languages are Maltese
and English. Over 80% of the people speak Maltese. English is used for international
trade and tourism. »>English; Maltese.
Maltese A Semitic language spoken by c.330,000 people in the island of Malta,
where it is an official language (along with English), and through immigration in a
few other countries, such as Italy, Tunisia, USA, and UK. A development of an
Arabic dialect, it now has many loan words from Italian, English, French, and other
languages. It is the only variety of Arabic to be written in the Roman alphabet. In
recent decades there has been an active campaign to promote the language, especially
in broadcasting and the press. »»Arabic; Malta; Semitic.

Manchu /man't{u:/ A member of the Manchu-Tungus group of the Altaic family of

languages, spoken now by less than a thousand of the Manchu population (of c.10
million) in north-east China, but formerly an official language of China and a major
lingua franca between China and the outside world for over 200 years. It is written
in the Manchu alphabet (an adaptation of Mongolian script), with a literary tradition
dating from the 17th century. However, the cultural and linguistic dominance of
the Chinese has caused a steady decline in numbers since the 19th century. »»Chi-
nese; lingua franca; Manchu-Tungus.

Manchu-Tungus /man'tfu: tun'gu:z/ A group of c.12 languages within the Altaic

family, spoken by c.50,000 people in a wide area across south-east Asia and northern
China. They include Evenki, Nanai, and Manchu (the only member with a literary
history). »»Evenki; Manchu.
Mandarin /'mandorin/ »>Chinese.

Mande /‘mandei/ A group of c.45 languages belonging to the Niger-Congo family,

spoken by over 12 million people in the western part of the bulge of Africa, between
Guinea and Nigeria. Its main members are Bambara, Malinke, Dyula, and Mende,
all found in the western part of the region. »Bambara; Dyula; Malinke; Mende;
Niger-Congo.

manner of articulation The nature of the chief articulatory constriction during

the production of a consonant sound. It refers especially to the degree of the
constriction and the way it is made. There may be a complete articulatory closure
(as in the case of stops); an oral closure, with the soft palate lowered (nasals); a close

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 Mariana Islands, Northern

approximation of the two articulators (fricatives); an open approximation of the

two articulators (approximants); a central closure only (laterals); or a vibration (trills,
taps, and flaps). »>articulation; consonant.

manual alphabet >finger spelling.

manualism An approach which concentrates on the teaching of sign language to

the deaf, to the exclusion of speech; contrasts with oralism, where the focus is
exclusively on the use of spoken language. Total communication is a system
which involves the simultaneous use of both manual and oral methods. »>sign
language.

Manx A member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic family of languages, spoken
now only by a few hundred people who have learned it as adults as part of the
modern revivalist movement, and by a handful who claim to have learned it as a
first language from their grandparents. It is used officially in the Isle of Man, where
laws are written in Manx as well as English, using the Roman alphabet. Manx
developed out of Irish Gaelic, and is closely related to nearby dialects in both Ireland
and Scotland. Written records date from the early 17th century. The island was
wholly Manx-speaking until the 18th century, and there were still some 5000 speakers
at the beginning of the 20th century; but by the 1940s the language was no longer
in use as a medium of daily interaction. »Celtic.

Maori /‘mauri:/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken by

c.60,000 people in New Zealand, and understood to some degree by perhaps as many
as 100,000. The Maori population steadily increased in the 20th century, after a
period of massive decline. There has been a marked improvement in social standards,
and this has influenced the status of the language, which is now taught as an optional
second language in schools. Maori is regularly used in songs, in oratory, and on
official occasions, and is developing a modern literature. An increasing number
of Maori words have come to be used in contemporary New Zealand English.
»> Austronesian.

Marathi /mo'ra:ti:/ A language belonging to the Western group of Indo-Aryan

languages, spoken by c.65 million people chiefly in the state of Maharashtra, north-
west India (where it is an official regional language), and in nearby areas. It is written
in the Devanagari alphabet. »»Devanagari; Indo-Aryan.

Mari /‘ma:ri:/ A member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric family of languages,
spoken by c.535,000 people, chiefly in the Mari region of Russia (where it has official
status), and nearby areas along the Volga valley; formerly called Cheremis. It is
written in the Cyrillic alphabet. »Finno-Ugric.

Mariana Islands, Northern (population in 1995 estimated at 51,000). The official

language is English. Over half the population speak an Austronesian language,

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markedness

Chamorro. Other languages include Chinese, Korean, and various Philippines lan-
guages. >»>English.
markedness An analytic principle in linguistics, whereby pairs of linguistic features,
seen as oppositions, are given values of positive (marked) or negative/neutral
(unmarked). In its most general sense, this distinction relates simply to the presence
or absence of a particular characteristic; for example, a voiced sound might be said
to be ‘marked for voice’, or a plural noun in English to be ‘marked for number’ (a
plural ending having been added to the unmarked singular form, as in boys vs. boy).
There are several other interpretations of markedness; for example, using a semantic
criterion, the more specific of a pair of items would be called marked, as in the case
of dog (unmarked) vs. bitch (marked). In recent generative grammar, markedness
theory deals with the tendencies of linguistic properties to be found in all languages:
an unmarked property is one which accords with these tendencies, whereas a marked
property goes against them. »>contrast; generative grammar; number; semantics;
voicing.
Marshall Islands (population in 1995 estimated at 56,600) The official language
is English. Most of the population speak an Austronesian language, Marshallese.
»>English.

Martinique (population in 1995 estimated at 385,000) The official language is

French. Almost everyone speaks a French-based creole (Patwa) widespread through-
out the Lesser Antilles. »»creole; French; Patwa.

Masai /mo'sai/ A Nilotic (or, in some classifications, Nilo-Hamitic) language spoken

by c.880,000 people, especially in the Great Rift Valley of Kenya and Tanzania. It is
written in the Roman alphabet. »»Nilotic.
masculine >gender.

mass noun >countability.

mathematical linguistics A branch of linguistics which studies the mathematical

properties of language. It includes such areas as the statistical properties of texts, the
algebraic study of string sets, the study of the formal properties of grammatical rule
patterns, and the exploration of parsing algorithms in computing. »computational
linguistics; linguistics.

matronymic /matro'nimik/ >patronymic.

Mauritania (population in 1995 estimated at 2,295,000) The official language is

Arabic, spoken by c.66% of the people. French is still important within the country,
and is also used for international purposes. About 7% of the population speak the
West Atlantic language, Toucouleur, a variety of Fulfulde. »»Arabic; Fulfulde.
Mauritius (population in 1995 estimated at 1,141,000) The official language is
English. About half the population speak a French-based creole (Morisyen, Kreole),

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 Mayan

widely used as a lingua franca. About 70% of the population is from India, many
speaking Bihari, Hindi, Tamil, or Urdu. Both English and French are used for inter-
national purposes. »>creole; English; lingua franca.

maxims of conversation General principles thought to underlie the efficient use

of language, and which together identify a general cooperative principle. Four
basic maxims have been recognized: the maxim of quality states that speakers’
contributions should be genuine, and not spurious (e.g. deliberately misleading);
the maxim of quantity states that contributors should give no more and no less
information than is required to make the message clear to the addressee; the maxim
of relevance states that contributions should be related to the purpose of the
exchange; and the maxim of manner states that contributions should be clear
and concise, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity. The notion of relevance has been
developed into a major principle which purports to explain the nature of cognition
(relevance theory). In this approach, all communicative acts are viewed as carrying
a guarantee of optimal relevance, and are interpreted in the light of this guarantee.
»>conversation analysis; cooperative principle; carton below.

Mayan /'maran/ A family of Amerindian languages spoken in Mexico and Central

America. The chief languages are Yucatec (or Maya, c.700,000), Quekchi (c.350,000),
and several varieties of Mam (c.450,000), Quiché (c.650,000), and Cakchiquel

ews)

‘Let’s get one thing clear: is this discussion going to be conducted in vague generalities
or specific generalities?’

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meaning

(c.440,000). The Mayans are best known for their early history, developing a system
of hieroglyphic writing from about the 3rd century ap, which continued in use until
after the Spanish invasions. After many fruitless attempts, considerable progress has
now been made in decipherment. However, evidence is limited, as most literary work
was considered to be pagan, and destroyed after the Spanish conquest. »>Amerindian;
hieroglyphic.

meaning A basicnotion used in language study in two main ways. First, determining
the signification of a message is the chief end of linguistic enquiry: above all, language
is concerned with the communication of meaning. Secondly, meaning is used as a
way of analysing the structure of language, through such notions as contrastiveness
and distinctiveness. For example, the criterion of meaning is used in order to establish
the set of phonemes in a language: pit is different from bit in meaning, and therefore
/p/ and /b/ are different phonemes. A traditional focus of enquiry recognizes the
existence of several different kinds of meaning. Terms such as referential, descrip-
tive, denotative, extensional, factual, and objective meaning are used when
the emphasis is on the relationship of language to extralinguistic entities, events, or
states of affairs. Attitudinal, affective, connotative, emotive, and expressive
meaning are the chief terms used when the emphasis is on the relationship between
language and the personal, emotional state of a speaker; and cognitive and ide-
ational meaning focus on a person’s intellectual state. Contextual, functional,
interpersonal, social, and situational meaning express the way variations in
the extralinguistic situation affect the understanding and interpretation of language.
Contextual and textual meaning refer to those factors which affect the interpret-
ation of a sentence, deriving from the rest of the discourse in which the sentence
occurs. Within linguistics, the role each linguistic level plays in the total interpret-
ation of a sentence is often referred to as the ‘meaning’ of that level, notably lexical
meaning and grammatical or structural meaning. The science of meaning is
semantics. »>affective meaning; ambiguous; connotation; reference 1; semantics;
sense.

mean length of utterance (MLU) A measure introduced into child language

studies by American psychologist Roger Brown (1925-_), as a means of monitoring
increasing complexity. Rules are given to compute the length of a child’s utterance
in terms of morphemes. »>acquisition.

mechanical translation »machine translation.

medial 1. Descriptive of sounds or syllables occurring in the middle of a word, or

of words occurring within a sentence or other grammatical unit; contrasts with
initial items (which occur at the beginning of the unit) and fimal items (which
occur at the end). For example, the /n/ of final is in medial position, as is the adverb
quickly in the clause They quickly walked home. »>position 1. 2. Descriptive of sounds
occurring in the middle of the vocal tract, neither very far forward or very far back,

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 metaphor

nor of vowels where the tongue is neither fully high nor fully low. »central/front
sound; high vowel.

medial vowel >high vowel.

medium The means of transmission of a message; also sometimes called mode or

modality. Drawing, music, painting, sculpture, nonverbal communication, and
other ‘media’ are all relevant, but in language study the term refers specifically to
the transmission of a linguistic message by speech, writing, or sign. In language
teaching, the medium of instruction is the language which a country has chosen
for use in its educational system. This is usually the standard variety, though in
multilingual countries (such as Belgium), the language of instruction may vary
among localities. »communication; language planning; semiotics.

Melanesian /mela'ni:zn/ >Austronesian.

Mende /'mendei/ A Mande language spoken by c.1.5 million people in Sierra Leone,
with a few in Liberia. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Mande.

Mennonite German »>German.

merger >convergence 2.

Meso-American /'mezav a'merikn/ »Amerindian.

mesolect /'mezalekt/ >creole.

metalanguage A language for describing an object of study, such as the technical

language of chemistry, engineering, or law. The headwords in the present book
constitute a linguistic metalanguage, and contribute towards the development of
our metalinguistic abilities or awareness. »language awareness.

metanalysis /meta'nalisis/ The formation of a new lexical item through a wrong

analysis of an existing word boundary; for example, in Old English, a naddre was
heard in the popular mind as an adder, which has become the modern form. It is a
kind of folk etymology. »etymology.

metaphor A semantic mapping from one conceptual domain to another, often

using anomalous or deviant language. Several kinds of metaphor have been recog-
nized. A conventional metaphor is one which forms a part of our everyday
understanding of experience, and is processed without effort, such as to lose the
thread of an argument. A poetic metaphor extends or combines everyday metaphors,
especially for literary purposes — and this is how the term is traditionally understood,
in the context of poetry. Conceptual metaphors are those functions in speakers’
minds which implicitly condition their thought processes — for example, the notion
that ‘Argument is war’ underlies such expressed metaphors as I attacked his views.
The term mixed metaphor is used for a combination of unrelated or incompatible

215
metathesis

metaphors in a single sentence, such as This is a virgin field pregnant with possibilities.
»> figurative language.

metathesis /ma'ta9asis/ An alteration in the normal sequence of elements in a

sentence — usually of sounds, but sometimes of syllables, words, or other units. The
effect may be heard in everyday speech (as when people say aks for ask), but it is
also a noticeable feature of language history: Old English hros became Modern
English horse, for example. »sound change.

method In the context of pedagogical linguistics, a specific way of teaching a

language. A three-fold terminological distinction has grown up, though the terms
are not always used consistently. Methods are seen as based on a theoretical view
(an approach) which takes into account the nature of language and language
learning; examples include the aural-oral approach and the communicative
approach. Methods then make use of a variety of classroom activities (techniques);
examples include sentence repetition drills and role playing. The analysis and evalu-
ation of methods is known as methodology, a subject which is broadly interpreted
to include the investigation of the whole range of principles and practices used in
language teaching. »>audiolingual method; communicative approach; composition;
direct method; drill; educational linguistics; grammar-—translation method; language
teaching.

metonymy /mi'tonomi:/ A figure of speech in which the name of an attribute of

an entity is used in place of the entity itself. People are using metonyms when they
talk about the bottle to mean ‘drinking’ or the press to mean ‘newspapers’. »>figurative
language.

metre >metrics.

metrics Traditionally, the study of versification, usually called scamsion; in linguis-

tics, the analysis of metrical structure, using the whole range of linguistic techniques,
especially those belonging to segmental and suprasegmental phonology. The linguis-
tic approach would pay attention to such factors as intonation in analysing a
line’s underlying prosodic structure and dramatic performance, and use a more
sophisticated analysis of rhythm than is found in the traditional method of counting
the length of lines in terms of a fixed set of feet. The traditional measures include
the monometer (/ma'nvmitd/, a line containing a single foot), dimeter (/‘dimita/,
two feet), trimeter (/'trimita/, three feet), tetrameter (/te'tramita, four feet), pen-
tameter (/pen'tamita/, five feet), and hexameter (/hek'samita/, six feet). »>alexand-
rine; foot; phonology; prosody; rhythm; stylistics.

metronymic /metra'nimik/ >patronymic.

Mexico (population in 1995 estimated at 89,872,000) The official language is

Spanish, spoken by c.90% of the people. There are over 250 Amerindian languages,
spoken by c.8% of a mainly bilingual Indian population — notably Nahuatl (c.1.6

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 minor sentence

million in total), Maya, Mixteco, Otomi, and Zapotec, all represented by several
varieties. Spanish and English are both used for international purposes. »»Spanish.

Miao-Yao /'mi:av ‘jau/ A small group of c.15 languages spoken in southern China
and nearby parts of south-east Asia, especially northern Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The two chief languages, which give the group its name, are Miao (also called
Hmong), spoken by c.4.4 million people, and Yao (Iu Mien), spoken by c.1 million.
Both are written in the Roman alphabet. The group’s status as a separate language
family is controversial, and links have been suggested with several other families in
the region, notably with Sino-Tibetan. »»Sino-Tibetan.

microlinguistics »>macrolinguistics.

Micronesia, Federated States of (population in 1995 estimated at 119,000) The

official language is English, but most people speak one of 17 Austronesian languages,
such as Ponape, Truk, and Yap. »>English.

Micronesian /maikra'ni:zn/ »>Austronesian.

Middle English >English.

middle voice >voice 1.

mid vowel >high vowel.

mim-mem method >audiolingual method.

minimal free form The smallest linguistic form which can stand on its own as
an utterance. This is a useful attempt at a precise definition of the notion of a word,
but it does not solve all problems; for example, words such as the and a, or y and je
in French, cannot normally be used in isolation as meaningful utterances. »>clitic;
morpheme; word.

minimal pair Two words which differ in meaning when only one sound is changed,
enabling linguists to determine whether the sounds belong to different phonemes.
For example, the contrast between sat and fat would warrant the setting up of /s/
and /f/ as different phonemes in English; the contrast between the distinct /-sounds
of leap and peel, however, would not, as to replace one quality of / by the other
would not cause a change in meaning. »phoneme.

minority From a linguistic point of view, a group of people who speak a language
other than the dominant (or majority) language of the country in which they
live. Linguistic minorities (also called language minorities or minority
languages) are found in most countries. Britain, for example, has over 100 such
languages, including both ‘native’ minorities (such as Welsh) and immigrant minori-
ties (such as Italian, Polish, Hindi, and Greek). »language dominance.

minor sentence >major sentence.

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minuscule

minuscule /‘minaskju:l/ >majuscule.

misarticulation The articulation of a vowel or consonant which deviates from

what is normal for the speech community to which the speaker belongs. It is common
in several clinical conditions, especially those where the vocal organs have been
affected as a result of delayed development, brain damage, or other physical or
psychological causes; but it may also be heard in everyday speech, as in slips of the
tongue. »>apraxia; dysarthria; slip of the tongue.

miscommunication A misunderstanding between participants in an interaction

caused by differences in their ways of using language. The problem is particularly
marked when communicative exchanges cross cultural boundaries, but it can apply
anywhere and to anyone. The notion covers many kinds of difficulty, such as
inadvertent ambiguity, taking points for granted, and talking at cross purposes.
»> communication; cooperative principle; language barrier; pragmatics.

miscue analysis The analysis of the errors made when children read aloud, as part
of the process of learning to read. A miscue is an unexpected response, such as the
insertion of a word which is not present in the text, or the use of a word which is
visually related to one present in the text; for example, a child might read He saw
the fish in the water instead of He saw the fin in the water. »»reading.

mismatch >overextension.

mistake (in language learning) >error analysis.

MIT An abbreviation of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, associated

with the school of linguistic thought launched by Noam Chomsky. The phrase ‘MIT
linguistics’ is synonymous with generative linguistics. »Chomskyan; generative
grammar.

mixed metaphor >metaphor.

mixing >code mixing.

MLU An abbreviation of mean length of utterance.

mmemonic /na'monik/ A strategy or device intended to assist the memory, often

linguistic in character. Rhymes and rhythms are commonly used in this way, as
in the verse to remember the number of days in each month: Thirty days hath
September...

Moabite /‘maveabait/ A Semitic language spoken in the Transjordan area of Palestine

probably from around the 14th to the 6th century Bc, known from various inscrip-
tions. The Moabites are referred to several times in the Old Testament of the Bible.
The Moabite Stone was discovered in 1868 at Dibon, near the Dead Sea, containing
a 34-line inscription relating to Mesha, king of Moab - one of the earliest examples
of alphabetic writing. It is now in the Louvre. »»alphabet; Semitic.

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 Mon

modality >medium; mood.

modals >mood.

mode >medium.

Modern Greek »>Greek.

modification 1. The structural dependence of one grammatical unit upon another,

especially within endocentric constructions. Dependent items which precede the
head of a phrase (premodification) are distinguished from those following the
head of a phrase (postmodification). In traditional grammar, the notion is restric-
ted to the relationship between adjective and noun or adverb and verb. In systemic
grammar, the term is reserved for premodifying structures only, postmodifying
structures being labelled qualification. »dependent; endocentric construction;
head; postmodification; premodification. 2. In phonetics, any factor which influ-
ences the air flow in the vocal tract, such as movement of the soft palate, or the
degree of closure of the glottis. The term is also used for any factor which alters the
typical actions of the vocal organs in producing the phonemes of a language, such
as extra lip rounding. »>articulation; secondary articulation.

modular >government and binding theory.

Mohenjo-Daro /mau hendoau ‘darau/ An undeciphered script found in the remains

of the ancient city of Mohenjo-Daro, on the banks of the Indus River in Pakistan,
where excavations have been continuing since the 1920s. The writing system was
probably used throughout the Indus Valley Civilization, which flourished in an area
of about half a million square miles around the Indus c.2300-1750 Bc. »>isolate.

Moldavian /mpl'dervien/ A member of the Romance family of languages, spoken

by c.3 million speakers in Moldova. As a result of its period of influence under Soviet
tule, the language is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. There is little linguistic difference
between Moldavian and Romanian, the most noticeable feature being the use of
different writing systems. Moldavian also shows the influence of Russian in its loan
words. »»Moldova; Romance; Romanian.

Moldova (population in 1995 estimated at 4,367,000) The official languages

are Moldavian (spoken by c.70% of the population), and Russian (c.12%). Other
languages include Ukrainian (c.14%), Gagauz, and several of those spoken further
in the west, such as Polish, German, and Bulgarian. »Moldavian; Russian.

Mon /maun/ A member of the Mon-Khmer family of languages, spoken by c.900,000

people, chiefly in Myanmar (Burma), with some in Thailand; also called Talaing.
It is written in the Burmese alphabet, and records date from the 6th century aD,
»>Mon-Khmer.

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Monaco

Monaco (population in 1995 estimated at 30,600) The official language is French,

spoken by c.60% of the population. The remainder speak either Ligurian (Italian) or
Provencal. »>French.

Mongol /‘mvngl/ The chief member of the Mongolian group of the Altaic family
of languages, spoken in two main varieties by c.5 million people in the Inner
Mongolian region of China (c.3 million) and in Mongolia; also called Khalkha.
In China the language uses the 26-letter Mongolian alphabet, which is written
downwards. The Cyrillic alphabet is now used in Mongolia. »Mongolia; Mongolian.

Mongolia (population in 1995 estimated at 2,302,000) The official language is

Mongol, spoken by c.90% of the population. A few other languages are in use,
notably Buryat, Chinese, and Kazakh. Russian is important in education, and is used
for international purposes along with English. »Mongol; Mongolian.

Mongolian A group of languages within the Altaic family, spoken by over 5 million
people in Mongolia and nearby China and Russia. The group inludes Buryat, Mongol,
and Kalmyk. Classical Mongolian refers to the written language of the Mongols,
attested since the 13th century. »»Altaic; Buryat; Mongol; Mongolia.

monitor model A theory of the relationship between acquisition and learning,

propounded by American linguist Stephen Krashen (1941-__). This account recog-
nizes a subconscious natural process (‘acquisition’) which is the primary force behind
foreign language fluency. ‘Learning’ is seen as a conscious process which edits
(‘monitors’) the progress of acquisition, and guides the performance of the speaker.
»> acquisition; language learning.

Mon-Khmer /maon ‘kmeo/ The largest group of languages within the Austro-Asiatic
family, spoken by over 70 million people throughout the south-east Asian mainland,
mainly in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and parts of Myanmar (Burma) and
Malaysia. Its main languages are Vietnamese, Mon, and Khmer. Membership of the
group is uncertain; for example, some scholars include Nicobarese, and some exclude
Vietnamese. >»>Austro-Asiatic; Khmer; Mon; Vietnamese.

monogenesis /mpna'Genisis/ The hypothesis that all human languages originate

from a single source; contrasts with polygemesis. The terms are also used in dis-
cussing the similarities among pidgins and creoles: monogenetic theories assume
the diffusion of a single pidgin to other areas via migration; polygenetic theories
assume that the development of a pidgin in one community is independent of the
development of a pidgin in another. »>creole; diffusion; pidgin; p. 221.
monoglot >bilingualism.

monolingualism >bilingualism; multilingualism.

monologue Speech or writing by a single person, as in a lecture or commentary;

opposed to dialogue, where two people are participants in the interaction. The

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 monophthong

(a) Original language

(b) Original languages

Ly Lo L3 Ly

Monogenesis and polygenesis. (a) The monogenetic view: all languages have
diverged from a common source. (b) The polygenetic view: language emerged more
or less spontaneously in several places.

latter term is often used to apply to situations where there are more than two
participants, but multilogue or polylogue are also available for such cases. A
soliloquy is a literary monologue uttered by a speaker who thinks no one else is
present. »>discourse analysis.

monometer >metrics.

monophthong /'movnafOpn/ A vowel with a single perceived auditory quality,

produced by a movement of the articulators towards one position in the vocal tract;
also called a pure vowel; contrasts with diphthong, where the auditory impression
is of two vowel qualities, and triphthomg, where three qualities can be perceived.
When a diphthong becomes a monophthong, as in some cases of historical or
dialect change, the sound is said to be monophthongized; conversely, when a
monophthong becomes a diphthong, the sound is said to be diphthongized.
»>diphthong; triphthong; vowel.

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monosyllable

monosyllable A word consisting of a single syllable; contrasts with polysyllable

(consisting of more than one syllable), and also with the more specific notions
of disyllable (consisting of two syllables) and trisyllable (consisting of three
syllables). A monosyllabic language is one where all or most of the words consist of
single syllables. >>syllable.
monotone Speech on a single pitch level. This effect may be under conscious
control, as when a speaker wishes to convey a particular attitude (in English, sarcasm
and irony often use monotone intonation); but it may also be a symptom of a voice
disorder, where there is little or no pitch variation because of poor vocal fold control.
»>intonation; voice disorder.

monotransitive >ditransitive; transitivity.

Montague grammar A linguistic theory derived from the work of American

logician Richard Montague (1930-70); based on the semantics of formal languages.
The grammar contains a syntactic and a semantic component related by a one-to-one
correspondence between categories set up at the two levels. »»semantics; syntax.

Montenegro >Yugoslavia.

Montserrat (population in 1998 estimated at 4000) The official language is English,

with an English-based creole in general use. Most of the population (formerly
c.11,000) left the island in 1997, following the eruption of Soufriére Hills volcano.
»>English.

mood A grammatical category, typically expressed by verb inflection, which indi-

cates what the speaker is doing with a proposition in a particular discourse situation.
Mood normally identifies the status of an utterance; for example, an utterance
may be indicative (the usual form), imperative (a command), hortative (an
exhortation), or subjunctive (a subordination). Mood is also referred to as
modality or mode, especially when inflectional forms are not involved. Modal
auxiliaries are verb-like words which typically express speakers’ attitudes towards
the factual content of an utterance, such as uncertainty, possibility, and necessity
(may, could, ought, etc.). »»auxiliary verb; imperative; indicative; optative; sub-
junctive.

Mooré >More.

mora /'m):ra/ In traditional metrics, a minimal unit of metrical time, equivalent

toa short syllable. It is now widely used in phonological theory (especially in metrical
phonology) as a unit of phonological length. »length; metrics; phonology.

Mordvin /'m5:dvin/ A member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric family of

languages, spoken by c.1 million people in the Mordvin region of Russia (where it
has official status), and in surrounding areas. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
The third largest Uralic language (after Hungarian and Finnish), it has two major

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 motherese

dialects, Erzya and Moksha, both in official use, and sometimes listed as separate
languages. »>Finno-Ugric. _

More /mea'tel/ A Voltaic language spoken by c.4.5 million people in Burkina Faso
and a further 2 million in Ghana; also called Méoré. The language of the Mossi
people (and sometimes called Mossi, as a consequence), it is written in the Roman
alphabet. »»Voltaic.

Morocco (population in 1995 estimated at 28,010,000) The official language is

Arabic, spoken by c.65% of the people. Most of the remainder speak varieties of
Berber. French is used for international purposes. »»Arabic.

morph »morpheme.

morpheme /'m5:fi:m/ The minimal distinctive unit of grammar, commonly classi-

fied into free forms (which can occur as separate words) and bound forms (which
cannot so occur— mainly affixes). Morphemes are the central concern of morphology,
also sometimes called morphemics. They are abstract units, realized in speech as
discrete items (morphs). Morphemic variants are allomorphs; for example, there
are three chief allomorphs of the past tense morpheme in English, represented by
the /t/ ending of jumped, the /d/ ending of bombed, and the /1d/ ending of faded.
»>affix; bound form; free form; morphology; root 1; word.

morphology The branch of grammar which studies the structure of words. It is

generally divided into inflectional morphology, the study of inflections, and
lexical or derivational morphology, the study of word formation. Morphology
contrasts with symtax, the combination of words into sentences. »>grammar 1;
morpheme; sandhi; suppletion; word.

morphophonemics >morphophonology.

morphophonology /m):fovufe'nvledi:/ A branch of linguistics which analyses the

phonological or grammatical factors that determine the form of phonemes; also
called morphonology, morphophonemics, and morphonemics. The basic
unit recognized in such an analysis is the morphophoneme; for example, the
notion of ‘plural’ in English nouns includes /s/ (as in cats), /z/ (as in dogs), /1z/ (as
in horses), zero (as in sheep), and several other forms. »morphology; phonology;
sandhi.

morphosyntax /m9d:fou'sintaks/ The study of grammatical categories or properties

for whose definition criteria of morphology and syntax both apply. The number
category in nouns, for example, may be expressed morphologically (through inflec-
tional endings) and syntactically (through agreement with a verb). Tense, person,
and voice are examples of other morphosyntactic categories. »morphology; syntax.

motherese The style of speech used by mothers when talking to their babies. It is
characterized by such features as short sentences, repetitive discourse, simplified

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mother-in-law languages

vocabulary, and expressive intonation. Because such patterns can also be found in
the speech of fathers, siblings, and others involved in looking after a young child
(grandparents, baby-sitters, etc.), the more general terms caregiver or caretaker
speech are now commonly used. »>acquisition; baby talk 1.

mother-in-law languages >avoidance languages.

mother tongue »first language.

motor theory A theory of speech perception which claims that the listener has
specialized neural mechanisms which convert the acoustic waveform into distinct
articulatory targets, or gestures. In other words, speech is perceived in terms of how
it is produced. »>speech perception.

Motu /'mavtu:/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken by

c.10,000 in the central part of Papua New Guinea. A pidginized variety, Hiri Motu,
developed as a trade language between speakers of Austronesian and Indo-Pacific
languages; formerly called Police Motu. It is an English-based language, spoken by
c.150,000 people in the Port Moresby area of Papua New Guinea, where it has official
status. »>Austronesian; Papua New Guinea; pidgin.

Mozambique (population in 1995 estimated at 18,138,000) The official language

is Portuguese. There are c.20 other languages, notably Makua (several varieties, c.6
million), Lomwe, Nyanja, Shona, Tsonga, and Yao. Swahili is a lingua franca in the
north. French and English are widely known among educated people. Portuguese
and English are used for international purposes. >»»Portuguese.

multilingualism A situation where a speech community (or an individual) makes

use of several languages, as in Switzerland or Belgium; sometimes called plurilin-
gualism or polyglottism. The term may subsume bilingualism (strictly, the use
of two languages), but is often contrasted with it, by emphasizing the use of more
than two languages (as is the case with the everyday word polyglot). »>bilingualism.
multilogue >monologue.

Munda /‘munda/ A small group of c.25 languages within the Austro-Asiatic family,
chiefly spoken in several parts of north-east India. The most widely used languages
are Santali (c.5.7 million) and Mundari (c.1.5 million). Northern, southern, and
western Munda subgroups have been recognized, with nearly 90% of the speakers
belonging to the northern subgroup. They use the Bengali and Devanagari alphabets.
>> Austro-Asiatic.

murmur >breathy voice.

Muskogean /maskavgien/ »>Algonkian.

mutation 1. A change in the quality of a sound because of the influence of adjacent
morphemes or words. There are several types of initial consonant mutation in Welsh,

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for example, such as pen ‘head’ becoming mhen ‘my head’. Initial mutations are a
particular problem for foreign learners, as they hide the underlying phonological
identity of a word, and make it difficult to find an unfamiliar word in a dictionary.
»> inflection 1; morphology; phonology. 2. »voice mutation.
mutism /'mju:tizm/ In clinical contexts, the involuntary inability to speak — a
pathological condition in which oral expression is absent or minimal, though com-
prehension of language remains normal. It may result from organic damage to the
central nervous system or be associated with psychological problems. In a broader
sense, mutism can refer to any instance where speech is suppressed, whether deliber-
ate, semi-deliberate, or involuntary. »>language pathology.
mutual intelligibility A criterion used in linguistic analysis, referring to the
ability of people to understand each other. If two varieties of speech are mutually
intelligible, they are strictly dialects of the same language; if they are mutually
unintelligible, they are different languages. The criterion seems simple, but there
are many problem cases. Two varieties may be partially intelligible —- for example,
because they share some vocabulary. Also, cultural or political factors may intervene,
causing two mutually intelligible varieties to be treated as different languages (such
as Swedish and Danish) or two mutually unintelligible varieties to be treated as the
same language (such as the varieties of Chinese). »>dialect; language 1; variety.

Myanmar (Burma) (population in 1995 estimated at 46,398,000) The official

language is Burmese, spoken by nearly 60% of the population. There are c.100 other
local languages, notably several varieties of Karen (c.3 million) and Shan (c.3 million).
Smaller languages include Arakan, Chin (in many varieties), Jingpo, Lu, and Parauk.
English is increasingly used for international trade and tourism. >»»Burmese.
_Mycenaean Greek /maisa'nien/ >Greek.

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N
N An abbreviation of noun.

Na-Dene or Na-Déné /na'deinet/ A group of over 50 languages spoken in Alaska

and north-west Canada, and in south-west-central USA. (The term derives from the
name of an Athabaskan tribe, the Déné; na is an Indian word meaning ‘dwelling’ or
‘people’.) Most of the languages belong to the Athabaskan family, spoken in the
Northwest Territory and the Yukon, Alaska, and parts of the US Pacific coast. Its
best-known member is Navajo (Navaho), spoken by nearly 150,000 speakers in
Arizona and New Mexico. The various dialects of Apache and Chipewyan are also
in this family. The other main branches are Haida (in south-east Alaska) and Tlingit
(in British Columbia), each consisting of a single language. These languages use the
Roman alphabet, when written. »»Amerindian.

Nagari /‘nagoari:/ >Devanagari.

Nahua /'na:wo/ >Nahuatl.

Nahuatl /‘na:wotl/ A member of the Aztec-Tanoan group of languages (specifically,

of the Uto-Aztecan family), spoken by c.1.4 million people in central and western
Mexico; also called Aztec. Different pronunciations of the name in the main dialect
divisions give rise to the alternative spellings of Nahual and Nahuat, and the use
of Nahua as a label for the language as a whole. Classical Nahuatl was the language
of the Toltecs (10th-12th centuries) and Aztecs (15th—-16th centuries), and there is
an extensive Aztec literature from the 16th century, using an orthography devised
by Spanish missionaries. The modern language uses the Roman alphabet. Many
hieroglyphic inscriptions have been discovered from Classical times. >»Aztec-
Tanoan; hieroglyphic.

Nakho-Dagestanian /‘nakavu daga'stemien/ A group of Caucasian languages found

in the north-east of the Caucasus region; also called North-east Caucasian. Most
of the languages belong to the Dagestanian branch, notably Avar, Lezghian, Dargwa,
Lakk, and Tabasaran. The Nakh branch comprises Chechen, Ingush, and Bats (the
latter found in a single village in Georgia). »»Avar; Chechen; Lezghian.

name >alias; ananym; aptronym; byname; eponym; nickname; onomastics; patro-

nymic; proper noun/name; pseudonym; stage name.

Namibia (population in 1995 estimated at 2,156,000) The official language is

English, spoken as a first or second language by c.5% of the people. About 7% speak

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Afrikaans, and there are still speakers of German (c.20,000). About 20 local languages
belong to the Benue-Congo and Khoisan families. »»English.

Nandi /‘nandi:/ A Nilotic (or, in some classifications, Nilo-Hamitic) language spoken

by c.2.5 million people in Kenya, with some speakers in adjoining Uganda and
Tanzania; also called Kalenjin. Several major dialects are recognized, some of which
have been proposed as different languages. It is written in the Roman alphabet.
Nandi is also the name of another language spoken by c.1 million people in the
Democratic Republic of Congo. »>Nilotic.

narrative A discourse recounting a real or fictional sequence of events. It is a major

topic in literary pragmatics, dealing with the temporal and logical structure of a
story, spoken or written, especially as encountered in fiction. The structural study
of narrative is narratology, and the narrative properties of a text constitute its
narrativity. »discourse analysis; literary pragmatics; script 2.

narrowing In historical linguistics, a type of change in which a word becomes

more specialized in meaning. In Old English, for example, mete referred to food in
general, whereas it now refers to only one kind of food. »>extension 2.

narrow transcription »>transcription.

nasal Descriptive of a type of consonant involving a complete closure of the oral

tract at the same time as the pathway between soft palate and pharynx is opened;
examples include [m] and [n]. Nasalization is the perceived nasal resonance heard
on sounds (typically, vowels) where the soft palate is lowered during articulation.
Nasalized vowels usually occur in the immediate environment of nasal conson-
ants, as in [man]. Sounds with reduced nasal resonance are said to be denasalized
or hyponasal. Sounds with excessive nasal resonance are hypernasal. »>denasal;
hypernasality; palate; vocal tract.
national language A language which is considered to be the chief language of a
nation state; for example, French is the national language of France, and also the
country’s official language - used in such public domains as the law courts,
government, and broadcasting. In many countries, there is no difference between
the national and the official language. However, in a multilingual country, such as
Belgium, Singapore, or Ghana, there may be no uncontroversial candidate for a
national language, and one or more of the languages used in the area may be
designated official. Several countries have two or more official languages, rep-
resenting the interests of their chief population groupings. »>bilingualism; standard.

native language/speaker >first language.

nativist hypothesis >innateness hypothesis.

natural approach Any approach to foreign language teaching which claims to

follow the principles used by children in learning their first language, emphasizing

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the primary role of speaking and listening, and the use of everyday objects and
activities. It is a reaction against the highly formal and artificial methods used in
traditional approaches to language teaching, common since the 19th-century. Sev-
eral types of natural approach have been proposed. »>direct method; language
learning/teaching.

natural gender »>gender.

natural language A language used in ordinary human communication, as opposed

to a theoretical or artificial system. Natural language processing (NLP) is a
branch of computational linguistics which deals with the computational processing
of textual materials in natural languages. Its applications include such areas as
machine translation and literary text analysis. »computational linguistics.

natural order hypothesis The view that people follow essentially the same path
in learning a foreign language that they used when learning their mother tongue.
The motivation for the hypothesis comes from observing the way many learners
make similar errors (e.g. I going), regardless of their language background. It is
suggested that a universal creative process is at work, learners following a natural
‘internal syllabus’ (as opposed to the ‘external’ syllabus of the classroom). Because
several of the errors closely resemble those made by children learning their first
language, a parallel is proposed between the natural order of first language acquisition
and the way people acquire a foreign language. »>language learning.

Nauru (population in 1995 estimated at 9900) The official languages are Nauruan
and English. About half the people speak Nauruan, an Austronesian language.
Other local languages include Ikiribati, Chinese, and Tuvaluan. English is used for
international trade and tourism. >»>English.

Navajo or Navaho /'navahau/ >Na-Dene.

Ndebele /nda'beli:, nda'bi:li:/ A member of the Bantu group of Benue-Congo lan-

guages, spoken chiefly by c.1.5 million people in Zimbabwe and, in a different
variety, by c.600,000 in the Transvaal region of South Africa, where it is one of the
11 official languages. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »>Benue-Congo.

negation A process or construction which typically expresses the contradiction of

some or all of the meaning of a sentence. In English, negation is primarily expressed
_ by the use of the negative particle not or the contracted negative n’t. Items
which have negative polarity are those words or phrases which are especially
found in negative environments in a sentence; any, for example, typically occurs in
such contexts as I don’t have any and not I have any. »>affirmative; polarity.

negative transfer >interference; transfer.

Nenets /‘nenets/ A member of the Samoyedic branch of the Uralic family of lan-
guages, spoken by c.25,000 people in the Nenets region of Russia (where it has official

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: regional status); formerly known as Yurak. It is the chief language of its group, and
is written in the Roman alphabet. »Samoyedic.
neo-Firthian >Firthian linguistics.

Neogrammarians A group of philologists, based at the University of Leipzig in

the 1870s, and dubbed the Junggrammatiker (‘young grammarians’) because of the
aggressive way in which they asserted their chief hypothesis, that sound laws admit-
ted no exceptions (the meogrammarian hypothesis). They included August
Leskien (1840-1916) and Karl Brugmann (1849-1919). »»law; philology; sound
change.

neologism /ni:'vladjizm/ The creation of a new lexical item, as a response to

changed circumstances in the external world, which achieves some currency within
a speech community; also called coimage. Examples in the 1990s include. many
new words which include the prefix Euro-, referring to the emerging role of the
European Community, such as Eurofighter, Euromeasure, and Eurothuggery. Only some
neologisms will become permanent features of the language, but it is never possible
to predict which will stay and which will die out. »>cliché; coinage; hybrid; nonce
word; word formation.

Nepal (population in 1995 estimated at 20,827,000) The official language is Nepali,

spoken by c.60% of the people. There are c.120 other languages, notably Maithili
- (c.11%), Bhojpuri (c.8%), Murmi, Newari, and Magar. Englishis used forinternational
purposes. >»>Nepali.
Nepali /na'po:li:/ A member of the Pahari group of Indo-Aryan languages, spoken
by c.10 million people in Nepal, and a further million in nearby parts of India; also
called Gurkhali (‘Gurkha language’), after the name of the Gurkha tribe, which
conquered Nepal in the 18th century. It is written in the Devanagari alphabet.
>> Devanagari; Indo-Aryan; Nepal; Pahari.
Netherlandic-German »>Germanic.

Netherlands, The (population in 1995 estimated at 15,449,000) The official

language is Dutch, spoken by almost the whole population. Frisian (c.700,000) is an
official regional language in Friesland. Low Saxon is spoken by c.1.5 million people
in the north-east of the country, most of whom use Dutch as a second language.
Immigrant minority languages include Arabic, Chinese, Malay, Papiamentu, Sranan,
and Turkish, and there are several Romani groups. English is used for international
purposes. >»>Dutch; Frisian.

Netherlands Antilles (population in 1995 estimated at 192,000) The official

language is Dutch. On the Leeward Islands (Bonaire, Cura¢ao, and the self-governing
island of Aruba), representing c.85% of the population, most people speak a Portu-
guese-based creole, Papiamentu - with English and Spanish used for international
purposes. On the Windward Islands (St Maarten, St Eustatius, Saba), an English-based

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creole (Sranan) is spoken, and English is used for international purposes. >>creole;
Dutch.
neurolinguistics The branch of linguistics which studies the basis in the human
nervous system for language development and use; also called neurological lin-
guistics. It specifically aims to construct a model of the brain’s control over the
processes of speaking, listening, reading, writing, and signing. »>clinical linguistics;
language areas; linguistics.

neuter »gender.

neutral 1. Descriptive of the visual appearance of the lips when they are held in a
relaxed position, with no rounding. »»rounding. 2. Descriptive of a lax vowel made
in the centre of the vowel articulation area. »>shwa.
new »>given.

New Caledonia (population in 1995 estimated at 186,000) The official language

is French, spoken by c.35% of the people. There are c.35 local Austronesian languages,
and speakers of Vietnamese, Bislama, and a local variety of Javanese. Bislama and
French are both used as lingua francas. »>creole; French; lingua franca.

New Englishes The name often given to the national varieties of English which
have emerged around the globe, especially since the 1960s in those countries which
opted to make English an official language upon independence. Regionally distinc-
tive use of vocabulary, pronunciation, and (to a much lesser extent) grammar is
found in all such countries, but often only on a very limited scale. The term is really
applicable only when there has been considerable linguistic development away from
the traditional standards of British and American English, with some degree of local
standardization (e.g. in the press), as has happened in India, Ghana, and Singapore,
and perhaps a dozen other countries where English is used as a second language. It
has thus also come to be applied to first-language situations, such as in Canada,
Australia, and South Africa, as well as in areas where creole or pidgin Englishes are
important, such as-the Caribbean and Papua New Guinea — even though in these
cases the Englishes in question have a considerable history behind them. »>creole;
English; pidgin; standard English; variety.
New Guinea »>Indo-Pacific.

New Zealand (population in 1995 estimated at 3,560,000) The official language

is English, spoken by c.90% of the people. Maori is used by c.2%. Immigrant languages
include Chinese, Hindi, and several from the Pacific islands, such as Samoan
(c.50,000), Fijian, Niuean, Rarotongan, and Tongan. »»English; Maori.

Ngumni /an'gu:ni:/ >Xhosa; Zulu.

Nicaragua (population in 1995 estimated at 4,553,000) The official language is

Spanish, spoken by c.95% of the people. About 20% of the coastal population speak

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 Nilo-Saharan

an English-based creole used throughout the western Caribbean. There are a few
Amerindian languages spoken by small numbers. Spanish and English are used for
international purposes. »>creole; Spanish.

nickname An unofficial extra name given to someone or something. The word

derives from earlier English an eke name, where eke meant ‘also’ or ‘additional’.
Nicknames may be pleasant (Richard Lionheart) or unpleasant (Fatty Smith, Scarface
Pete), and apply not only to people, but also to places (the Pool for Liverpool), and all
kinds of objects and creations (e.g. Beethoven’s Pastoral). »onomastics.

Nicobarese A tiny group of languages within the Austro-Asiatic family, spoken by

c.10,000 people in the Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Some scholars consider
Nicobarese to belong to the Mon-Khmer group. Inscriptions are found from the
11th century. »>Austro-Asiatic.

Niger (population in 1995 estimated at 9,050,000) The official language is French.

There arec.15 other languages, including Hausa (spoken by about half the population,
and widely used as a lingua franca), Dyerma (Zarma, c.23%), Fulfulde (c.15%), Arabic,
Kanuri, and Tamashek. French is used for international purposes. »»French; lingua
franca.

Niger-Congo The largest language family in Africa, containing c.1350 languages

and an indefinite number of varieties whose status as languages or dialects is difficult
to determine. It spreads across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, west of the River
Nile, and extends along the eastern half of the continent as far north as the Horn
of Africa. It is usually divided into six groups of languages (see cross-references).
Among the important Niger-Congo languages are Igbo, Swahili, Wolof, Yoruba, and
Zulu. »Adamawa-Eastern; Africa; Benue-Congo; Kwa; Mande; Voltaic; West Atlantic.

Nigeria (population in 1995 estimated at 96,171,000) The official language is

English. Official regional languages are Hausa (spoken by c.20 million in the north),
Igbo (spoken by c.17 million in the south-east), and Yoruba (spoken by c.19 million
in the south-west). There are c.450 other languages, some with very small numbers.
A few of the larger languages have some degree of official status in a locality (notably
in broadcasting), such as Edo, Efik, Fulfulde, Idoma, and Kanuri. Several languages
are used as lingua francas, such as Efik, Hausa and Nigerian Pidgin English. English
is used for international purposes. »>English; lingua franca; pidgin.

Nilo-Hamitic /‘natlau ha'mitik/ A group of Nilo-Saharan languages sometimes

proposed as a separate family, but often grouped as an eastern branch of the Nilotic
family. They are spoken in southern Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and northern Tanzania,
_ and include Nandi, Bari, and Masai. The suggested relationship with the Hamitic
group of languages is disputed. »»Bari; Masai; Nandi; Nilo-Saharan; Nilotic.

Nilo-Saharan /‘nailav sa‘ha:ran/ A group of c.180 languages spoken in two areas

around the upper parts of the Chari and Nile Rivers, most of which can be placed

231
Nilotic

in a single family, known as Chari-Nile. The overall area extends north-south from
Egypt to Tanzania and east-west from Mali to Ethiopia. The sub-classification of the
languages in the group is a source of argument. A western branch, known as Nilotic,
is often recognized; it includes such languages as Luo, Dinka, Acholi, and Lango.
Some studies distinguish an eastern branch, known as Nilo-Hamitic, which includes
Nandi, Bari, and Masai. Several other languages have been placed within this family,
notably Songhai and Fur, as well as the Saharan, Maban, and Koman groups of
languages. But the exact relationship of many of these languages to each other is
controversial. »>Africa; Fur; Hamito-Semitic; Koman; Maban; Nilo-Hamitic; Nilotic;
Nubian; Saharan; Songhai.

Nilotic /nar'lotik/ A proposed group of languages within the Nilo-Saharan family,

spoken in Uganda, Kenya, and parts of Sudan and Tanzania. The relationship between
the languages has been controversial, and they have been variously sub-classified.
One important classification recognizes a western group (which includes Luo and
Nuer), an eastern group (which includes Masai), and a southern group (which
includes Nandi). The eastern and southern groups are sometimes classified under
the separate heading of Nilo-Hamitic. »Acholi; Dinka; Lango; Luo; Masai; Nandi;
Nilo-Saharan; Nuer.

Niue (population in 1995 estimated at 2100) The official language is English, with
most of the population speaking Niwean /nju:'eian/, an Austronesian language.
»>English.

Nivkhi /‘nivki:/ >Gilyak.

NLP An abbreviation of natural language processing.

nodule >vocal nodule.

nomenclature A list of names, or terms, arranged in a hierarchy so as to provide

a Classification, as in the case of botanical or zoological terms. The list can then act
as a standard of usage to guide those working within a subject or learning about it.
»>lexicon; term bank.

nominal Characteristic of anoun; in some linguistic approaches used as a substitute

for ‘noun’ in certain technical terms (e.g. nominal group is equivalent to ‘noun
phrase’). The term may also be used as a label for words that have some of the
properties of nouns, but not all, as in the rich, the Chinese: such words are sometimes
called nominals, rather than nouns, to indicate their grammatical individuality.
The process or result of forming a noun from some other word class is called
nominalization (e.g. good + ness). »noun.

nominal aphasia »>aphasia.

nominal group >noun; phrase.

nominalism. In the philosophy of language, the view that the forms of words

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 non-native varieties

have no inherent connection with the objects to which they refer, but are related
arbitrarily, the result of customary usage by a community. This was one of two
conflicting views argued at length by the Greeks, the other being naturalism, that
there is an intrinsic connection between words and things. The arbitrariness of the
relationship between words and things has been a tenet of modern linguistics since
the work of Saussure, though there is considerable interest in those aspects of language
which seem to support a naturalistic view, such as onomatopoeia. »>arbitrariness;
philosophical linguistics; Saussurian; sound symbolism.

nominative case One of the ways in which an inflected language makes a word
change its form, in order to show its grammatical relationship to other parts of the
sentence. The nominative is the case typically taken by a noun phrase (often a single
noun or pronoun) when it is the subject of a verb; for example, in German, the
sentence Der Mann seht den Mann (‘The man sees the man’) illustrates the nominative
form of the definite article, der, and the accusative form, den. In Latin and related
languages, the nominative case is used as the identifying or basic form of a noun —
the form under which the noun is given in grammars and dictionaries. »>case;
inflection 1.

nonce word A word which a speaker consciously invents or accidentally uses on

a single occasion, in order to solve an immediate problem of communication; also
called a nonce form(ation). For example, in order to describe the way a dog on a
lead tends to walk round a tree on the opposite side to the way its owner wants it
to go, someone invented the word circumtreeviation. Lewis Carroll introduced several
nonce words into ‘Jabberwocky’, such as brillig and slithy. The term nonce is an
Elizabethan English form of ‘once’, suggesting that such words are introduced for
use on a single occasion, with no intention that they should be remembered for
future use. It would be unusual for a nonce word to be widely used, and to be
recognized as a dictionary form. If it were, it would be more properly called a
neologism. »neologism.

noncount(able) noun >countability.

nondefining >restrictiveness.

nondefinite >definiteness.

nondiscrete >discrete.

nonfinite >finite.

nonfluency >dysfluency. —

non-native varieties Varieties of a language which have emerged in speech

communities where most of the speakers do not have the language as a mother
tongue. The notion has been chiefly used with reference to English, and specifically

233
nonproductive

in relation to the kind of English which has grown up in India, Singapore, and many
of the countries of Africa. »»English as an international language.

nonproductive >productivity.

nonrestrictive >restrictiveness.

nonsexist language >inclusive language; sexist language.

nonstandard »>standard.

non-U >U and non-U.

nonverbal communication >body language; cartoon below.

Norfolk Island (population in 1995 estimated at 2100, with S56 on Pitcairn)

The official language is English. Some (c.600) still speak an English-based creole,
Pitcairn-Norfolk. »>creole; English.

normative Descriptive of a linguistic rule which is considered to set a socially

approved standard of correctness (or ‘norm’) for language use. Examples from English
include the recommendation to avoid a split infinitive, or to use whom (as opposed

INSTITUTE FOR
NONVERBAL CommuNicaTion

234
 notional syllabus

to who) in such contexts as The lady — I asked. . . A systematic collection of such rules
constitutes a normative grammar. >>correctness; prescriptivism.

Norn »>Scandinavian.

Norse »>Scandinavian.

Norway (population in 1995 estimated at 4,345,000) The official language is

Norwegian, spoken by almost the whole population. There are some speakers of
Finnish, Same, and Romani. »»Norwegian.

Norwegian A North Germanic language, a member of the West Scandinavian

group, spoken by c.4 million people in Norway, with some in Denmark, and through
immigration especially in the USA and Canada. It began to emerge from common
Old Norse after the 11th century, but political unions with other Scandinavian
countries halted the development of a distinct Norwegian literature until indepen-
dence was achieved in the 19th century. There are now two main varieties. Bokmal
(‘book language’) or Riksmal (‘language of the kingdom’) is the literary variety,
deriving from the written form of Danish introduced during the period when Norway
was united with Denmark (1380-1814). Nynorsk (‘new Norwegian’, formerly called
Landsmal) was devised by a language scholar, Ivar Aasen (1813-96) in the 19th
century; he based it on western rural dialects, which he felt better represented a
direct connection with Old Norse than did the Danish-influenced Bokmal. Both
varieties are written in the Roman alphabet; they are mutually intelligible; and both
have national status in government and in schools. However, Bokmal is used by
three times as many people, and is the language of literature and the national press.
Plans to mould them into a common Norwegian language (Sammorsk) are highly
controversial. »»Danish; diglossia; Norway; Scandinavian.
Nostratic /nv'stratik/ A proposed super-family of European and Asiatic languages,
including Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Dravidian, Uralic, Altaic, and Kartvelian
(south Caucasian) families. Originally suggested in 1903 by the Danish linguist
Holger Pedersen, the notion attracted renewed interest in the 1980s, especially
among Soviet linguists. »Indo-European; philology.

notation In linguistics, any system of graphic symbols used for the representation
of speech, or of the categories needed in order to analyse speech. The alphabet is
the most widely used kind of notation. Other examples include the various numerical
systems devised for calculation, the prosodic notations devised to write down speech
melody and rhythm, and systems of phonetic transcription. »»alphabet; transcrip-
tion; p. 236.

notional grammar >formal grammar; grammar 1.

notional syllabus A type of syllabus which has been developed since the 1970s
for use in foreign language teaching, organized on the basis of the sentence meanings
and functions which a learner needs in order to communicate — notions such as

235
noun

(a)
e e
oa ek | e& °

Quando ci rivedremo?

Let :
(b) poheg look ath steth |

a : © ope.

Te
‘AMD AN
“ l” Hilda SAID ‘PREGN
(d)
cca 86-90
> > > > >
1G. OD 2 WS Oe) CRA
ie) Ree Ce pe ee Bae Cer Ee I As eR aS \ is 4 2s
1 ya Ln) ES) Ee SE 2) SS Pe 2 oS. 2 PD.
ge (2 SE SEA ITEE CRE) SEAS / SEY Ea

Vég-re meg — 6r — kez—tekiMar hisz—6 ~ ve nem lét—tuk egy—méstl

(e)
Qu’ est - ce qu’ on a pour le diner, maman?

(f)
ia d3ien d3r jan fu thi ipa
A232 2 2 . 2 2

Notation: Six ways of notating intonation (all to be read from left to right):
(a) the widely used ‘tadpole’ notation in which size of dot indicates the relative
loudness of syllables (the language is Italian); (b) the typography reflects pitch
movement directly; (c) pitch movement and loudness are reflected directly;
(d) amusical notation (the language is Hungarian); (e) a semi-musical notation,
with an unspecified stave (the language is French); (f) impressionistic pitch
levels on an unspecified stave (the language is Chinese).

time, location, and quantity, and functions such as requesting and persuading. A
notional syllabus contrasts primarily with the traditional approach, where the basis
of organization is a graded series of grammatical structures (a structural syllabus).
It also contrasts with a situational syllabus, where the content is organized into
aseries of language-using situations, such as the airport, bank, or shops. »communic-
ative approach; speech act.

noun A word class, traditionally defined as the ‘name ofa person, place, or thing’, and
described linguistically in terms of a set of grammatical properties. These properties
include a noun’s ability to act as subject or object of a clause, and to be analysed in

236
 number

terms of number, gender, case, and countability. Nouns are generally sub-classified
into common and proper types. A construction with a noun as head is a noun
phrase (NP). »>case; clause; common noun; countability; gender; nominal; number;
phrase.

noun phrase >noun.

Novial /'‘npviel/ A language invented by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen in 1928; its
name is an acronym of New International Auxiliary Language. It was largely
based on previous proposals, mainly Ido (1907) and Edgar von Wahl’s Occidental
(1922). »>artificial language; Ido.

NP An abbreviation of noun phrase.

Nubian /‘nju:bian/ A Nilo-Saharan group of languages spoken by c.1 million people

in the Sudan and Egypt, chiefly along the banks of the River Nile. There is a long
written history (an unusual feature of languages in this region), with manuscripts
in a modified Coptic alphabet dating from the 8th to the 14th century ap (Old
Nubian); they are largely translations of Greek Christian writings. »»Coptic; Nilo-
Saharan.

Nuclear English A proposal to adapt the English language to produce a core system
of structure and vocabulary for international use. Suggested by the British linguist
Randolph Quirk, it was presented as a possible solution to problems of commun-
ication arising from the emergence of international varieties of English. Nuclear
English would eliminate all features that were ‘dispensable’, in the sense that the
language has an alternative means available for their expression (e.g. one of the two
indirect object constructions, or the range of tag questions). A communicative
nucleus would remain, which could be the focus for international purposes. »»com-
mon core; English; Quirkian.

nuclear stress/tone >nucleus 1.

nucleus 1. The syllable in an intonation unit which has the greatest pitch promin-
ence; also called the nuclear or tonic syllable. The nucleus carries the nuclear
tone or nuclear stress. In an unemphatic rendition of the sentence I saw an
elephant, the nucleus would be on the syllable EL. »intonation; syllable; tonicity.
2. >syllable.

Nuer /'nu:a/ A Nilotic language spoken by c.1 million people around the banks of
the River Nile in southern Sudan, with some speakers in Ethiopia. It is written in
the Roman alphabet. »>Nilotic.

number A grammatical category used for the analysis of word classes, especially
nouns, which display such contrasts as singular, dual, and plural - the contrasts
of ‘one’ vs. ‘two’ vs. ‘many’, respectively. These contrasts generally correspond to the
number of real-world entities referred to, but there is no straightforward one-to-one

237
numbers

correlation; for example, the noun wheat in English is singular, and oats is plural,
though there is hardly a difference between the number of stalks in a field in each
case. Pronouns and verbs also commonly display contrasts of number. >»>count-
ability; dual; noun.

numbers Words which refer to specific quantities. The two chief linguistic systems
are the cardinal numbers, which are the numbers used in ordinary counting,
answering the question ‘How many?’ (one, two, etc.), and the ordinal numbers,
which indicate order in a sequence (first, second, etc.). The symbols used to represent
a number are called numerals — such as those used in the Arabic, Roman, and Greek
systems. »>number.

Nyanja /‘njandja/ A member of the Bantu group of Benue-Congo languages, spoken

by c.5 million people in Malawi (c.3.2 million), where it is an official language (along
with English), and parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Zambia; also called Chewa.
It is used by a further 5 million people in the region as a second language. It is
written in the Roman alphabet. »Benue-Congo.

Nynorsk /‘ni:no:sk/ >Norwegian.

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 O
O An abbreviation of object.

obelisk A typographic symbol (7); also called a dagger. Its functions are to mark
a cross-reference (e.g. to a footnote or bibliographical item), and alongside someone’s
name to indicate that the person is dead. »>typography.

object (O) A major constituent of sentence or clause structure, traditionally associ-

ated with the receiver or goal of an action, such as the ball in The boy kicked the ball.
A widely recognized distinction is between direct and indirect object, as in The
child gave the toy to her mother, where the toy is the direct and her mother the indirect
object. »>clause; recipient; subject.

objective case »>accusative case.

objective genitive >subject.

oblique >solidus.

obscenity »>taboo language.

obsolescence 1. In historical linguistics, the gradual loss of a lexical item because

changes in the language or in the external world eliminate the opportunity or
motivation for its utterance. Examples would be the terms referring to early modern
vehicles, such as Jandau or hansom. These words have not gone completely out of
use, as they will be heard from time to time at vintage rallies and in other specialized
settings, but most people would not use them. When a word does go totally out of
general use, it would be referred to as obsolete. Traitorly, for example, is now
obsolete: it was used in Elizabethan English, but has since been replaced by treacherous.
»>archaism. 2. The gradual loss of a language, which takes place when its transmission
between generations ceases, and the number of its native speakers diminishes.
>> language death.

obsolete >obsolescence.

obstruent /'pbstru:ant/ A major division of consonant sounds, in terms of manner

of articulation, in which the vocal tract is sufficiently constricted to interfere with
free air flow (as is the case with plosives, fricatives, and affricates). A contrast is
usually drawn with approximant (also sonorant or resonant), where sounds
are produced with a relatively free airflow (as is the case with vowels, liquids, nasals,
and laterals). »approximant; consonant.

239
Ob-Ugric

Ob-Ugric /'vb'ju:grik/ >Finno-Ugric.

obviative /‘pbviativ/ A fourth-person form used in some languages (e.g. some of
the Algonkian languages of North America). It usually contrasts with the third person
pronoun to refer to an entity distinct from that already referred to — the notion of
‘someone or something else’. »>person; pronoun.

Occitan /pksi'tan/ A Romance language, spoken in south-east France, Italy, and

Monaco by an uncertain number of people (perhaps 10 million), generally heard
mixed with colloquial French; also called langue d’oc. The name derives from the
name of the geographical region, Occitania. Closely related to Catalan, Occitan has
several dialects, notably Provengal, spoken east of the Rhone chiefly in the Provence
region. Old or Classical Provengal can be traced back to the 10th century. It was the
language of the medieval troubadours, and became a standard language in France
and northern Spain until the 14th century; there were literary revivals in the 19th
and the 20th centuries. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »»French; Romance.

occlusion The duration of the closure made while a plosive is being articulated. A
plosive is sometimes referred to as an occlusive. >>plosive.

occupational dialect >dialect.

oesophageal >esophageal.

off-glide >glide.

official language >national language.

ogham or ogam /'pgam/ An alphabetic script dating from the 4th century ap,
found in about 500 inscriptions in Irish and Pictish. Its origins are unknown. The
alphabet has 20 letters, divided into four sets of five. The letters were simple strokes

C L
R T
Z D
H
NG c
N
G y
M : 3
2 A
The ogham alphabet.

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 open

or notches cut into the edges of a stone (or possibly wood). They are usually read
from bottom to top, or from right to left. »»alphabet; Irish Gaelic.
Old Church Slavonic »>Slavic.

Old English >English.

Old Norse »Scandinavian.

Oman (population in 1995 estimated at 1,845,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken by c.70% of the population. Other languages are Baluchi, Farsi (Persian),
Mahri, Swahili, and Urdu. English is used for irtternational purposes. There are over
half a million expatriates in the country. »»Arabic.

Omotic /au'motik/ A branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages, spoken by

nearly 3 million people in western Ethiopia and northern Kenya. About half of these
are speakers of Walamo. There are about 20 other languages in the group, which is
sometimes classified as a western branch of Cushitic. »»Afro-Asiatic; Cushitic.

on-glide »>glide.

onomasiology /pnemasi:'vlaci:/ The study of sets of associated concepts in relation

to the linguistic forms which designate them; for example, the study of the ways
lexical items can be organized conceptually in a section of an encyclopedia. This
direction of study, from concepts to items (as in a typical thesaurus) is sometimes
contrasted with semasiology, where the direction of study is from items to concepts.
»>semantics; thesaurus.

onomiastics /pna'mastiks/ A branch of semantics which studies the etymology of

proper names; also called onomatology (the word comes from Greek onoma
‘name’). Its subdivisions include anthroponymy, the study of the names of people,
and toponymy (or toponomastics), the study of the names of places. »>etymol-
ogy; hydronymy; name; patronymic; semantics; teknonymy.

onomatology /pneme'tola&i:/ >onomastics.

onomatopoeia /pnematsa'pi:a/ »sound symbolism.

onset >syllable.
ontogeny /pn'todani:/ The chronological acquisition, development, and decay of
language in the individual, from birth to death; chiefly used for the study of language
acquisition in children. The corresponding study applied to the speech community
as a whole is phylogeny - the subject-matter of philology and historical linguistics.
»> acquisition.

open 1. Descriptive of the lips when they are held relatively wide apart, but without
noticeable rounding. The body of the tongue is held low in the mouth. »>close
vowel; rounding. 2. Descriptive of a syllable which ends in a vowel; contrasts with

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open class

a closed syllable, which ends in a consonant. »»syllable. 3. In one approach to

early language acquisition, descriptive of the variable item at the 2-element stage of
sentence development, the other being referred to as the pivot. For example, such
utterances as see there, go there, cat there, are analysed as having a pivotal item, there,
in association with an item from a relatively open set. »»acquisition; closed class.

open class »>closed class.

operator In some approaches to English grammar, the first auxiliary verb to be
used in a verb phrase. It is so called because it performs an ‘operation’ on the clause,
such as marking the change from statement to question. In He was leaving, was is
the operator (cf. Was he leaving?). In She has been telling me, has is the operator (cf.
Has she been telling me?). >»>auxiliary verb.

oppositeness >antonymy; complementarity; converseness.

opposition >contrast.

optative /'pptetiv/ A grammatical category of mood which expresses a desire, hope,

or wish. It is chiefly known from Classical Greek. Optative expressions in English
use the modal verbs or the subjunctive: May they get home safely, Heaven help us!.
>»>mood.

Oracle >teletext.

oracy /'d:rasi:/ Ability in speech fluency and listening comprehension; a‘term coined
on analogy with literacy. The notion is chiefly encountered in relation to the
development of spoken language skills in mother-tongue education. »>educational
linguistics; literacy.

oral >cavity; nasal.

oralism >manualism.

oral tradition The spoken expression of a culture, as found in sagas, myths, folk
tales, folk poetry, and other texts transmitted from generation to generation without
use of written records. The tradition is especially encountered in cultures which
have little or no history of literacy, but a living oral tradition may be found anywhere.
»> anthropological linguistics.

order The pattern of relationships within a linear sequence of linguistic units. The
notion is chiefly encountered with reference to word order (e.g. whether an
adjective precedes or follows the noun in a noun phrase), but it is also found in
discussion of the order of phrases and other elements of sentence structure (e.g. the
distinction between languages which use a subject—verb-object order, and. those
which do not). »position 1; syntax; typology of language; word order.

order of mention In psycholinguistics, a use of language where the order of events

in the outside world is paralleled by the order in the sequence of semantic units

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 origins of language

within the corresponding utterance. For example, order of mention is preserved in

the sentence After Mary left, Jane went home - the first thing to be said is the first
thing to happen. By contrast, order of mention is lost in the sentence Jane went home
after Mary left -— the first thing to be said is the last thing to happen. This kind of
distinction proves to be important in identifying levels of difficulty in learning
sentences, especially by young children. »»psycholinguistics.

ordinal number >numeral.

organs of speech >vocal organs.

origins of lamguage The topic of where, when, and how human speech first
developed. The question has attracted a vast amount of speculation, but none of
the theories produces much evidence in support. Scientific investigations of the
fossil record, to determine whether primitive humans had the physiological capacity
to speak, have produced intriguing but inconclusive results. There is an enormous
gap between the time period when speech may have begun to develop (perhaps
35,000- 70,000 years ago) and the earliest recorded evidence of language (written
inscriptions of less than 10,000 years ago). »bow-wow/ding-dong/la-la/pooh-pooh/
yo-he-ho theory; glossogenetics; philology.

ZaGT nevi \fyowens!

RSKTDGM PQV +HATS Weer
EINZ, 7 we NEED! /

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Oriya

Oriya /v'ri:ja/ A language belonging to the Eastern group of Indo-Aryan languages,

spoken by c.30 million people, chiefly in the state of Orissa, eastern India, where it
is an official regional language. It is written in an alphabet derived from an early
Brahmiscript. The earliest known inscriptions date from the 14th century. »>Brahmi;
Indo-Aryan.

Oromo /‘pramau/ A member of the Cushitic language family, spoken by c.10 million
people in two main varieties, chiefly in Ethiopia, with some in nearby parts of Kenya;
formerly called Gallinya. It is written in the Amharic alphabet. »»Cushitic.
orthoepy /5:'Qavapi:/ The study of correct pronunciation, especially as practised
in the 17th and 18th centuries. Among the leading orthoepists of the period were
Bishop John Wilkins (1614-72) and the mathematician John Wallis (1616-1703).
Several works provide detailed descriptions of the sounds of contemporary English.
>> pronunciation; spelling.

orthography A standardized system for writing a specific language. The notion

includes a prescribed system of spelling and punctuation. »»graphology 1; script 1.

Ossetic /p'setik/ A member of the Iranian group of languages, spoken by c.500,000

people in the northern Caucasus. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. There is a
well-established oral epic literature, and a written literary language has developed
since the 19th century. »>Iranian.

Ostrogothic /'pstragpO1k/ >Gothic.

Oto-Manguean /avto'mangeion/ A family of Amerindian languages spoken in

Central America, in a small area centred on the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The main
languages are Otomi, Mixteco, and Zapotec, each with c.250,000 people. The modern
languages are written in the Roman alphabet. »»>Amerindian.

overcorrection >hypercorrection.

overextension A relationship between child and adult meaning in a lexical item,

where the child’s item has a wider range of application than the equivalent adult
term. An example is the use of cat to refer to other animals as well as cats. The notion
contrasts with underextension, where the child’s item has a more restricted range
than that found in adult language, as when cat is used to refer to only one kind of
cat (such as the one living in the child’s house). A contrast may also be drawn with
lexical mismatch, where there is no evident overlap at all with the adult meaning,
as when cat might be used to refer to a biscuit. »»acquisition; semantics.
overgeneralization »>genetalization.

overt prestige In sociolinguistics, a type of prestige attached to the use of a

language or variety which follows the norms set by influential members of society.
Someone may use (consciously or unconsciously) the forms of the standard language,
for example, because this will convey an educated or cultured impression. The notion

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contrasts with covert prestige, where a positive value is associated with the use
of vernacular forms, emphasizing solidarity and local identity. In sucha case, speakers
may use (again, consciously or unconsciously) nonstandard slang or local dialect
forms to show that they ‘belong’. »>language change; sociolinguistics.
Oxford English »>standard English.
oxymoron, plural oxymora /pksi:'ms:ren/ A figure of speech which combines
words of incongruous or contradictory meaning. Oxymora are usually identified in
literary contexts, such as Milton’s living death (in Samson Agonistes), but they are
often to be heard in everyday conversation — for example, describing a toddler as a
piece of charming wickedness. >>figurative language.

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P An abbreviation of phrase, predicator, preposition, or particle.

paedography /pi:'dogroafi:/ A writing system which has been devised in order to

help children learn to read. An example is the initial teaching alphabet. »>i.t.a.

page proof »>proof.

Paget-Gorman Sign System A sign language devised by Sir Richard Paget in the
1950s and developed after his death (1955) by Pierre Gorman, librarian at the Royal
National Institute of the Deaf in London. It contains c.3000 signs, representing the
words and morphemes of spoken English. Sentences are signed following English
word order. >>sign language.

Pahari /pa‘ha:ri:/ A group of languages belonging to the North-western group of

Indo-Aryan, spoken in the lower Himalayas. They include Nepali, Garhwali, and
Kumauni. »>Indo-Aryan; Nepali.

Pahlavi /'pa:lovi:/ >Persian.

Pakhto /'paktau/ >Pashto.

. Pakistan (population in 1995 estimated at 141,783,000) The official language is

Urdu, spoken by c.11 million as a first language, and by most others as a second or
third language. English is an associated official language. Panjabi (spoken by c.40%
of the population, chiefly in Panjab) and Sindhi (by c.12%, chiefly in Sindh) are
official regional languages. There are c.60 other languages, notably Pashto (c.10
million) and Baluchi (three main varieties, c.S million). English is used for inter-
national purposes. >»>Urdu.

palatal >>palate.

palate The arched structure that forms the roof of the mouth, much used for the
articulation of speech sounds. It is divided into the hard palate, the immobile
bony area immediately behind the alveolar ridge, and the soft palate or velum,
the mobile fleshy continuation which culminates in the uvula. Palatal consonants
are made when the front of the tongue articulates with the hard palate (as in German
ich ‘T’); this term is also sometimes used with reference to high front vowels, which are
made approaching the palate. Palatalization refers to any articulation involving a
movement towards the hard palate. Palatography is the instrumental study of

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articulation in the palatal area, which produces displays known as palatograms.

»>electropalatograph; palato-alveolar; uvular; vocal organs.

palato-alveolar /‘palatau alvi:'sula/ Descriptive of a consonant sound made by

the blade of the tongue against the alveolar ridge while the front of the tongue is
raised towards the hard palate. The initial sound of English ship is one example; the
initial sound of French je ‘T’ is another. »>alveolar; palate.

palatography »>electropalatography; palate.

Palau >Belau.

paleography or palaeography The study of ancient and medieval writings and

inscriptions, in order to establish the provenance, date, and correct form of a text.
The subject chiefly involves the study of writing on papyrus, parchment (vellum),
or paper, though it does not exclude other forms (e.g. graffiti). Most paleographic
research has been into manuscripts within the Greek/Latin tradition. weholestaply
internal evidence; writing.

Paleosiberian or Palaeosiberian A grouping of languages now represented by

a few thousand people scattered throughout north-eastern Siberia. They comprise
four genetically-unrelated groups, studied together since the 19th century: Luorawet-
lan in the far north-east, Yukaghir in the west, Yeniseyan on the River Yenisey, and
the single language Gilyak in the south. Since the early part of the present century,
each of these languages has been written down, using the Cyrillic alphabet. »>Gilyak;
Luorawetlan; Yeniseyan; Yukaghir.

Pali /‘pa:li:/ A member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages, known because of

its status as the sacred language of the Theravada Buddhist canon; the name means
‘(canonical) text’. Its use derives from Buddha’s wish to use vernacular languages
for his teaching (as opposed to Sanskrit, a scholarly language). The oral tradition
which ensued was eventually transcribed in the 1st century Bc. The language contains
many archaisms and mixed dialect features, and cannot be identified with any single
vernacular. »>Indo-Aryan; Prakrit.

palilalia /palr'letlia/ Involuntary repetition of words and phrases. The term has
been used only in a clinical context, where it characterizes the symptoms of several
types of disorder, notably aphasia. »»echolalia.

palilology /palt'lvladzi:/ In the study of rhetoric, word repetition for emphasis, as

in I am dying, Egypt, dying (Antony and Cleopatra, IV, xvi), or O villain, villain, smiling,
damned villain (Hamlet, I, v). The notion is common in colloquial contexts, too, as
in That was a splendid, splendid performance. The term is not current in linguistics.
»>rhetoric.

palindrome /'palindraum/ A word or expression which reads the same backwards

or forwards. Simple examples are such words as Ada and madam; more complex ones

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Panama

are Able was.I ere I saw Elba. Two palindromic language names are Malayalam and
Nauruan. Palindromes of several thousand letters have been constructed, presumably
for fun. »word game.

Panama (population in 1995 estimated at 2,669,000) The official language is

Spanish. There are c.10 Amerindian languages, as well as some speakers of Chinese,
and an English-based creole (spoken by c.14%) used in other parts of the western
Caribbean. Spanish and English are used for international purposes. »>creole;
Spanish.

pangram A meaningful sentence which contains every letter of the alphabet —

ideally, a single instance of each letter. The typist’s sentence The quick brown fox
jumps over the lazy dog is a pangram, but an imperfect one, as there are several
duplications. A 26-letter pangram devised in 1984 (with genuine words, all listed in
the large Oxford English Dictionary) is: Veldt jynx grimps Wagaf zho buck. »word game.

Panini /‘pa:ni:ni:/ An Indian grammarian, the first to produce an authoritative text

on the nature of Sanskrit. Written sometime between the 7th and 5th centuries Bc,
his ‘eight books’ deal mainly with rules of word formation, and are notable for their
detailed phonetic descriptions. »»Sanskrit.

Panjabi also spelled Punjabi /pun'd&a:bi:/ A language belonging to the North-

western group of Indo-Aryan languages, spoken by c.50 million people in Pakistan
and c.23 million in India, and also in several countries as an immigrant language,
notably Great Britain. It is an official regional language both in Panjab province,
Pakistan, and in Panjab, India. In India it is written in the Gurmukhi alphabet,
devised in the 16th century for writing the Sikh scriptures, and now in widespread
use; in Pakistan it is written in the Arabic alphabet. Panjabi is the religious language
of Sikhism. A western variety, Lahnda, is often classified as a separate language.
»> Indo-Aryan.

panlectal grammar >lect.

Panoan /pa'naven/ >Gé-Pano-Carib.

Papiamentu or Papiamento /papja'mentu:/ A Spanish creole, showing consider-

able Portuguese and Dutch influence, spoken by c.200,000 people chiefly in Curacao
and Bonaire (part of the Netherlands Antilles), and Aruba in the Caribbean, with
c.60,000 in The Netherlands. Some scholars consider the creole to have a Portuguese
origin. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »>creole.

Papuan /'papju:on/ >Indo-Pacific.

Papua New Guinea (population in 1995 estimated at 4,093,000) The official

language is English, with Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu also given official status. All three
are used as lingua francas — essential in a country which has a higher density of

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languages (over 800, belonging to the Austronesian and Indo-Pacific families) than
any other. »»English; Hiri Motu; Tok Pisin.

paradigm The set of substitutional relationships a linguistic unit has with other
units in a particular context; for example, in the context ‘— will leave’, the pronouns
I, you, we, etc. can substitute for each other, and thus comprise a paradigm. A class
of elements related in this way (‘paradigmatically’) is often referred to as a system
— the pronoun system, in this case. More narrowly, the term is used for a set of
grammatically conditioned forms all derived from a single root or stem, as in the
case of Latin, where all the case-forms of a noun are said to be in the same paradigm
(puella, puellam, puellae, etc.). »>case; substitution; syntagm; system.

paradox A statement which is contradictory or absurd on the surface, and which

thus forces the search for a deeper level of meaning. A famous example is Orwell’s
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. »>figurative language.

paragram A play on words by altering some of its letters, especially the first letter.
An example is the pun made by the artist who described his picture of a female nude
as a ‘shescape’. >>pun.

paragrammatism /paro'gramotizm/ A disorder involving specific errors of mor-

phology or syntax in the spoken or written language of someone suffering from
aphasia; a clinician might describe a speech sample as ‘paragrammatic’ — displaying
paragrammatism. The term is also used clinically for an instance of such an error —
the use of was been, for example, could be described as ‘a paragrammatism’. Linguists
tend to use rather more detailed terminology when discussing grammatical errors.
»>agrammatism; aphasia; grammar 2.

paragraph A unit of written discourse between the sentence and the whole text,
graphically distinguished either by indention of the first line or by white space
preceding and following. The function of a paragraph is to show the reader that the
sentences in a particular set are more closely related to each other than to the
sentences in adjacent text. There is no simple way of defining the unit of meaning
which a paragraph expresses, or its internal structure, though attempts are often
made to specify a ‘topic’ for each paragraph, and to identify ‘topic sentences’ (sen-
tences which introduce a paragraph’s theme). There are clear stylistic trends — for
example, the marked tendency for paragraphs to be shorter in popular writing.
»> discourse analysis; indention; punctuation; sentence; topic.

Paraguay (population in 1995 estimated at 4,896,000) The official languages are

Spanish and Guarani. About 95% of the people speak Guarani. There are c.15 other
Amerindian languages, most spoken by only a few hundred, and c.40,000 speakers
of German. Spanish and English are used for international purposes. »»Guarani;
Spanish.

paralanguage /'paralangwid/ Variations in tone of voice which seem to be less

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definable and systematic than other aspects of nonsegmental phonology, such as

creaky or breathy voice; also called paralinguistic features. The term is sometimes
broadened to include other features of speech (e.g. pauses, voice quality) and nonver-
bal features (e.g. kinesic features). Paralinguistic features are often described using
other labels, such as ‘vocal qualifiers’ or ‘voice qualifications’. »breathy voice; creaky
voice; kinesics; pause; phonology.

parallelism A sequence of identical or strikingly similar elements in speaking or

writing. The notion is especially used in grammatical description, where whole
constructions can be related through their use of parallel syntax; but sounds and
words may be used in parallel, too. An example is Hamlet’s Doubt thou the stars are
fire; /Doubt that the sun doth move; / Doubt truth to be a liar; /But never doubt I love (II,
ii). >>style; syntax.

parameter In linguistics, a specification of the variations that a principle of

grammar shows among different languages. A head parameter, for example, would
specify the possible positions of heads within phrases. Determining the values
of parameters for given languages is called parameter-setting. The notion was
introduced in the mid-1980s as part of government and binding theory. »»govern-
ment and binding theory; head.

parametric phonetics An approach to phonetics that analyses speech as a single

physiological system in which the range of articulatory variables (parameters, such
as voicing, tongue movement, and soft palate movement) is seen to be continually
in operation. These parameters interact along the time dimension to produce a
continuum of sound which listeners segment according to the rules of the language.
The approach is a reaction against the traditional view of speech as a sequence of
self-contained phonetic segments — [b] + [e] + [t], etc - now seen to be a serious
oversimplification. »>coarticulation; phonetics.

paraphasia In the study of anomia and related disorders, an involuntary error in

the production of words or phrases. Phonological paraphasia isa type of incorrect
response in which phonemic elements are absent, distorted, or misplaced within an
otherwise recognizable word; also known as literal paraphasia. Examples include
bandona for banana, and larding for loading. Insemantic paraphasia the error relates
in meaning or category to the desired name, such as soldier for policeman, or siren for
ambulance; also known as verbal paraphasia. These terms have currency within
language pathology, not in linguistics. »anomia; language pathology; phonology.

paraphrase The process or result of producing alternative versions of a sentence

or text without changing its meaning. A similar notion has long been used in school
language classes, where a student might be asked to paraphrase a passage: here the
new text has to preserve the ‘core’ meaning of the old, or be a close approximation
to it. The linguistic use of the term usually involves a stricter sense, requiring that
the two texts have the same meaning - thus, John caught the ball and The ball was

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caught by John are said to be syntactic paraphrases of each other. »transformation.

pararhyme /'pararaim/ Repetition of the same initial and final consonants in

different accented words, or of the final consonant(s) only; also known as half-
rhyme. An example, from Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ (which uses pararhyme
throughout) is: And by his smile I knew that sullen hall, / By his dead smile I knew we
stood in Hell. »rhyme.

paratactic /‘parataktik/ »>hypotactic.

parenthesis 1. In punctuation, either or both of a pair of round brackets (paren-

theses) to signal an optional, included element of meaning; also called brackets
in British English. The preceding sentence contains an illustration. »punctuation.
2. In speech, any construction which can be considered an optional, included
element of a sentence. If it is genuinely parenthetic, the construction can be removed
without this affecting the grammatical structure of the rest of the sentence. Comment
clauses (e.g. you see, to be honest, frankly speaking) provide good examples: That car,
to be honest, is an expensive failure. »comment clause.

parent language >family of languages.

parole >langue.

paronomasia /parpna'melz2/ >pun.

paronymy /pe'ronami:/ The semantic relationship which exists between words

derived from the same root. The notion is especially used for the formation of a
word which changes only slightly from a word in another language, such as French
pont ‘bridge’ from Latin pons, but words such as boyhood and boyish could also be
called paronyms. »>etymology.

parsing In traditional grammar, the pedagogical exercise of analysing and labelling

The old man called me a crazy inventor.

called inventor

A diagrammatical method of parsing. A system of vertical and slant lines

represent the syntactic relationships within a sentence - commonly used in
American schools. The representations are often called ‘Reed and Kellogg’
diagrams, after the authors of a nineteenth-century English textbook. A long
vertical line marks the subject—predicate boundary; a short vertical line divides
verb and object; and a short slanting line marks off a complement. Other
items are written in underneath.

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the grammatical elements of single sentences; also, especially in the USA, called
diagramming. A sentence on a blackboard, such as The cat sat on the dog, would
be parsed into Subject + Predicate, the Predicate parsed into Verb + Adverbial, and
the type of Adverbial recognized (of Place). The mechanical nature of the exercise
(in which, for example, the several types of adverbial phrase might be learned by
rote), and the use of examples which seemed to bear little or no relationship to the
linguistic experience of the student, led to this approach going out of fashion in the
late 1950s. In linguistics, the analysis of sentences is not generally called ‘parsing’,
therefore, to avoid confusion with the traditional approach; but in any case, linguists
are not so much concerned with the labelling of elements as with the criteria which
lead to the identification of these elements. However, in recent years, the term has
come back into fashion, being widely used for the general process of sentence analysis
employed in computational linguistics. »computational/educational linguistics;
grammar 2; language in use; machine translation.

participant roles 1. The functions that can be ascribed to people taking part in
a linguistic interaction. Participants may have such roles as speaker, addressee, and
message source (i.e. someone other than the speaker). »>discourse analysis. 2. The
semantic functions attached to clause elements, such as agent and recipient. In this
sense, the roles are participating in the meaning of a sentence, rather than in the
dynamics of an interaction. »>agent; clause; patient; recipient.

participle In traditional grammar, a word derived from a verb and used as an

adjective, as in shining example and parked car. The name comes from the way such
a word ‘participates’ in the characteristics of both verb and adjective. There are two
related notions in Latin grammar, and these were carried through into the description
of many modern languages (though often without any real regard to differences
between the grammar of those languages and that of Latin, with the result that the
distinction was generally misunderstood or ignored). A gerund is a noun derived
from a verb (a ‘verbal noun’), such as amandum ‘loving’; two such forms are illustrated
in Seeing is believing. A gerundive is an adjective derived from a verb (a ‘verbal
adjective’), such as amandus ‘lovable’; an English example would be crumbling ruin.
In linguistics, the notion of participle is generally restricted to the nonfinite forms
of a verb (other than the infinitive), and these forms are classified into two types:
present (e.g. shining) and past (e.g. parked). However, as participles can refer to any
time (past, present, or future), linguists often use other terminology to describe them
~ in English, -ing forms and -en forms, respectively. »»adjective; finite; grammar
2; -ing form; verb.

particle An invariable item with a grammatical function. The term is especially

used for a form which does not readily fit into a standard classification of parts of
speech. The to in front of an English infinitive (to see) is often described as a particle,
as is French y in such forms as II y a ‘There is/are’. »»infinitive; word class.
partitive A form which refers to a part or quantity, such as piece, ounce, and

292,
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bar (of soap). Some partitive forms are very general, occurring with almost any
quantifiable lexical item (e.g. some); others are restricted to a single lexical item, or
a very small set (e.g. blade — of grass, flock — of sheep, birds). »>quantifier.
part of speech >word class.

Pashto /'pajtau/ A member of the Iranian group of languages, spoken by c.11 million
people in Pakistan, and by c.8 million in Afghanistan (where it is an official language,
along with Persian); also spelled Pakhto (reflecting a northern dialect pronunci-
ation) and sometimes called Afghan. It is written in the Arabic alphabet, and has
a literary tradition from the 16th century. It was declared the national language of
Afghanistan in 1936, and there is a Pashto Academy. »»Afghanistan; Iranian.

pasigraphy /po'sigrofi:/ The use of a system of symbols which can be understood

between different languages. Several such systems have been proposed, some using
current signs and symbols in current use (e.g. +, & 2, £), others using batteries of
artificially constructed forms. »>logogram.

passive knowledge »>active knowledge.

Passive voice >voice 1.

past anterior A tense form used in some languages to express the rapid completion
of a past action. In French, for example, it is chiefly used instead of the pluperfect
in past narrative after temporal conjunctions or when the main verb is in the past
historic. It is formed by combining the past historic tense of an auxiliary verb with
the past participle of a lexical verb: Dés qu’elle eut mangé, elle sortit ‘As soon as she
had eaten, she left’. »past historic; pluperfect; tense.

past definite »>past historic.

past historic A past tense form of a verb, used in some languages to refer to a
completed action; also sometimes called the past definite. In French, for example,
it is used in the written language as part of past narrative description as well as in
the reporting of completed past events: Hier, Marie se leva et sortit ‘Yesterday, Marie
got up and went out’. »>past tense.

past participle >participle.

past perfect >perfect.

past tense A tense form which refers to a time of action prior to the moment of
utterance. Languages make different distinctions within this period, such as whether
the reference is recent or distant, or whether the action is completed or not. French,
for example, recognizes imperfect, past historic, perfect, pluperfect, and past anterior
tenses, as well as future and conditional perfect forms. English also traditionally
recognizes a range of past tense forms, following the influence of Latin grammar,
though only a single past tense form is represented inflectionally (I walked), other

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past time reference using auxiliary verbs (J have walked, etc.). »>imperfect; inflection
1; past anterior/historic; perfect; preterite; tense.

pathologist (of speech or language) >language pathology.

patient In some grammatical analyses of a sentence, the entity that is affected by

the action of the verb. The typical example is the object of a transitive verb, as in
Mary drove the car, but the subject of certain kinds of construction may also be
described as the patient, as in The cat was chased by the dog. »>participant roles;
recipient.

Patois /‘patwa:/ >Patwa.

patois /‘patwa:/ A popular label for a provincial dialect, especially one spoken by
people considered to be primitive, illiterate, or outside society in some way (e.g.
tustics, gypsies). It usually carries a disparaging connotation, and is not used in
dialectology. »>dialect.

patronymic /patra'nimik/ A name given to someone based on the name of the

person’s father, such as Johnson or Johanson. This is a fairly common event in the
name histories of different countries. In Russian, for example, people have three
names: first name, patronymic, and surname ~ as illustrated by Ivan Nikolayevich
Gogol. Much less common is the use of a matronymic (or metronymic), based
on the name of a person’s mother, as in Marjorison. Spanish is an example of a
language where a surname may contain both a father’s and a mother’s surname, as
in (Gabriel) Garcia Marquez. »onomastics.

pattern drill >drill.

Patwa or Patois /'patwa:/ The name given to several varieties of creole French
spoken by over a million people in several parts of the Caribbean and French Guiana,
notably Saint Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. It is regularly used in
broadcasting and the press. The name is also used for the variety of creole English
spoken in Jamaica. With a small p, the term patois is widely used in.a general (and
usually disparaging) way to refer to any provincial dialect in a region; this usage has
no standing in linguistics. »creole; Dominica; French Guiana; Guadeloupe; Jamaica;
Martinique; Saint Lucia.

pause A temporary break in the flow of speech, often classified into silent pause,
where there is no vocalization, and filled pause, where a hesitation noise is intro-
duced (e.g. erm, ah). In grammar, the criterion of potential pause is sometimes
used as a method for establishing the words in a language, since pauses are more
likely at word boundaries than within words. >»>hesitation; paralanguage.

peace linguistics A climate of opinion which emerged during the 1990s among
many linguists and language teachers, in which linguistic principles, methods,
findings, and applications were seen as a means of promoting peace and human

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rights at a global level. The approach emphasizes the value of linguistic diversity
and multilingualism, both internationally and intranationally, and asserts the need
to foster language attitudes which respect the dignity of individual speakers and
speech communities. »>ecolinguistics; language attitudes/awareness/planning/
teaching; Linguapax.

pedagogical grammar A grammatical account of a language whose purpose is

to facilitate the teaching and learning of that language; also called a pedagogic
grammar. Such a grammar is especially found in foreign language teaching, where
it contrasts with such notions as descriptive grammar and theoretical grammar.
»> educational linguistics; grammar 1.
pedagogical linguistics »educational linguistics.
pejoration /pi:de'rei{n/ A change of meaning in which a word develops a sense
of disapproval. An example is notorious, which formerly meant ‘widely known’, but
now means ‘widely and unfavourably known’. »»amelioration.
pejorative /pi'dproativ, 'pi:dgarativ/ Descriptive of a linguistic form which expresses
a disparaging meaning. Examples include goodish, a youth, and (see above) patois.
»>connotation.

pen name »>pseudonym.

Pennsylvanian Dutch »>German.

pentameter >metrics.

Penutian /pa'nu:j/n/ A group of over 60 Amerindian languages spoken from south-

west Canada down through the western states of the USA, Mexico, and Central
America, and into south-west South America. In its broadest interpretation (as
Macro-Penutian), this grouping thus provides the main linguistic bridge between
North, Central, and South America. (A narrower interpretation uses the term for just
the 20 or so North American languages involved.) The Penutian languages with
most speakers belong to the Mayan family, spoken in Mexico and Central America.
The main South American language is Mapudungan (also called Araucanian or
Mapuche), spoken by c.250,000 people chiefly in Chile, with some in Argentina. All
these languages now use the Roman alphabet when written down. Maya developed
a sophisticated hieroglyphic system. »»Amerindian; Mayan.
perception »speech perception.
perfect (perf.) A grammatical category of a temporal or durative kind, typically
applying to verb forms, sometimes handled under the heading of tense and some-
times under aspect; for example, I go vs. I have gone, or I have gone vs. I had gone (the
latter traditionally called the pluperfect, or past perfect). In perfect contexts,
an event in the past is seen as having some present relevance; for example, I’ve hurt
my knee implies that the knee is currently sore (whereas in I hurt my knee (last week),

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the knee may be quite well again). In perfective aspect, a contrast is typically seen
as a whole, regardless of the time contrasts that may be a part of it; imperfective
or nonperfective aspect typically draws attention to the internal time-structuring
of the situation. This last type of contrast is important in Slavic languages. »>aspect;
imperfect; tense 1; verb.

perfective >perfect.

performance 1. Language seen as a set of specific utterances produced by speakers;

contrasts with competence. Performance, in this view, includes all the nonfluencies
and other limitations (e.g. of memory and attention) which are a normal part of
speech production. The notion was introduced by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s,
and is analogous to the Saussurian concept of parole. A grammar which takes into
account the various biological and psychological processes involved in speech is a
performance grammar. »Chomskyan; competence; parole; speech production.
2. >ear training.

performance grammar >grammar 1.

performative A type of sentence or verb where an action is performed by virtue

of the sentence having been uttered. Simply by sayingI apologize, an apologyismade
(‘performed’). To say I promise is a sign that a promise has been made. Performative
utterances are an important part of a theory of speech acts. »>illocutionary act;
speech act.

period A punctuation mark which signals the end of an orthographic sentence in

statement form; also called a full-stop in British English. It contrasts with the other
sentence-final marks (the question and exclamation marks), and also with the mark
of sentence-incompletion (usually a triple dot, . . . ). »»punctuation.

periphrasis /pa'rifrasis/ The use of separate words instead of inflectional affixes to

express the same grammatical relationship. For example, the comparison of adjec-
tives in English involves both inflectional forms (e.g. bigger) and periphrastic
forms (e.g. more interesting). »>adjective; circumlocution; inflection 1.

perlocutionary act/effect /p3:la'kju:{nari:/ >illocutionary act.

perseveration /p3:seva'rerjn/ An involuntary tendency to continue an activity,

whether it is appropriate to do so or not; in the context of this book, the continuous
use of a linguistic form or pattern. The term is chiefly used in clinical contexts, where
it identifies a symptom noticeable in aphasia and certain other disorders. In one
sequence, an aphasic patient, having described a picture (correctly) as ‘The man is
sweeping the floor’, went on to describe the next picture (of a man cleaning a car)
as ‘The man is sweeping the car’, and then proceeded to perseverate on sweep for
several more utterances. Perseveration (on sounds) is also a noticeable feature of
stuttering. »>aphasia; stuttering.

256
 pharynx

Persian A member of the Iranian group of languages, spoken by c.25 million people
in Iran (where it is the official language), with a further 7 million speaking an eastern
variety chiefly in Afghanistan (where it has official status along with Pashto); also
called Farsi (in Iran) and Dari (in Afghanistan). It is written in the Arabic alphabet.
Written forms of the language date from cuneiform inscriptions in Old Persian
during the first millennium sc. Middle Persian (Pahlavi) was spoken from the 3rd
century Bc to the 9th century ap; it was the basis of the modern language, which
has been much influenced by Arabic. »»Afghanistan; cuneiform; Iran; Iranian.

person A grammatical category referring to the number and nature of the partici-
pants in a situation. Speakers use first person pronouns to refer to themselves, or
to a group including themselves (I, we); they use second person pronouns to refer
to the person(s) they are addressing (you); and they use third person pronouns to
refer to other people, animals, things, etc (he, she, it, they). Some languages recognize
a fourth person or obviative. Verb constructions which lack a person contrast,
usually appearing in the third person, are called impersonal (e.g. it seems tome... ).
»> inclusive; obviative; pronoun; T/V forms.

personification A type of metaphor in which human qualities are ascribed to

nonhuman entities or notions. This kind of figurative expression is common in
poetry (e.g. The mountains spoke of ancient wars), but there are many everyday
examples (e.g. The town slept). A related term is hypostatize — to speak of an abstract
quality as if it were human. »>figurative language.

Peru (population in 1995 estimated at 23,407,000) The official language is Spanish,

spoken by c.85% of the people. There are c.65 Amerindian languages, notably
Quechua, spoken in over 30 varieties (by c.15% in total), and Aymara. Spanish and
English are used for international purposes. »»Spanish.

petroglyph /'petraglif/ An ancient stone inscription; also called a petrogram.

The earliest petroglyphs made use of primitive pictures and signs (e.g. human figures,
geometric shapes). Though there are certain resemblances to writing, they lack the
systemicness which is found in a writing system. »>epigraph 1; writing.

petrogram »>petroglyph.

pharyngeal /fa'rindgal, farin'dgral/ Descriptive of a consonant sound made by the

root of the tongue with the back wall of the pharynx. Arabic is a language which
uses this articulation, and has both voiceless and voiced forms. Any articulation
involving a constriction of the pharynx is said to be pharyngealized. A ‘stage
whisper’ typically involves a great deal of pharyngeal constriction. »»consonant,
pharynx; vocal organs.

pharynx /‘farmks/ The part of the vocal tract above the larynx which connects the
mouth and nose to the esophagus. It is important in providing resonance for speech

257
phatic communion

sounds, and is actively involved in the production of certain voice qualities and
consonants. »>pharyngeal; vocal tract.

phatic communion /'fatik/ The social function of language, used to show rapport
between people, or to establish a pleasant atmosphere. A typical British example is
a comment about the weather or a passing enquiry about someone’s health. The
term derives from Greek phatos, ‘spoken’. »>referential language.

Philippines, The (population in 1995 estimated at 67,900,000) The official

languages are Pilipino (spoken as a first language by c.60% of the population, and
as a second language by a further 35%) and English (spoken by c.50% as a second
language). There are over 100 local languages, several spoken in many varieties,
including Cebuano (c.25%), Ilocano (c.11%), Hiligaynon (c.10%), and Bicolano
(c.7%). Over 250,000 speak a Spanish-based creole (Spanish was formerly an official
language), such as Chavacano (Zamboanguefio), and Chinese is also spoken (over
500,000). Pilipino and English are lingua francas. English is used for international
purposes. »>Cebuano; creole; English; Ilocano; lingua franca; Pilipino.

philology Traditionally, the study of language history, sometimes including the

historical study of literary texts; also called comparative philology when the
emphasis is on the comparison of the historical states of different languages. The
subject overlaps substantially with historical linguistics, but there are several
differences of emphasis, both in training and in subject-matter. The philological
tradition is one of painstaking textual analysis, often related to literary history, and
using a fairly traditional descriptive framework. The newer, linguistic approach tends
to study historical data more selectively, as part of the discussion of broader issues
in linguistic theory, such as the nature of language change. »>diachronic linguistics;
internal evidence; law; reconstruction.

philosophical linguistics A branch of linguistics which studies the role of lan-

guage in relation to the understanding and elucidation of philosophical concepts,
as well as the philosophical status of linguistic theories, methods, and observations.
Within philosophy, this interaction is often referred to as linguistic philosophy
or the philosophy of language. »linguistics.

Phoenician /fa'ni:jn/ A Semitic language spoken in an area corresponding to

modern Lebanon and parts of nearby Syria and Israel, as well as in those parts of the
Mediterranean coast colonized by the Phoenicians. Inscriptions in the language date
from the 11th century sc, and there is evidence of its use in Phoenicia for about a
millennium. It is written from right to left, using a 22-letter alphabet which does
not represent vowels. A derivative of the North Semitic alphabet, it is probably the
ancestor of the Greek alphabet, which in turn gave rise to all Western alphabets.
Several variant forms of the alphabet exist. An important later development of both
the language and the alphabet, known as Punic, came to be used throughout

258
 phonesthenia or phonaesthenia

the Carthaginian Empire, and continued in use until around the 5th century ap.
»>alphabet; Greek; Semitic.

phonation The use of the vocal folds to produce the range of voiced sounds in
speech, as well as certain other laryngeal effects, such as creaky and breathy voice.
These effects are often called phonation types. »>breathy voice; creaky voice;
larynx; setting; vocal folds.

phone In phonetics, the smallest perceptible discrete segment of sound in a stream

of speech. From a phonological point of view, the term has a similar application,
referring to the physical realization of a phoneme. »>discrete; phoneme; phonetics.

phoneme The smallest unit in the sound system of a language, according to the
traditional phonological theory called phonemics or phonemic phonology. In
this approach, units such as/p/and/b/are established on the grounds that substitution
of one for the other can cause a change in meaning (asin pitvs. bit). Acomplete analysis
in these terms displays alanguage’s phonemic system. Phonemic units are transcribed
within slashes, to distinguish them from the physical sounds of speech, which appear
within square brackets. Thus, the phoneme /1/ in English can appear in speech as a
‘clear’ [l] (as in lead), a ‘dark’ [I] (as in fool), and voiceless (as in please). These
variant forms of a phoneme are called allophones. »>allo-; clear J; minimal pair;
phonological feature theory; phonology; transcription; table below.

phonemic transcription >transcription.

phonesthenia or phonaesthenia /fonas'@i:nia/ An abnormally weak voice

quality. The term is found only in clinical contexts, where the problem (often caused

Consonants Vowels
% % % %

n 7.58 b 1.97 E) 10.74 U 0.86

t 6.42 f 1.79 I 8.33 a: 0.79
d 5.14 p 1.78 e 2.97 au 0.61
s 4.81 h 1.46 al 1.83 3 0.52
| 3.66 4) HAS A 1.75 €3 0.34
6 3.56 g 1.05 el 1.71 1d 0.21
r 3.51 f 0.96 it 1.65 oI 0.14
m 3.22 j 0.88 aU 1.51 va 0.06
k 3.09 & 0.60 a 1.45
w 2.81 tf 0.41 D 1.37
z 2.46 6 0.37 ar 1.24
v 2.00 3 0.10 Ur as

The phonemes of southern British English, with an indication of their fre-

quency in conversation. From D. Fry, Archives Néerlandaises de Phonétique
Experimentale 20, 1974.

259
phonesthetics

by inadequate respiratory pressure from the lungs) is an important contributory

factor in some types of voice disorder. »>voice disorder/quality.

phonesthetics or phonaesthetics /fonas'Oetiks/ The study of the aesthetic

properties of sound, especially of the symbolism attributed to individual sounds,
sound clusters, or sound types. Examples include the implication of smallness in
the close vowels of such words as teeny weeny, and the unpleasant associations of
the consonant cluster /sl-/ in such words as slime, slug, and slush. Direct sound/
meaning correspondence is also called phon(a)esthesia or syn(a)esthesia, and
the postulated sound units are sometimes analysed as phon(a)esthemes. A direct
linguistic imitation of a sound in nature is traditionally referred to as onomato-
poeia. >»sound symbolism.

phonetically consistent forms (PCFs) The first recognizably recurrent, mean-

ingful units of speech produced by a child; also called protowords. The forms
are phonetically less controlled than the corresponding forms in adult speech.
»>acquisition; babbling.

phonetic alphabet >transcription.

phonetician >phonetics.

phonetics The study of the characteristics of human sound-making, especially of

those sounds used in speech; generally divided into articulatory, acoustic, and
auditory branches. Instrumental phonetics is the study of any of these aspects
using physical apparatus. The use of scientific methodology is reflected in the term
experimental phonetics. General phonetics emphasizes the aim of discovering
universal principles governing the nature and use of speech sounds. A student or
scholar of phonetics is a phonetician. »>acoustic phonetics; articulation; auditory
phonetics; parametric phonetics; sonority.

phonetic spelling A spelling system which represents speech sounds in a one-to-

one way; strictly, the term should be ‘phonemic spelling’, as it is the phonemes of
the language which are being represented, but the popular usage is ‘phonetic’. The
most ambitious attempt at such a spelling system is the International Phonetic
Alphabet. The alphabets of some languages come close to being consistently pho-
nemic (e.g. Spanish, Finnish); English is one of several languages which does not.
»>International Phonetic Alphabet; phoneme; spelling.

phonetic transcription >transcription.

phoniatrics /founi:'atriks/ The study of pathologies affecting voice quality and

pronunciation. The phoniatrist /fa'natstrist/ is especially concerned with the diag-
nosis and treatment of voice disorders. »»voice disorder/quality.

phonics A method of teaching reading which trains recognition of the sound values

260
 phrase (P)

of individual letters; also sometimes called the phonetic method. Syllables and
words are then built up in a linear way. »look-and-say; reading.

phonic substance Speech regarded as a set of physical properties; also called

phonetic substance. It can be defined in acoustic or articulatory terms.
»> phonetics.

phonogram A symbol in a writing system representing a speech sound. A contrast

is intended with the logogram, where symbols represent words. Any writing system
which represents individual speech sounds (as in the alphabet and syllabary) is a
phonography. »alphabet; logogram; syllabary.

phonological feature theory An analysis of vowels and consonants in terms of

a set of additive components within a single phonetic framework. The sounds are
classified using a hierarchical arrangement of binary features, such as voiced [+ voice]
vs. unvoiced [- voice], or high [+ high] vs. low [- high]. Features can be grouped
into four main classes, relating to place of articulation, type of stricture, the oral/
nasal process, and laryngeal activity. However, several different approaches have
been devised, and terms vary. »>distinctive; phoneme; phonology.

phonology The study of the sound systems of languages, and of the general or
universal properties displayed by these systems. In linguistic theory, it is seen either
as a level of linguistic organization, contrasted with phonetics, grammar, and seman-
tics, or as a component of a generative grammar, i.e. the phonological
component, contrasted with the syntactic and semantic components. Segmental
phonology analyses speech into discrete segments, such as phonemes; supraseg-
mental phonology, also called nonsegmental or plurisegmental phonology,
analyses features which extend over more than one segment, such as intonation
contours. The student or scholar of phonology is a phonologist. »>intonation;
phoneme; phonetics; phonotactics; prosody; syllable.

phonostylistics »>stylistics.
phonotactics The sequential arrangements of phonological units that are possible
inalanguage. In English, for example, initial /spr-/is a possible phonotactic sequence,
whereas /spm-/ is not. »>distribution; phonology; position 1; postvocalic; syllable.

phrasal verb A type of verb consisting of a sequence of a lexical element plus one
or more particles, such as come in, sit down. There are many such verbs in English.
Subtypes may be distinguished on syntactic or semantic grounds, and ‘phrasal’ is
sometimes used in a narrower sense to refer to one or other of these subtypes. »>verb.
phrase (P) An element of structure typically containing more than one word,
but lacking the subject—predicate structure usually found in a clause. Phrases are
traditionally classified into functional types related to word class, such as noun
phrases (e.g. the big car) and verb phrases (e.g. has been walking). The equivalent
notion in systemic grammar is group — for example, a noun phrase is described as

261
phrase-marker (PM)

a ‘nominal group’. In generative grammar, the term has a broader sense as part of a
general characterization of the first stage of sentence analysis - the phrase-
structure part of a grammar. In this approach, several traditional terms are used
differently; in particular, the term ‘verb phrase’ is used to subsume everything except
the subject of a sentence. »>clause; generative grammar; grammar 2; phrase-marker;
phrase-structure grammar; systemic grammar.

phrase-marker (PM) In generative grammar, the structural representation of a

sentence in terms of a labelled bracketing, as assigned by the rules of the grammar.
For example, the first steps in the analysis of the sentence the cat chased the dog can
be represented as ((the cat)yp (chased the dog)yp)s. Such analyses are usually presented
in the form of a tree diagram. >»»>generative grammar; tree.

phrase-structure grammar (PSG) A type of grammar containing rules, called

phrase-structure rules (PS rules), capable not only of generating strings of
linguistic elements, but also of providing a constituent analysis of the strings.
The phrase-structure component of a transformational grammar specifies the
hierarchical structure of a sentence, the linear sequence of its constituents, and
indirectly some types of syntactic relation. Several approaches to syntax have been
developed that are equivalent to PSGs, but do not employ PS-rules, such as Gen-
eralized Phrase Structure Grammar. »>constituent; generative grammar; phrase;
rewrite rule; syntax.

Phrygian /'fridien/ >Anatolian.

phylogeny /far'lodani:/ >ontogeny.

phylum /'failam/ The highest level recognized in genetic linguistic classification,

representing a group of languages where the genetic relationship has not been fully
demonstrated. The term contrasts with family, which is used for established levels
of classification (though sometimes ‘family’ is used loosely for both kinds of group-
ing). For example, the Andean and Equatorial groups of languages spoken in parts
of South America are sometimes placed together in a single Andean-Equatorial
phylum. »family of languages; genetic classification.

physiological phonetics >articulation.

pictogram A symbol used in picture writing; also called a pictograph. Pictogra-

phy is the study of pictorial systems, or an instance of sucha system. The pictograms
provide a recognizable representation of entities as they exist in the world (e.g. wavy
lines representing sea). They have been discovered in Egypt and Mesopotamia dating
from c.3000 Bc (see illustration at cuneiform). Modern pictograms are widespread,
such as those used in present-day road signs (e.g. crossroads ahead). »>hieroglyphic;
ideogram; p. 263.

pictograph »>pictogram.

262
 pictograph

Formulae for DNA

components

number of DNA
nucleotides

DNA
double
helix

Height
of human

World Human
‘
population being

Planets

Arecibo
telescope

Modern pictograms. The pictographic message transmitted into space by

the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974, aimed at the M13 star
cluster. The radio pulses, arranged pictographically, represent data on the
chemical basis of life on earth, the human form, and the solar system. © 1975
Scientific American Inc. All rights reserved.

263
pidgin

pidgin A language with a markedly reduced grammatical structure, lexicon, and

stylistic range. The native language of no one, it emerges when members of two
mutually unintelligible speech communities attempt to communicate; often called
a trade language, when seen in the context of the expansionist era of colonial
economies. Pidgins contrast with creoles, which are created when pidgins acquire
native speakers. Many pidgins are based on European languages, reflecting the history
of colonialism, but there are undoubtedly a large number of unstudied pidgins in
the many situations of language contact in Africa, south-east Asia, and South America.
Some pidgins have become so useful that they have developed a role as auxiliary
languages, and been given official status by the community (e.g. Tok Pisin). These
cases are called expanded pidgins because of the way they have added extra forms
to cope with the needs of the users. »>Bislama; Cameroon; creole; language contact;
Liberia; monogenesis; Motu; relexification hypothesis; Sango; Tok Pisin; Zambia.

Pig Latin A type of children’s word-play in which the first consonants of a word
are put at the end, and a nonsense syllable (such as ay) added. An example is ontday
oselay isthay ookbay ‘Don’t lose this book’. Several variants exist, in which other
letters are placed in odd positions. >»>play language.

Pike, Kenneth >tagmemics.

Pilipino /pili'pi:nou/ The name given to the national language of the Philippines,
when the country became independent in 1946, now spoken by over 40 million
people (c.60% of the population). Itis a standardized form of Tagalog, an indigenous
Austronesian language spoken by c.15 million people as a first language in central
and south-western parts of the island of Luzon, which includes the capital, Manila,
and parts of Mindanao. It is written in the Roman alphabet. It is now taught in
schools, and has become a lingua franca throughout the Philippines (along with
English). In the 1970s a further attempt was made to create a national language,
based less on Tagalog, and this came to be called Filipino. However, this has not
replaced Pilipino. »»Austronesian; Philippines, The.

pinyin >Chinese.

Pitcairn Island >Norfolk Island.

pitch The attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a sound may be ordered
on a scale from ‘low’ to ‘high’. Pitch corresponds to some degree with the acoustic
feature of fundamental frequency, which in the study of speech is based upon the
number of complete cycles of vibration of the vocal folds. The linguistic use of pitch
in words is called tome, and in sentences intonation. Pitch forms part of the study
of a language’s prosodic features. »>contour; intonation; prosody; tone; vocal folds.

pivot >open 3.

place of articulation The location of the chief articulatory constriction during

the production of a consonant sound. The main places of articulation involve the

264
 pneumotachograph

action of the lips (labial, bilabial); the tip or blade of the tongue and the upper teeth
or teeth ridge (dental, alveolar); the blade or front of the tongue and the hard palate
(palato-alveolar, palatal); the back of the tongue and the soft palate or uvula (velar,
uvular); and the root of the tongue and the back wall of the pharynx (pharyngeal).
>> articulation; consonant; phonetics.

Plain English Campaign A campaign which began in the late 1970s to promote
the use of clear spoken and written English in all specialized contexts. The cam-
paigners attack the use of unnecessarily complex or obscure language (‘gobblede-
gook’) by governments, businesses, and other authorities whose role puts them in
linguistic contact with the general public. Annual awards are given to those indi-
viduals cr organizations which, in the views of the campaigning body, have produced
the clearest documents, and booby prizes (the Golden Bull Awards in the UK, the
Doublespeak Awards in the USA) to those guilty of excessively complex, misleading,
confusing, or evasive language. »>English.

play language A linguistic code, usually devised for jocular purposes, which
manipulates some of the rules of normal speech or writing in an unconventional
way; also called a language game. The notion includes the many forms of children’s
game (Pig Latin, talking backwards, etc.), secret codes, and speech disguises, and
may involve serious as well as playful purposes (as with thieves’ rhyming slang).
»>ludic language; Pig Latin; rhyming slang; verbal play.
pleonasm /'pli:anazm/ An unnecessary use of words, often taken to be an indication
of careless speech or writing. Examples include in this present day and age and in the
future which is to come. Not all instances are as clear-cut as these, however, and often
expressions are condemned as pleonastic which in fact actually contain important
nuances of meaning oradd stylistic emphasis. In the preceding sentence, for example,
some readers might consider it pleonastic to use both in fact and actually, which
overlap in meaning; this view the author would vigorously oppose. >>solecism;
tautology.

plosive /‘plousty, 'plevziv/ A consonant sound made when a complete closure in

the vocal tract is suddenly released (e.g. [p], [d]). The outward movement of air upon
release is called plosion. »consonant; occlusion.

pluperfect »>perfect.
plural >number.
plurilingualism >multilingualism.
plurisegmental >phonology.
PM An abbreviation of phrase-marker.
pneumotachograph /nju:mav'takagraf/ An instrument which measures air flow
from nose and mouth independently and simultaneously. A face mask is placed

265
poetics

over the nose and mouth, and separate meters monitor the air flow. »>aerometty;
experimental phonetics.

poetics The study of those aspects of linguistic structure which make a verbal
message a work of art, and which thus identify the aesthetic function of language
in literary texts. The analysts involved are sometimes called poeticiams. »>phones-
thetics; stylistics.

point size The size of a printed letter. The notion derives from the method of sizing
pieces of type in printing, where the ‘point’ was equal to 1/72 of an inch (c.0.35 mm).
The system is now also used as a reference measure in desk-top-publishing software.
»> typography.

12131416 18 20 22 24 30 36

424860 72 A selection of point sizes.

Poland (population in 1995 estimated at 39,000,000) The official language is

Polish, spoken by c.98% of the population. Other languages include Belorussian
(c.230,000), German (c.1.5 million), Ukrainian (c.1.5 million), and an uncertain
number of Romani speakers. English and Russian are used for international purposes.
>> Polish.

polarity The system of positive/negative contrastivity found in a language. It may

be expressed syntactically (e.g. It was there vs. It was not there), morphologically (e.g.
wise vs. unwise), or lexically (e.g. fat vs. thin). »negation.

Police Motu >Motu.

Police Speak »>Seaspeak.

Polish A member of the West Slavic group of languages, spoken by c.44 million
people, chiefly in Poland, and also in nearby parts of the republics of the former
USSR. It is an important immigrant language in the UK, USA, Australia, and several
other countries. Traces of the language can be found in the 12th century, but the
modern literary language dates from the 16th century, based on the dialect of the
Poznan area. Polish is closely related to Sorbian, Czech, and Slovak. It is written in
the Roman alphabet, with the addition of diacritics, notably for the nasalized vowels

266
 Portuguese

a and ¢ - the latter heard (but not usually printed) in English transcripts of the
surname of former President Lech Walesa. »»Poland; Slavic.

politeness phenomena Features of language which serve to mediate norms of

social behaviour, in terms of such notions as courtesy, rapport, deference, and
distance. Such features include the use of special sentence markers (e.g. please),
appropriate tones of voice, and acceptable forms of address (e.g. choice of intimate
vs. distant pronouns, or of first vs. last names). »>address, forms of; honorific; T/V
forms.
polyalphabetic >cipher.
polygenesis /ppli:'dgenisis/ »>monogenesis.

polylectal grammar »>lect.

polylogue >monologue.

Polynesian /pola'ni:zn/ >Austronesian.

polysemy /'poli:si:mi:, pa'lisami:/ The association of one lexical item with a range
of different meanings, such as the various senses of plain (‘clear, ordinary’, etc.); also
called polysemia. A large proportion of a language’s vocabulary is polysemic or
polysemous. »>homonymy; lexicon.
polysyllable >monosyllable.
polysynthetic language »>typology of language.
polysystemicism »>Firthian linguistics.

pooh-pooh theory The name of one of the speculative theories of the origins of
language: it argues that speech arose through people making instinctive sounds,
caused by pain, anger, or other emotions. The main evidence is the use of interjec-
tions, but no language contains many of these. »>origins of language.

popular etymology >etymology.

Portugal (population in 1995 estimated at 9,793,000) The official language is
Portuguese, spoken by the whole population. There is also an uncertain number of
Romanispeakers. English and French are used along with Portuguese for international
trade and tourism. »>Portuguese.
Portuguese A member of the Romance family of languages, spoken by c.175 million
people as a first language, chiefly in Brazil (c.163 million) and Portugal (c.10 million),
with others in the former colonies in Africa. It is also an official language in Angola,
Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, S40 Tomé and Principe, and Cape Verde, and also has
special status in Macao (along with Chinese). It is an important immigrant language
in many countries, and there are several Portuguese-based creoles in former colonial
areas. At least 12 million people use it as a second language. Galician, spoken by c.3

267
position

million people in parts of north-west Spain (where it is an official regional language)

is closely related to Portuguese, and is being given increasing recognition in its own
tight. There is a dialect continuum with Spanish in the border areas, with several
varieties of the two languages being mutually intelligible. The standard language is
based on the dialect of Lisbon. It is written in the Roman alphabet. Written materials
date from the 12th century, with a literature emerging a century later in the form
of troubadour songs. The national epic, Os Lusiadas (‘The Lusciads’) by Luis de
Cam6es, was published in 1572. »>creole; Romance.

position 1. A functionally contrastive place within a linguistic unit; for example,

initial, medial, or final position of a sound within a word, or of a word within a
sentence. Some sounds are restricted to certain positions, such as English /h/, which
cannot occur at the end of a word. Also, the meaning or syntactic function of a word
may be affected by its position: compare Naturally, he walked and He walked naturally.
»> order; phonotactics. 2. In phonetics, the location of the vocal organs during the
articulation of a sound. In order to articulate the sound [u], for example, the position
of the back of the tongue needs to be high, and the position of the lips needs to be
rounded. »>articulation.

positive >affirmative; degree; polarity.

positive transfer >transfer.

possessive A linguistic form which indicates possession. English examples include

both words (possessive adjectives such as my and your, and possessive pronouns
such as mine and theirs) and inflections (the possessive case, or genitive, as in
John’s). »>genitive case.

postalveolar >alveolar.

post-creole continuum »>creole.

postdeterminer A type of word which occurs after the determiner and before an
adjective in a noun phrase. Several quantifying words hold this position, such as
first, other, and the numerals (e.g. the three big chairs, the other leading participants).
>determiner.

post-editing >machine translation.

postlingual deafness >deafness.

postmodification The part of a construction that follows the head of an endo-

centric phrase. In The car by the house is John’s, by the house postmodifies car. Several
types of unit may be strung together as part of the postmodification, such as John’s
is the car in the street with a bald tyre and a broken headlight. »endocentric construction;
modification 1.

postmodifying genitive >genitive.

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 Prague School

postposition A word that follows a noun phrase (often a single noun or pronoun)
to form a structural constituent, often of adverbial function. The notion is analogous
to the use of a preposition in front of a noun phrase. Several languages use postpos-
itions (e.g. Panjabi, Japanese). In Japanese, for example, the phrase ‘from X to Y’
would appear as X kara Y made. »>preposition.

post-structuralism »>logocentrism; structural.

postvocalic /paustveu'kalik/ Descriptive of a sound which follows a vowel; for

example, /t/ is postvocalic in the word cat. ‘Postvocalic r’ refers to the use of an r
quality after vowels in certain accents (e.g. in Scotland and most parts of the USA).
There is a contrast with prevocalic, referring to a sound which precedes a vowel
~ /k/ in the word cat, for example. Some consonants are restricted to one position
or the other: in English syllables, /h/ occurs only prevocalically, as in hot, and /n/
only postvocalically, as in sing. »phonotactics; vowel.

potential pause >pause.

pragmalinguistics The study of language use from the viewpoint of the language’s
structural resources. It contrasts with an approach to pragmatic studies (sometimes
called sociopragmatics) which examines the conditions on language use deriving
from the social situation. The former approach might begin with the pronoun system
of a language, and examine the way in which people choose different forms to
express a range of attitudes and relationships (such as deference and intimacy). The
latter approach might begin with the social backgrounds of the participants in an
interaction, and examine the way in which different factors (such as age, sex, class)
lead people to choose particular pronouns. »pragmatics.

pragmatic competence >competence.

pragmatics The study of language from the point of view of the users — especially
of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social
interaction, and the effects their use of language has on the other participants in an
act of communication. The study of the principles governing the communicative
use of language, especially as encountered in conversations, is sometimes called
general pragmatics. The study of verbal interaction in such domains as coun-
selling, medical interviews, language teaching, and judicial sessions, where problems
of communication are of critical importance, is the domain of applied pragmatics.
»>conversation analysis; literary pragmatics; pragmalinguistics; presupposition;
speech act; cartoon, p. 270.

Prague School The name given to the Linguistic Circle of Prague, and the scholars
it influenced. The Circle was founded in 1926 by Vilém Mathesius (1882-1946). Its
main emphasis was on the analysis of language as a system of functionally related
units (showing the influence of Ferdinand de Saussure), and led to important develop-

269
Prakrit

(pragmatics)

ments in phonology. Prague School ideas are still practised, especially among Czech
linguists. »>functional; Saussurian.

Prakrit /‘pra:krit/ The name given to a group of Indo-Aryan vernacular varieties

which developed into literary styles in India in the Middle Ages - the name means
‘ordinary, natural’. Used by Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist writers, the Prakrits provided
the basis for the modern Indian languages. »>Indo-Aryan; Pali.

predeterminer An item that occurs before the determiner in a noun phrase. In

English, all in all the people is a predeterminer. Other such items include both and
half. »>determiner.

predicate A major constituent-of sentence structure, in which all obligatory con-

stituents other than the subject are considered together. Primary predication is
the relationship between a predicate and its subject, as illustrated by the cat and
chased the ball. Secondary predication is the relationship between an adjunct
complement of a noun phrase in a clause which already contains a primary predi-
cation (e.g. the relationship between Mary and happy in Mary returned home happy).
At a more detailed level, distinctions are often drawn between predicative and

270
 preposition (P, pr., prep.)

nonpredicative functions of words, such as the use of adjectives in predicative

(post-verbal) and attributive (pre-noun) positions in English: the child is happy vs.
the happy child. »»adjective; constituent; sentence; subject.

predicative >adjective; predicate.

pre-editing >machine translation.

prefabricated language >formula.

preface »>foreword.

prefix >affix.

prelims /‘pri:limz/ >end matter.

prelingual deafness >deafness.

prelinguistic 1. Descriptive of the hypothetical stages in speech production which

precede those involved with the structural organization of language. The term
presupposes the existence of various kinds of cognitive function (e.g. processes of
attention and memory) which need to be identified as part of a complete explanation
of linguistic behaviour. »psycholinguistics; speech production. 2. In language acqui-
sition, descriptive of the period immediately preceding the emergence of linguistic
patterning in children’s vocalization, usually towards the end of the first year. In a
broader usage, this prelinguistic stage can be thought of as stretching back to birth
(or even beyond, if studies of fetal response to sound are taken into account).
»> acquisition; babbling.

premodification The part of a construction which precedes the head of an endo-

centric phrase. For example, both the new red premodifies the head cars in the phrase
both the new red cars. »»endocentric construction; modification 1.

prep. An abbreviation of preposition.

preposing Moving a constituent to a position earlier in the sentence (e.g. saying

Today I went to town instead of the unemphatic I went to town today). The term is
chiefly used in generative grammar. >>constituent; generative grammar.

preposition (P, pr., prep.) An item that typically precedes a noun phrase to form
a single constituent of structure - a prepositional phrase or prepositional
group - often used as an adverbial. Examples include in the garden and on my bike.
Prepositions may also combine with certain other kinds of construction, such as
clauses: by leaving the door open. ..Constructions of the type in accordance with
are sometimes called complex prepositions, because they can be analysed as a
sequence of two prepositions surrounding a noun, the whole construction then
being used with a following noun phrase: in accordance with your instructions. »»>ad-
verbial; noun phrase; postposition; stranded.

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prescriptivism

prescriptivism The view that one variety of language has an inherently higher
value than others, and that this ought to be imposed on the whole of the speech
community. It is an authoritarian view, propounded especially in relation to usage
in grammar and vocabulary, and often with reference to pronunciation. The favoured
variety is usually a version of the standard written language, especially as encountered
in literature, or in the formal spoken language which most closely reflects literary
style. Those who speak or write in this variety are said to be using language ‘correctly’;
those who do not are said to be using it ‘incorrectly’. An example of a prescriptive
rule in English is the recommendation to use whom, and not who, in such sentences
as — did you speak to?. Some authors distinguish rules of this kind, which recommend
usages that are acceptable, from proscriptive rules, which identify usages that
should be avoided (such as ‘Never end a sentence with a preposition’). Linguists
avoid both prescriptive and proscriptive attitudes, concentrating instead on the
task of description and explanation. »»appropriateness; correctness; description;
grammar 1; Latinate; normative; purism; solecism.

present participle >participle.

present tense A tense form which typically refers to a time of action contempor-
aneous with the time of utterance; widely used in descriptions of ongoing events
(as in sports commentary) and accounts of mental states (I know, I remember). In
practice, the form is often used as part of a reference to other durations and aspects
of time: in particular, it may be used with adverbials of frequency, to convey a
‘habitual’ sense (J go often); with time-specific adverbials, to convey future or past
time (I’m going tomorrow, Three weeks ago I’m walking down this street...); and
in newspaper headlines, to convey a ‘recent past’ interpretation (Minister dies).
»> adverbial; tense.

pressure stop >stop.

Prestel >viewdata.

presupposition What a speaker assumes in saying a particular sentence, as opposed

to what is actually asserted. The invitation Have you time for a drink?, said by one
man to another while leaving work, presupposes, for example, that the speaker
knows somewhere which will provide a drink, and that he has the wherewithal to
pay for it. »pragmatics; speech act.

preterite /‘pretarit/ The simple past tense form of a verb, seen in I saw or I jumped.
The term is chiefly used in traditional grammar. >>tense; traditional grammar.

prevarication A suggested defining property of human language, referring to the

way languages can be used to misinform. Lying, irony, the half-truth, and conscious
ambiguity are some of the ways in which we can prevaricate. »language 1; zo6-
semiotics.

prevocalic /pri:vou'kalik/ >postvocalic.

272
 profile

primary stress >stress.

primary vowel >cardinal vowels.

primitive In the context of language, a term popularly used to describe languages

thought to have a very simple grammar and a vocabulary of only a few dozen or
hundred words, and where the speakers have to compensate for the deficiencies by
relying on gestures. No such languages have ever been discovered, and it is a tenet
of linguistics that no such languages exist. Although a community may be ‘primitive’
in anthropological terms, it uses a fully developed language, with a complexity quite
comparable to those of the so-called ‘civilized’ nations. »>pidgin.
principal parts The forms of a verb required to determine which conjugation it
belongs to. The notion was important in Latin grammars, where the principal parts
of amo, for example, included the first person form of the present indicative (amo),
the infinitive (amare), the first person form of the perfect indicative (amavi), and the
supine (amatum), which was a type of verbal noun. Verbs like amo (‘first conjugation
verbs’) could thus be quickly distinguished from verbs belonging to other conju-
gations. »conjugation; verb.

principles and parameters >government and binding theory.

proclitic /prau'klitik/ >enclitic.

production The active use of language, whether spoken, written, or signed. The
notion usually contrasts with comprehension and with perception. »>speech
production.

productivity The capacity of language users to produce and understand an indefi-

nitely large number of sentences; also referred to as creativity, and sometimes
suggested as a defining property of human language. In a narrower sense, a pattern
is productive if it is repeatedly used to produce further instances of the same
type, such as the use of -s to form plural nouns in English. This contrasts with
nonproductive or unproductive patterns, which lack any such potential, such
as the plural formation involved in mouse/mice. The term also contrasts with semi-
productive forms, where there is limited or occasional productivity, such as the
use of un- to form lexical opposites — unhappy, unqualified, uninformed, but not *unsad.
»>language 1; stereotype 1; zodsemiotics.

profanity >taboo language.

proficiency test >achievement test.
profile In some areas of language study, a chart which describes an aspect of a
person’s spoken or written language in such a way that distinctive patterns of
achievement readily emerge. Profiles permit a more detailed impression of the range
of structures used than can be obtained from a test, and enable the analyst to plot
emerging strengths and weaknesses in several areas simultaneously. The concept

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pro-form

has been used in several domains, such as language pathology, foreign language
teaching, and stylistics. Specific profiles have now been devised relating to the main
linguistic levels (grammar, semantics, etc.), and are used in research, teaching, and
therapy. »Language Assessment, Remediation and Screening Procedure.
pro-form /‘prouf>:m/ An item in a sentence which substitutes for another item or
construction, such as it (I saw it in the garden) and so (He did so too). The central class
of examples (which gave rise to the general term) is the pronoun, which substitutes
for anoun phrase. Analogous terms include pro-constituent, pro-NP, and simply
pro. »>pronoun; substitution.
prog. An abbreviation of progressive.

prognostic test >language aptitude.

progressive (prog.) A grammatical category, typically applied to verbs, showing

a contrast of a temporal or durative kind, sometimes handled under temse and
sometimes under aspect. A progressive or continuous form, which emphasizes
the duration or frequency of an action (e.g. I was kicking) contrasts with the nonpro-
gressive or simple form (e.g. I kicked), where these emphases are lacking. »>aspect;
tense 1; verb.

prolongation The abnormal lengthening of a sound in stuttering. The effect may

be unanticipated, as when an initial [m] is held for several seconds while the stutterer
tries to release the word man; or it may be controlled, as part of a therapeutic
technique (known as ‘slowed speech’) in which the stutterer is taught to articulate
sounds in a deliberately slow manner. »>slowed speech; stuttering.

prominence In auditory phonetics, the degree to which a sound or syllable stands

out from others in its environment. In the word interpretation, the most prominent
syllable is ta; in the sentence It was Mary who paid, the most prominent word would
usually be Mary. »»accent 2; auditory phonetics.
pronoun An item that can substitute for a noun phrase (or single noun); sometimes
referred to as a pronominal. Several types of pronouns are distinguished in gram-
mars. They include: personal pronouns (c.g. J, you), possessive pronouns (e.g.
my, mine), demonstrative pronouns (e.g. this, that), interrogative pronouns
(e.g. who, which, as in Who did you see?), reciprocal pronouns (e.g. each other),
reflexive pronouns (e.g. myself, yourself), indefinite pronouns (e.g. anyone,
nobody), and relative pronouns (e.g. who, whom, as in the girl who left). Some
linguists also recognize a resumptive or shadow pronoun, such as the use of
him in John, I know him. »person; T/V forms.

pronunciation The way in which speakers articulate speech sounds. This word is
the most general way of describing what we hear when people speak, but it is rather
too vague for it to have achieved a technical status in linguistics. In particular, it
fails to distinguish between the phonetic and the phonological aspects of speech

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 prothesis

production, or between segmental and nonsegmental features. »orthoepy; pho-

netics; phonology; segment.

proof A trial printing of a text, made for checking and correction. Two stages of
proofing are commonly used in book preparation (but there may be more). A galley
proof presents the text on long strips of paper, with no division into pages (a galley
is a flat tray used for holding metal type, in the days when text was typeset by hand).
After the galleys are corrected, page proofs present the text divided into the pages
as they will appear in the book. With textual material which is unlikely to need
much realignment, the galley stage is often omitted, as an economy. »>stet; typogra-
phy; p. 276.

prop A meaningless element introduced into a structure to ensure its grammaticality

(e.g. the it in It’s a nice day). Substitute words (e.g. one in I’ve found one) are also
sometimes described in this way. »grammatical; syntax.

proper noun/name »>common noun.

proposition The unit of meaning which constitutes the subject matter of a state-
ment, and which is asserted to be true or false. It takes the form of a simple declarative
sentence, such as The car is outside. »»declarative.

propositional language »>referential language.

proscriptive >prescriptivism.

prose Written language which typically lacks the grammatical compression, figurat-
ive focus, and linear discipline of poetry (specifically, its metrical and verse form).
This negative definition is rather more useful than the one which looks towards
etymology, where Latin prosa can be glossed as ‘straightforward discourse’. While
much prose is indeed straightforward, in that it lacks the artistic shaping and
adornment characteristic of poetry, a great deal of imaginative prose is highly poetic,
and hybrid notions (such as ‘poetic prose’ and ‘prose poem’) have been recognized
in literary criticism. For example, a great deal of the first narrator’s part in Dylan
Thomas’s Under Milk Wood could be called poetic prose: in bonnet and brooch and
bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nanny-goats, sucking
mintoes, forty-winking hallelujah . . . »figurative language; metrics.

prose poem >found poem.

prosody Variation in pitch, loudness, tempo, and rhythm, as encountered in any

use of spoken language; also called prosodic features, and studied as part of
nonsegmental phonology. The notion subsumes the traditional sense of the term,
referring to the metrical features of versification. »>juncture; lento; loudness; metrics;
phonology; pitch; rhythm; tempo.

prothesis /pra'Gi:sis/ >epenthesis.

275
 In text :i
To substitute mae

OR they dead letters 4

To transpose rey Mist

OR tolboldlyfgo] | f |
=
To delete pure
“ of)
OR he also cared ted d)

To insert pe

OR theyfeone gs
~~.

= ~~
To close up over reach —

To insert space selfknowledge Y

To change to self knowledge

italic ad uw

To change italic nowledge

to upright type yy

To change to bold the vectorny vw

To change capital cheGiace +

to lower case

To change lower the state a

case to capital . =

To start a new ends here finthe next J

paragraph
OR thy discussion ends here
[Ie the next lecture Johns {

To run on ends here >)

In the next lecture .

the discussion ends here

OR
fefln the next lecture sal

To insert space the discussion ends here

between lines fu the next lecture Johns

To close up the cavalry

space between the paratroops
lines
the gunners

To substitute or insert note According, toJohngthis 4

indicator or superior

To substitute or insert the formula nfo is he

inferior

To stet (if you make a the baiete Were portant bisheps (2)
mistake and want to restore
the original)

To make punctuation changes

Text mark to substitute OR A to insert

;
Margin ©
full
stop
©
colon
:
seml-
colon
ey
comma
PRECISE
quotation
marks
paren-
theses
—_—ihyphen dash
FO
oblique

Put / after each correction that does not already end in a caret (omission
sign). This is especially important when two or more correction marks
are required on one line.

Example d/O/= /

The chief proof-correcting conventions.

 prototype

proto- 1. Descriptive of a linguistic form or state of a language said to be the ancestor

of an attested form or language. The term is widely used as part of the language names
of prehistory (proto-languages), such as Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Germanic.
»> family of languages; reconstruction. 2. In child language acquisition, descriptive
of the emerging linguistic system of the young child. Word-like forms might be
described as proto-words, and sentence-like forms as proto-sentences. »>acquisi-
tion; phonetically consistent forms (PCFs ).

Proto-Indo-European >Indo-European.

proto-language The common ancestor of the languages of a family, such as

Proto-Indo-European. A proto-language implies a proto-culture participated in by

2os
the speakers of the proto-language. »Indo-European; Nostratic.

prototype A typical member of the extension ofa referring expression; for example,
a sparrow could be a prototype of a bird, whereas an ostrich (because of its atypical

This array of objects for sitting on raises the question of how the prototype
chair is best defined.

277
protowords

features) would not. Prototype semantics holds that word meaning is best ana-
lysed in terms of such prototypes, with category membership not absolute: birds
display different degrees of ‘birdness’, which can be analysed along a gradient ranging
from most to least prototypical. Several areas of meaning seem to benefit from being
analysed in this way; further examples include chair, cup, and shrub. >»>extension 1;
semantics; stereotype 2.

protowords >phonetically consistent forms (PCFs).

Provengal /provan'sal/ >Occitan.

proverb A short, pithy, rhythmical saying which expresses a general belief or truth;
also referred to as an ‘adage’, ‘maxim’, or ‘saying’. Many can be divided into two
parts which balance each other, often displaying parallel syntax and rhythm, and
links of rhyme and alliteration. Examples include Least said, soonest mended and
Welsh Cenedl heb iaith, cenedl heb galon (‘A nation without a language is a nation
without a heart’). »aphorism.

proxemics /prok'si:miks/ The study of variations in posture, interpersonal distance,

and tactile contact in human communication. Touching behaviour, for example,
has a wide range of functions in a community, expressing such ‘meanings’ as
affection, aggression, sexual attraction, greeting and leave taking, congratulation,
and the signalling of attention. Some societies are much more tolerant of touching
than others: among the ‘contact’ societies are the Arabs and Latin Americans; among
the ‘non-contact’ societies are the North Europeans and Indians. The subject forms
part of the study of semiotics. »communication; semiotics.

PS(G) An abbreviation of phrase structure (grammar).

pseudepigraphy /sju:da'pigrafi:/ The false ascription of an author’s name to a

written work. The notion has been particularly employed in relation to the writings
of biblical times, where several of the works traditionally ascribed to Moses or St Paul,
for example, are now thought to be by other authors.

pseudonym /'sju:danim/ A fictitious name, especially one used by an author (a

pen name). The intention is to conceal the writer’s true identity, for any of a wide
range of personal reasons. Famous examples include the Bronté sisters, who called
themselves Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and Charles Dodgson, who called himself
Lewis Carroll. »proper name.

psittacism /'sitasizm/ Meaningless repetitive (‘parrot-like’) speech. The term has

never had much currency.

psycholinguistics A branch of linguistics which studies the correlation between

linguistic behaviour and the mental processes and skills thought to underlie that
behaviour; earlier called the psychology of language. The study of the acquisition
of language by children is often distinguished as developmental psycholinguist-

278
 pure vowel

ics. When the emphasis is on the use of language as a means of elucidating psycho-
logical theories and processes, the term psychological linguistics is sometimes
used. »>acquisition; cocktail party effect; speech perception/production.

Puerto Rico (population in 1995 estimated at 3,683,000) The official languages

are Spanish (spoken by c.75% of the population) and English. There are a few speakers
of French, German, Italian, and local creoles. »»English; Spanish.

pulmonic /pul'monik/ Descriptive of any activity associated with the lungs, especi-
ally in the context of speech sound production. Speech typically uses a pulmonic
airstream, a flow of air from the lungs under relatively constant pressure. The normal
direction of the air flow is outwards, though inwards-flowing pulmonic air is also
sometimes used. >>airstream; egressive.

pun A witticism which relies for its effect on playing with the different meanings
of a word, or bringing together two words with the same or similar form but different
meanings. Notwithstanding the contempt poured on the poor pun (‘the lowest and
most grovelling form of wit’, according to the English poet, John Dryden), they have
a respectable and long-standing literary history (illustrated by the many puns to be
found in Shakespeare). Most puns are auditory, a feature of informal conversation
or special speech settings, such as drama or advertising (e.g. the adhesive slogan,
Our word is your bond). Some are visual, illustrated by a Spanish author’s description
of some girls he knew as senoreaters. Punning is technically called paronomasia.
»>verbal play.

punctual >durative.

punctuation A set of graphic signs used in written language to signal certain

important grammatical and attitudinal contrasts. Its three main functions are: to
separate units in a linear sequence (e.g. a space separates words, a period separates
sentences); to indicate when one unit is included within another (e.g. a parenthesis,
quotation marks, or a pair of commas); and to mark a specific grammatical or
attitudinal function, such as a question (question-mark), exclamation (exclamation
mark), or the notion of possession (the apostrophe). A further aspect of punctuation
is to express something of the prosody of spoken language, though the correlation
here is a complex one, and prone to idiosyncrasy, especially in the use of capitaliz-
ation, the comma, and the dash. Non-English punctuation marks include the use
of the inverted question-mark and exclamation-mark in Spanish direct speech.
»> apostrophe; brackets; colon; comma; dash; hyphen; paragraph; period; quotation
marks; semi-colon; solidus; typography; writing; cartoon, p. 280.

Punic /'pju:nik/ >Phoenician.

Punjabi >Panjabi.

pure vowel >monophthong.

279
purism

MR
MAS TREML
AN err ce|
\NORDINATELY ©
LDRGEONE?

‘No — stupid boy! Exclamation mark! Doesn’t that pratt Bairnswater teach you
anything?’ (punctuation)

purism A school of thought which sees a language as needing preservation from

the external processes that might infiltrate it and thus make it change. Purist attitudes
are a normal accompaniment to the perception, which each generation represents,
that standards of language (as social standards generally) are deteriorating. Purists
are conservative in matters of usage, emphasize the importance of prescriptive rules
in grammarand pronunciation, and insist on the authority of dictionaries, grammars,
and other manuals. »»academy; language change; linking; prescriptivism.

putonghua /pu:ton'wa/ >Chinese.

280
Q
Q An abbreviation of question or quantifier.

Qatar (population in 1995 estimated at 597,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken by c.56% of the population. The remainder speak Farsi (c.23%), Urdu, or
other languages from the South Asian subcontinent or the Philippines. English is
used for international purposes. »»Arabic.

qualification A type of structural dependence of one grammatical unit upon

another. A qualifier is a word or phrase which limits the meaning of another
element. The notion is traditionally used for the dependent items (such as adjectives)
in a noun phrase: these are said to qualify the noun. In systemic grammar, the
term is used more narrowly for structures following the head of the noun phrase;
this contrasts with modification, for structures preceding the head. »»dependent;
modification 1; systemic grammar.

quality 1. In auditory phonetics, the characteristic resonance or timbre of a sound,

resulting from the range of frequencies which make up the sound’s identity. Single
types of sound can be considered in this way (e.g. vowel quality) as can more general
notions (e.g. voice quality). A specific contrast is often drawn between quality and
quantity, or length. »length; timbre; voice quality. 2. »>maxims of conversation.

quantifier An item which expresses a notion of quantity (e.g. all, some, both). In
logic, a distinction is drawn between universal quantification (‘For all X, it is
the case that...’) and existential quantification (‘For some X, it is the case
that ...’), and this is often used in semantic theory. »>partitive; semantics.

quantitative linguistics A branch of linguistics which studies the frequency and

distribution of linguistic units using statistical techniques. It aims to establish general
principles concerning the statistical regularities governing the structure of language,
as wellas to elucidate linguistic problems (such as authorship identity). »>linguistics;
statistical linguistics.

quantity >length; maxims of conversation.

Quechua /‘ketfwa/ A member of the Quechumaran family of Andean-Equatorial

languages, spoken by c.8 million people, chiefly in Peru (c.3.5 million), Ecuador
(c.1.5 million), and Bolivia (c.2.9 million), and as a lingua franca widely throughout
the central Andean region. Quechua was the language of the Inca civilization in the
15th-16th centuries. It is written in the Roman alphabet. Several related languages

281
Quechumaran

are placed together in a Quechuan group; all are now losing numbers because of the
dominance of Spanish. »Amerindian; Andean-Equatorial.

Quechumaran /ket{o'ma:ran/ >Andean-Equatorial.

question (Q) A major type of sentence, typically used to elicit information or a
response, and defined variously on grammatical, phonological, semantic, or socio-
linguistic grounds; contrasts with statement, command, and exclamation.
Questions may be marked by a question word, such as wh-questions in English
(what, where, etc.); these are also called special questions. Other types include
yes-no or general questions (e.g. Did she phone?), disjunctive questions (e.g.
Did she phone or did she write?), and tag questions (e.g. She phoned, didn’t she?). A
rhetorical question is a question to which no answer is expected (Whoever heard
of such a thing?). »>direct speech; echo; interrogative; statement; tag 1.

Quirkian Adjective derived from (Charles) Randolph Quirk, Lord Quirk (1920- ),
British grammarian and writer on the English language, a major influence on the
development of English language studies in the UK since the 1960s. He was professor
of English at University College London (1960-81), where he founded and directed
the Survey of English Usage. Major grammars in which he has been involved include
several co-authored works, notably A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language
(1985) — and it is this series of works which has given rise to the use of the adjective
‘Quirkian’. »Nuclear English; Survey of English Usage.

quotation marks A punctuation mark which typically signals a piece of direct

speech; also called inverted commas or, informally, quotes. Opening and closing
quotation marks are usually distinguished in print, but not in typescript, and often
not in handwriting or on the computer screen. Single quotation marks (‘ ’) are
generally used in American publishing, and are normal in typescript and handwritten
material. Double quotation marks (‘‘’’) are traditional in British publishing, but
there is now a notable tendency towards simplification, and single marks are increas-
ingly the norm. There are also variations between the two dialects about whether
other punctuation marks should occur inside or outside the quotation marks. I told
him it was called ‘The Fly’. is typically British usage; I told him it was called ‘The Fly.’
is typically American. When a quotation is used within a quotation, both varieties
agree that it is essential to switch from one convention to the other: “Who said
‘charming’ like that”, John asked. »>direct speech; punctuation.

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Rajasthani /rada'sta:ni:/ Several varieties (considered by some to be separate

languages) belonging to the Midland group of Indo-Aryan languages, spoken by c.30
million people, chiefly in the state of Rajasthan in India, but also in adjoining states
and in Pakistan. The chief variety/language is Marwari, spoken by c.12 million. Hindi
is the official language in the state. »»Indo-Aryan.

rank »>level 3.

rapid reading A technique which teaches people to read more quickly, while
retaining understanding; also called speed reading. Readers are trained to use more
effective eye movements, so that they do not make so many backward glances
(regressions) along a line, and to assimilate text in larger chunks, avoiding a ‘word
by word’ approach. Average reading speed for everyday material is between 250 and
500 words per minute (w.p.m.). For careful reading (such as while studying), speed
may be as low as 200 w.p.m. or less. While skimming a text, speeds of over 800
w.p.m. can be achieved, though comprehension there is inevitably much reduced.
»> reading.

rate of speech The speed at which people speak, usually measured in number of
syllables per minute. A distinction can be drawn with rate of articulation, which
is the number of syllables per minute less any time devoted to pausing. »>tempo.

readability The ease with which the written language can be read with understand-
ing. Several approaches have tried to devise measures of readability (readability
formulae), generally computing the average length of the words and sentences in
a passage, and sometimes attempting to deal with lexical novelty (the number
of new words found in successive samples from the passage) and grammatical
complexity. The formulae are often criticized as primitive and misleading, in that
none of them is able to take semantic complexity adequately into account. »>reading.

reading The recognition and comprehension of written text. The process can
take place silently (silent reading) or by reading aloud (oral reading), and the
comprehension of the passage can be evaluated in different ways (e.g. by asking
readers questions about it, or asking them to paraphrase or draw inferences from it).
Two main theories have been developed to explain what takes place in learning to
read. One theory (of ‘phonic mediation’) argues that a phonological step is an
essential feature of the process; on this account, letters are sounded out in a linear
way, with larger units gradually being built up (‘reading by ear’), The alternative

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argues that there is a direct relationship between the graphology and the semantics,
a phonological bridge being unnecessary; on this account, words are read as wholes,
without being broken down into a linear sequence of symbols (‘reading by eye’).
Several integrated accounts have also been proposed. »>dyslexia; language experience
approach; linguistic method; literacy; look-and-say; miscue analysis; phonics; rapid
reading; readability.

realization The physical expression of an abstract linguistic unit. Phonemes, for

example, are realized in phonic substance as phones. »phoneme.

rebus /'ti:bas/ Words and sentences made out of a combination of letters, pictures,
or logograms. An everyday example is IOU ‘I owe you’. More complex items include
XQQ ‘excuse’ and H& ‘hand’. Children’s comics and game books often contain
rebuses with a strong pictorial element. The notion has also been used in devising
systems of simplified communication for people suffering from language disability.
»>word game; illustration below.

Received Pronunciation (RP) The regionally neutral, educationally prestigious

accent in British English. When this accent displays features of regional influence,
it is known as modified RP. »>accent 1; Estuary English; standard.

receptive aphasia >aphasia.

recipient In some grammatical analyses of sentences, the animate being which is

passively implicated by the happening or state expressed by the verb; also called

FIND THE ANIMALS

AN YOU OISCOVER THE ANIMALS
“Boom THE PICTURE CLUES >

A typical rebus game from a children’s annual.

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 reduplication

patient, dative, or affected. This is typically the role of the indirect object (e.g.
you in I gave you the book), but other elements may act as recipient. The term is
sometimes used in a more general sense to include the role of the direct object.
»> object; participant roles.

reciprocal Descriptive of a grammatical feature expressing the meaning of mutual

relationship. The notion is chiefly encountered in reciprocal pronouns (e.g. each
other) and reciprocal verbs (e.g. meet). »pronoun.

reconstruction A method in historical studies of language whereby a hypothetical

system of sounds or forms, representing an earlier, non-extant state of a language,
is established from an analysis of the attested sounds and forms of extant texts. This
is called internal reconstruction, if evidence from only one language is used,
and comparative reconstruction, if evidence from a number of related languages
is used. The comparison of forms taken from cognate languages to determine the
details of their historical relationships is called the comparative method. »>cogn-
ate; philology.

recursive /1'k3:stv/ Descriptive of rules which are capable of repeated application

in generating a sentence; also sometimes called iterative. For example, a rule for
inserting adjectives before a noun applies recursively in English: adjectives can in
theory be added indefinitely to ‘the small, interesting, expensive . . . book’. The term
is further applied to the structures generated in this way, and to the languages
characterized by these rules. »>rule 1.

reduction 1. In phonology, a process in which a unit loses some of its full phonetic
identity. The term is chiefly used with reference to stressed vowels which become
unstressed; for example, the stressed vowels in telegraph are reduced in the word
telegraphy. It is also used for the simplification of consonant sequences found in
early child speech (e.g. /kl-/ becoming /g-/ would be an instance of consonant
cluster reduction). »>phonology; stress. 2. »>ellipsis. 3. » contraction.

redundant Descriptive of a feature whose presence is unnecessary in order to

identify a linguistic unit or make a linguistic contrast. In English, The bell rings
displays redundancy, in that both subject and verb are marked for singular — the
noun lacks a plural ending, and the verb adds a singular ending. >»>contrast.

reduplication Various types of repetition in the structure of a word. In historical

linguistics, the term refers to the way a prefix/suffix reflects certain phonological
characteristics of a root. In Greek, for example, /lu:o:/ is the present tense form, ‘I
loose’; /leluka/, witha repeated /I/, is the perfect tense form, ‘I have loosed’. In English,
compound words such as helter-skelter are called reduplicative compounds. In
language acquisition, the term describes the early pronunciation of polysyllabic
words when children pronounce the different syllables in the same way (e.g. water
as /'wawa/). »>prefix; root 1.

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reference

reference 1. The relationship between a linguistic expression and the entity in the
external world to which it refers; also called the referential meaning of the
expression. For example, the referent of the word table is the object ‘table’. Reference
is an extra-linguistic notion, therefore, in which aspects of the real world play a part,
and contrasts with the intralinguistic notion of semse, a property arising from the
meaning relations between lexical items and sentences. »>connotation; sense. 2. In
grammatical analysis, a relationship of identity which exists between grammatical
units, as when a pronoun refers to a noun phrase. When the reference is to an earlier
part of the discourse, it may be called back-reference; reference to a later part of
the discourse is forward-reference. >»>anaphora; extension 1; referential language.

reference grammar »grammar ibs

referential language Language whose primary function is to communicate ideas,

facts, opinions, and other notions of an intellectual kind; also called propositional
or ideational language. It is the kind of language employed whenever people
wish to learn from each other. The term was devised to draw a contrast with those
functions of language where the communication of information is not the main
consideration, such as the language of play, social interaction, or social identity,
which are relatively neglected areas of linguistic study. »connotation; emotive
language; ideation; ludic language; phatic communion; reference. .

referential meaning »>reference.

reflexive Descriptive of a construction where the subject and the object refer to
the same entity, as in She washed herself. Such forms as herself and themselves are
known as reflexive pronouns. >»>pronoun.

regional dialect >dialect.

register 1. In phonetics, the voice quality produced by a particular physiological

constitution of the larynx (e.g. soprano, tenor, falsetto). The term is also used for
the types of phonation that a speaker can use in a controlled manner, such as creaky
voice. »>creaky voice; phonation; voice quality. 2. In stylistics and sociolinguistics,
a variety of language defined according to its use in social situations. Examples
include the ‘scientific register’ and the ‘formal register’. »>genre; stylistics; variety.
regular >irregular.

relational grammar A model of grammar which takes as central the notion of

grammatical relations (e.g. subject and object), rather than the categorial terms of
standard phrase-markers (e.g. NP, VP). A relational network is a formal represen-
tation of a sentence, showing the grammatical relations that elements of the sentence
bear to each other, and the syntactic level(s) at which these relations hold. >> grammar
1; phrase-marker.

relative Descriptive of various items and constructions which occur as part of the

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 repertoire

postmodification in a noun phrase. Relative pronouns (e.g. who, which, that) are
used to introduce a postmodifying clause, the relative clause. When and where are
sometimes called relative adverbs when linking a relative clause to its noun. Types
of relative clause include adnominal (The case thatIcited is convincing), nominal
(What interests me is his answer), sentential (The house is for sale, which is
absurd), and zero or contact (The book I read is on the table). Restrictive or
defining relative clauses (where the identity of the head is dependent upon the
presence of the clause) are contrasted with nonrestrictive or nondefining (where
the identity of the head is independent of the clause); compare the restrictive
character of The Bible which I own. .. and the nonrestrictive character of The Bible,
which I often read. . . In transformational grammar, the process of forming a relative
clause is called relativization. »clause; postmodification; pronoun; restrict-
iveness; wh-form.

relative universal >universal.

relativity, linguistic >Sapir—Whorf hypothesis.

release The type of movement made by the vocal organs away from a point of
articulation. The notion is particularly used as part of the description of plosive
sounds (e.g. [p]). »>plosive.
relevance >maxims of conversation.

relexification hypothesis The hypothesis that pidgin languages are derived from
the first widely-used pidgin, which was based on Portuguese. The grammar of this
language was retained, but new lexical items were introduced from the other Euro-
pean languages. >»>pidgin.

remedial language teaching Instruction designed to increase the achievement

of a language learner so that it matches expected norms. The notion is chiefly used
in educational and clinical settings, with reference to the needs of language-
disadvantaged or language-delayed children, but it may also be found in relation to
adult language disorders and foreign language teaching. »language pathology/
teaching.
repair In conversation analysis, the attempt made by participants to make good a
real or imagined deficiency in the interaction, such as a mishearing or misunderstand-
ing. A self-imitiated repair is made by a speaker without prompting from the
listener; this is contrasted with an other-initiated repair, which is prompted by
the listener. Repairs may also be classified as self-repairs (made by the speakers
themselves) and other-repairs (made by listeners). »conversation analysis.
repertoire The range of languages or language varieties available for someone’s
use, each of which enables the person to perform a particular social role; sometimes
called a repertory. The term is also used collectively for the range of linguistic
varieties within a speech community. >>variety.

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reported speech

reported speech »>direct speech.

resonance Vibrations of air movement in the vocal tract which are set in motion
by a source of phonation. The main resonance chambers are the mouth, nose,
and pharynx. »phonation; vocal tract.

resonant >obstruent.

REST An abbreviation of Revised Extended Standard Theory.

restricted code >elaborated code.

restricted language A highly reduced linguistic system used for a special com-
municative purpose. Examples include the language of air-traffic control, ship-to-
shore communication at sea, heraldry, radio weather reports, and knitting patterns.
»>variety.

restrictiveness The semantic relationship of a modifying structure to its accom-

panying head word. In restrictive or defining modification, the linguistic
identity of the head is dependent upon the accompanying modification; if the
modification is inessential to the head’s identity, the term monrestrictive or
nondefining is used. For example, in I’ve got a black car, emphasis on black implies
that the blackness is crucial to the identity of the car (thus restrictive) — the contrast
is with cars of other colours; with no emphasis on black, a nonrestrictive interpret-
ation is more likely —- I have just the one car, which happens to be black. »»mod-
ification 1; relative.

result A clause or clause element whose meaning expresses the notion of conse-
quence or outcome; also called resultative, resulting, or resultant. In English,
clauses introduced by so that are typically resultative. »>clause.

resumptive pronoun »>pronoun.

retracted Descriptive of the backward movement of an articulator. It is especially

used of the back of the tongue moving towards the velum, as heard in velarization.
>»velum.

retroflex Descriptive of a consonant sound made by the tongue tip against the
back of the alveolar ridge. Retroflexed forms of t, d, and r are common, and are
heard in several languages of India. Retroflex r is common in American English.
Vowels preceding a retroflexed consonant are said to be r-coloured or rhotacized.
»>alveolar; rhotic.

Réunion (population in 1995 estimated at 654,000) The official language is French.

A French-based creole is spoken by over 90% of the population. »>creole; French.
reverse indention »>indention.

Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST) »>Standard Theory.

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 rhotic

rewrite rule In generative grammar, a type of rule which takes the form X => Y;
also called a rewriting rule. The symbol to the left of the arrow represents a single
structural element; the symbol to the right represents a string of one or more
elements; and the arrow is an instruction to replace X by Y. So, if the string were
VP —V+NP, the rule would replace any verb phrase in the sentence with a sequence
of verb and noun phrase. »>generative grammar; phrase-structure grammar; rule 1.

Rhaetian /'ri:{n/ A member of the Romance family of languages, spoken by c.40,000

people chiefly in Italy, with some in Switzerland; also called Rhaeto-Romance,
and sometimes Ladin or Ladino. A western variety is spoken in Switzerland by
c.65,000 people, chiefly in the Grisons canton (Graubtinden), where it is known as
Romansch or Grishun; this language has national status in Switzerland, and is in
official use in the Grisons. It has a literary tradition dating from the 12th century.
Dolomitic is a central variety spoken in the regions of Trentino-Alto Adige and
Veneto, Italy. Friulian is an eastern variety, spoken north of Venice in an area
extending east as far as Slovenia. The central and eastern varieties display the
influence of Italian, whereas Romansch is closer to French. Written Rhaetian varieties
all use the Roman alphabet. »Romance.
Rhaeto-Romance /'ri:tau-/ »Rhaetian.

rhetoric The study of effective or persuasive speaking and writing, especially as

practised in public oratory. Several hundred rhetorical figures were used by
classical rhetoricians, classifying the way words could be arranged in order to achieve
special stylistic effects. Notions which have continued in use in modern analysis
include metaphor, simile, personification, and paradox. »>figurative language; styl-
istics.

rhetorical question >question.

rhinophonia /raiavfaunie/ Abnormal nasal resonance in speech. The term is
restricted to clinical contexts. »»nasal; voice disorder.

rhopalic /rav'palik/ A type of verbal play in which word length increases by a fixed
amount (e.g. an extra syllable or letter) as the text proceeds. The effect can be
attempted either within poetic lines (rhopalic verse), or in prose. This sentence
illustrates convincingly. The term comes from Greek rhopale ‘club’ — a device which is
thin at one end and gradually gets thicker. »>verbal play.
rhotacism /'rautasizm/ A phonetically abnormal use of /r/. Particularly noticeable
is the ‘weak r’, where the normal articulation is replaced by a semi-vowel of a [w]
quality or a uvular sound. The term is chiefly used in clinical contexts. »»speech
defect.
rhotic /‘rautik/ Descriptive of a dialect or accent where /r/ is pronounced following
a vowel, in such words as car and cart. A geographical area in which this sound is
used (such as much of south-west England) is called a rhotic area. Varieties which

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thyme

do not have this feature are non-rhotic. ( >illustration at isogloss.) >»>retroflex.

rhyme A correspondence of syllables, especially at the ends of lines in verse; for

example, Hilary rhymes with distillery. Internal rhyme is the rhyming of words
within a single line of verse. »>pararhyme.

rhyming slang A form of expression, used by Cockney speakers, which hides the
identity of a word in a rhyming phrase that has little or no meaningful relationship
to it. The expression typically consists of two or three words, the last of which
rhymes with the target. Examples include Cain and Abel for ‘table’ and Hampstead
Heath for ‘teeth’. Often the expression is abbreviated, keeping the first word only,
so that the rhyme is not apparent, as in china from china plate, ‘mate’. Sometimes,
a comic allusion is present, as in Gawd forbids for ‘kids’. The origins of the genre are
obscure. It emerges clearly in the early 19th century, and may have arisen from an
earlier criminal argot. »argot; Cockney; slang.

rhythm The perceived regularity of prominent units in speech. It is stated in terms

of such patterns as stressed vs. unstressed syllables (as in English), or long vs. short
syllables (as in Latin). Languages vary greatly in their basic rhythmic types. >>foot;
isochrony; metrics; prosody.

riddle A traditional utterance intended to mystify or mislead. Objects, animals,

people, and events are deliberately described in such a way that their description
suggests something quite different. The task of the recipient of the riddle is to resolve
the ambiguity.and arrive at an appropriate interpretation. In Europe, riddles are
common in children’s games, generally with humorous intent. They often take the
form of a conundrum - a riddle whose answer involves a pun (When is a door not
a door? When it’s ajar). In many cultures, however, they are used seriously by adults,
often to express a philosophical or spiritual issue or to test a person’s wisdom or
worthiness. »enigma; pun; verbal play.

rights >Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights.

Riksmal /'tiksmo:1/ >Norwegian.

rising tone >falling tone.

Roget, Peter Mark >thesaurus.

roll >trill.

Romaji /‘romaji:/ A script used for writing Japanese in the Roman alphabet, with
the addition of Arabic numerals. It is often seen in Japan in such contexts as street
signs, train station names, and international company names. Two transliteration
systems have been used: one devised by a 19th-century US missionary, James Hep-
burn (Hebon-shiki) and the other introduced by the Japanese government in 1954
(kunreishiki), which has replaced the Hepburn system in all but a few international
contexts (such as in passports). »»Japanese; Roman alphabet; transliteration.

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 Romanian

Roman alphabet An alphabetical system derived from that used in ancient Rome
for Latin, and the source of most Western alphabets; also called the Latin alphabet.
The use of this alphabet to transcribe the signs of non-Latin writing systems is called
romanization. Chinese is a particularly well-known example of the application
of this process. »>alphabet; Chinese; pinyin; Romaji; transliteration.

Romance A group of Indo-European languages descended from the spoken (or

‘vulgar’) form of Latin used throughout the Roman Empire, and forming the main
part of the Italic language family. The chief languages are French, Spanish, Portu-
guese, Italian, and Romanian. Also within the family are Sardinian, Occitan, Rhae-
tian, and Catalan. Dalmatian became extinct at the end of the 19th century. Over
650 million people now speak a Romance language, or one of the creoles based on
French, Spanish, or Portuguese. »»Catalan; French; Indo-European; Italian; Ladino;
Latin; Occitan; Portuguese; Rhaetian; Romanian; Sardinian; Spanish.

Romani, earlier Romany A member of the Indo-Aryan group of languages, spoken

by an uncertain number of Gypsies (perhaps 5—8 million) in a wide range of dialects
worldwide; also called Gypsy. Gypsy populations are largest in Europe, especially
in Slavic countries (notably Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia~-Herzegovina, Macedonia,
Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Czech and Slovak republics), but
there are also many in other parts of Europe, the Middle East, the USA, and South
America. Regional forms display considerable influence (especially in vocabulary)
of the languages with which they are in contact. When written, Romani uses the
alphabet of the locality, generally Roman or Cyrillic, but it is essentially a spoken
language, with a rich oral literature. It is also widely used as an argot, when Gypsy
groups come into contact (and conflict) with local communities. »>argot; Indo-
Aryan; language contact.

Romania (population in 1995 estimated at 23,033,000) The official language is

Romanian, spoken by c.90% of the population. There are c.10 other languages,
including German (c.150,000), Hungarian (c.3 million, strongly present in Transyl-
vania), Bulgarian, Gagauz, and Turkish. There may be as many as half a million
speakers of Romani. French and English are used for international trade and tourism.
>> Romanian.

Romanian or Rumanian A member of the Romance family of languages, spoken

by c.26 million people, chiefly in Romania (over 20 million), with some in nearby
parts of Yugoslavia (in Voivodina, where it has official status), Greece, Albania,
Bulgaria, and Moldova, with many immigrants in Israel, the USA, Canada, and
Australia. It is written in the Roman alphabet, and materials date from the 16th
century. Its geographical separation from the other Romance languages has made
Romanian very different, with many Slavic loan words and idiosyncratic grammatical
features (notably, the suffixation of the definite article to the noun). »»affix; Mol-
davian; Romance; Romania.

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Romansch

Romansch or Romansh /ravu'man{/ »>Rhaetian.

Romany >Romani.

root 1. The base form of a word, which cannot be further analysed without loss
of the word’s identity; alternatively, that part of the word left when all affixes are
removed. Roots may be free morphemes (e.g. go, hat) or bound morphemes (e.g.
-ceive in receive, conceive, etc.). A root-inflected language is one where the inflections
affect the internal phonological structure of the root (e.g. Arabic); this contrasts with
aroot-isolating language, where the root morphemes are invariable (e.g. Chinese).
»>affix; morpheme; stem; typology of language; word. 2. In phonetics, the furthest
back part of the tongue, opposite the pharyngeal wall. »tongue. 3. In generative
grammar, the topmost node in a tree diagram. »tree. 4. In historical linguistics,
the earliest form of a word. »»etymology.
root language >typology of language.

Rosetta Stone /ra'zeta/ The name given to a black basalt stone discovered at Rashid
(Rosetta) in Egypt by members of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition in 1799; it is now
in the British Museum. The stone, measuring 114 x 72 cm, was carved with three
scripts: hieroglyphic, a demotic script, and Greek. Because the Greek version could
be translated, the Stone provided the key to the other scripts, which had previously
been undeciphered. The full text was published in 1822 by the French Egyptologist
Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832). It proved to be part of a commemoration
of the accession of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (2nd century Bc). »>demotic; hieroglyphic.

round brackets >brackets.

rounding The use of lip protrusion for the articulation of vowels and sometimes
of consonants. Rounded vowels include [u] and [o]; they are opposed to
unrounded or spread vowels, such as [i] and [e]. »>labial; vowel.

routine >formula.

RP An abbreviation of Received Pronunciation.

Ruanda »>Rwanda.

rule 1. A formal statement of relationship between linguistic elements or structures.

In contrast with the traditional use of the term (where it refers to a recommendation
for correct usage), no prescriptive or proscriptive implication is present. A generat-
ive rule is predictive, expressing a hypothesis about the relationships between
sentences which hold for a language as a whole, and reflect the speaker’s competence.
Rules may be classified in terms of the components of the grammar in which they
appear, such as ‘phonological rules’ or ‘syntactic rules’. »»competence; irregular;
phrase-structure grammar; prescriptivism; rewrite rule. 2. In typography, a continu-
ous line, such as would be used to mark the top and foot of a table, or the upper and
lower parts of a fraction. »>typography.

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 Russia

Rumanian »Romanian.

Rundi /‘rundi:/ »Rwanda 2.

rune A letter from a type of alphabet used in north-west Europe from around the
3rd century AD. The earliest runic alphabet, used in Scandinavia and southern
Germanic areas, consisted of 24 letters, and is usually known as the older futhark,
a name made up out of the sounds of its first six letters. (The contrast is with the
younger futhark of 16 letters, used in Scandinavia in the 8th century.) It may
have derived from the Roman alphabet. The version used in Britain, usually called
the futhorc, devised extra symbols to cope with the range of Anglo-Saxon sounds.
Runes continued to be used on charms and monuments until the 17th century, and
their traditional association with religion and magic continues to provide resonances
today. »>alphabet; writing.

obaiath tlsietes 8
alge paresile Bie ©de
ba Pua TK epecoM ace
cehuattiie Githamel tiles
Se a
Kitae at opt sea
Xg9 BbX g
Pw Mek
Hh Mmx k
: Ser er eS
baddind& cng
The English futhorc.

running head >headline.

running text In typography, a piece of continuous text. A contrast is intended

with any textual material which is displayed in a special setting, such as equations,
footnotes, and tables. »typography.

Russia (population in 1995 estimated at 149,900,000) The official language is

Russian, spoken by over 80% of the population. There are over 80 other languages,
a number with local official status, such as Avar, Bashkir, Buryat, Chechen, Chuvash,
Kabardian, Kalmyk, Komi, Mari, Mordvin, Ossetic, Tatar, Tuvin, Udmutrt, and Yakut.
Several western European languages are in use, such as German, Polish, and Yiddish,
and there are many speakers of Romani. »>Russian.

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Russian

Russian A member of the East Slavic group of languages, spoken by c.290 million
people as a first (c.170 million) or as a second (c.120 million) language, chiefly in
Russia (c.125 million), with the others mainly in the republics of the former USSR
and in nearby countries (such as Afghanistan and China). The language is also widely
used as a lingua franca in those parts of eastern Europe which formerly fell under
Soviet influence, and has been taken by immigrants to the USA, Canada, and
elsewhere. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. There are many dialects, broadly
grouped into northern, central, and southern divisions, with the modern standard
language based on the (central) Moscow dialect. Russian can be traced back to the
11th century. It displays considerable influence of western European languages,
especially in vocabulary. Among its interesting linguistic features are its use of
palatalized consonants, and its distinction between perfective and imperfective verb
aspects. The works of the poet Alexandr Pushkin (1799-1837) are recognized as
having had a particular influence on the development of the modern language.
»>aspect; Cyrillic; lingua franca; palate; perfect; Slavic.

Rwanda /ru:'anda/ 1. (name of country) (population in 1995 estimated at 8,430,000,

but figures are uncertain in the aftermath of the civil war) The official languages
are Rwanda (Kinyarwanda, spoken by c.98% of the population), English, and French.
French is used for international purposes. »»French. 2. (name of language) A Bantu
language spoken by over 15 million speakers, mainly in Rwanda (c.8 million),
Burundi (c.5 million), and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with smaller numbers
in Uganda and Tanzania; also known as Rwanda-Rundi, and sometimes spelled
Ruanda. In Burundi, where it also has official status, the language is called Rundi.
It is written in the Roman alphabet. Rwanda-Rundi is the Bantu language with the
largest number of speakers as a mother tongue. »>Bantu.

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S
S An abbreviation of sentence or subject.

Saami >Same.

Saharan A small group of Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Chad and adjoining

areas of Nigeria, Niger, Libya, and Sudan. It includes Kanuri (its chief member),
Tebu, and Zaghawa. »>Nilo-Saharan.

Saint Helena (population in 1995 estimated at 6800, including Ascension and

Tristan da Cunha) The official language is English, spoken by the whole population.
»>English.

Saint Kitts and Nevis (population in 1995 estimated at 42,800) The official
language is English. Most people use an English-based creole widespread throughout
the Lesser Antilles. »>creole; English.

Saint Lucia (population in 1995 estimated at 140,000) The official language is

English. Most people use a French-based creole (Patwa) found throughout the Lesser
Antilles. »>creole; English; Patwa.

Saint Pierre and Miquelon (population in 1995 estimated at 6600) The official
language is French, spoken by almost everyone. There are a few speakers of English.
»>French.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (population in 1995 estimated at 120,000)

The official language is English. Most people use an English-based creole widespread
throughout the Lesser Antilles. »>creole; English.

Salish /'seili{/ A group of c.20 Amerindian languages whose relationship to the

other language groups of North America has not been determined. They are spoken
along the Canadian/US Pacific coastline, with a few found inland. They include
Bella Coola, Okanogan, and Squamish. Numbers of speakers are now very small, in
the hundreds or less. »Amerindian; isolate.

Same or Saami /'samei/ A member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric family
of languages, spoken by c.20-50,000 people chiefly in northern Norway, with some
in northern Sweden, Finland, and Russia; also called Lapp or Lappish (but these
terms are considered derogatory by Same speakers). It is written in both Roman and
Cyrillic alphabets (the latter in Russia), There are three main dialects, sometimes
considered to be different languages. Same has no official status, and most if not all

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speakers use one or other of the national languages of the country where they live.
There is now a certain revival of interest in Same language and culture, and increasing
concern over the social problems of Same minorities. »Finno-Ugric.

Samnorsk /'samno:sk/ >»Norwegian.

Samoa, formerly Western Samoa (population in 1995 estimated at 193,000) The
official languages are Samoan (spoken by c.86% of the population) and English.
English is used for international purposes. »>English; Samoan.

Samoa »>American Samoa.

Samoan /sa'maven/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken by

over 360,000 people chiefly (c.153,000) in Samoa (where it is an official language,
along with English) and the USA, with some in American Samoa, New Zealand,
Hawaii, and Fiji. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Austronesian.

Samoyedic /sama'jedik/ A branch of the Uralic family of languages, spoken by less

than 30,000 Samoyeds, scattered across a vast area of Arctic Russia. The most widely
spoken language is Nenets; others include Selkup, Nganasan, and Enets. Several
Samoyedic languages have very few speakers, and some (e.g. Kamas) have died out
in recent years. »»Nenets; Uralic.

sandhi /'sandi:/ The phonological modification of grammatical forms which have

been juxtaposed, such as do + not becoming don’t, or je + ai becoming j’ai (French).
A distinction is sometimes made between external sandhi, which operates across
word boundaries, and internal sandhi, which operates within words. »morpho-
phonology.

Sango /'sangau/ A pidginized language spoken by c.5 million people, used primarily
in the Central African Republic (where it has official status). It is derived from
Ngbandi, a member of the Adamawa-Eastern group of African languages, with much
influence from French, and is widely used as a lingua franca in the Central African
Republic and surrounding areas. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »Adamawa
Ubangi; lingua franca; pidgin.

San Marino (population in 1995 estimated at 24,500) The official language is

Italian, spoken by the whole population. Over 80% use a local dialect, Emiliano-
Romagnolo. »Italian.

Sanskrit A member of the Indo-Aryan group of languages, the classical language

of the Hindus of India. Dating from the early part of the second millennium Bc, it
is the language in which the Vedas, the oldest sacred texts, are written — the name
itself means ‘purified’ or ‘refined’. Sanskrit was described and codified by the Indian
grammarian Panini in the Sth century sc, and is written in the Devanagari alphabet.
Classical Sanskrit (dated from c.500 Bc to c.1000 ap) came to be used as the standard
language of Hindu scholarship and literature, and in recent years has attracted

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renewed interest, both as a language for original writing and as a spoken language.
Awareness of the structural similarity of Sanskrit to Latin and Greek was a major
factor in the development of comparative philology at the end of the 18th century.
»> Devanagari; Indo-Aryan; Panini; philology; Prakrit.

Sans serif or sanserif >serif.

Sao Tomé and Principe (population in 1995 estimated at 135,000) The official
language is Portuguese. Most people (c.85%) speak a Portuguese-based creole (Cri-
oulo). English and Portuguese are used for international purposes. »>creole;
Portuguese.

Sapir—-Whorf hypothesis /sa'pia ‘wo:f/ A view about the relationship between

language and thought, proposed by US linguist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and his
pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941). It combines two principles: that language
determines the way we think (linguistic determinism); and that the distinctions
encoded in one language are not found in any other language (linguistic relativity).
The existence of successful translations argues against the strong form of the hypoth-
esis; but some conceptual differences between speakers of different languages can
be shown, and there is clear evidence that language does influence the way we
perceive, remember, and perform mental tasks. »psycholinguistics.

Sarcasm >irony.

Sardinian A variety of Romance, closely related to Italian, spoken by an uncertain

number (perhaps over a million) on the island of Sardinia. Written materials date
from the 11th century, but there has been little literary work, and none of the
dialects has emerged as a standard, Italian being the official language. Sardinian is
the variety of Romance which is closest to Vulgar Latin. »>Italian; Latin; Romance.

satem language >centum language.

Saudi Arabia (population in 1995 estimated at 17,124,000) The official language

is Arabic, spoken by over 80% of the population. There are many immigrants of
varying language backgrounds, notably from the Philippines, Iran, and the sub-
continent of India. English is used for international purposes. »>Arabic.

Saussurian /sovu'sjuetien/ Adjective derived from Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-

1913), a Swiss linguist whose theoretical ideas are widely regarded as providing
the foundation for the science of linguistics. His thought is summarized in the
posthumously published Cours de linguistique générale (‘Course in general linguistics’,
1916), consisting of a reconstruction by two of Saussure’s students of his lecture
notes and other materials. The Geneva School of linguistics continued to develop
Saussurian thought. »>linguistics; Prague school; semiotics; sign 1; structural.

scale and category grammar A linguistic theory developed by Michael Halliday

in the early 1960s. The structure of language is seen as an intersecting set of scales

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(rank, exponence, delicacy) and categories (unit, structure, class, system) operating
at different levels. The approach developed into systemic grammar. >>Firthian lin-
guistics; systemic grammar. ;

Scandinavian A group of languages forming the North Germanic branch of the

Germanic family, traditionally divided into East Scandinavian (Swedish and Danish)
and West Scandinavian (Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faeroese). A more recent classifi-
cation distinguishes Mainland Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) and
Insular Scandinavian (Icelandic, Faeroese). The older states of these languages are
called Old Norse — known especially from the Icelandic sagas. Runic inscriptions
from the 3rd century provide the earliest evidence of the group. The differences
between the modern languages began to emerge at the end of the 11th century.
Today, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are largely mutually intelligible (though
their status as separate languages is firmly maintained by the different peoples on
cultural and historical grounds). Icelandic and Faeroese are grammatically rather
different, and not usually comprehensible to speakers of other languages in the
group — facts which have motivated the more recent classification referred to above.
A variety of West Scandinavian, Norn, was spoken on Shetland and Orkney until the
18th century. »Danish; Faeroese; Germanic; Icelandic; Norwegian; rune; Swedish.

scansion >metrics.

schwa »>shwa.

scope The stretch of language affected by the meaning of a particular form. For
example, the scope of negation in English normally extends from the negative
word to the end of the clause. Compare She hasn’t bought the fridge and the microwave,
where it is the buying of both fridge and microwave that is denied, and She has bought
the fridge and not the microwave, where only the microwave is denied. »>negation.

Scotland >Scottish Gaelic; United Kingdom.

Scottish Gaelic /'geilik, 'galik/ A member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic
family of languages, spoken by c.80,000 people in Scotland (mainly in the north-west
mainland and in the Hebrides); also called Scots Gaelic (often referred to simply
as Gaelic) or Erse. It is an official regional language in the Western Isles, and is
written in the Roman alphabet. The language developed from Irish Gaelic, which
was brought to Scotland by immigrants from the 6th century. A distinction between
Irish and Scots Gaelic is clearly in evidence from the 10th century, and a literary
tradition emerged. There was a major period of poetic literature in the 18th century,
but a standard written language did not develop until the Bible translation of 1801.
In the 18th century, many Scots Gaels emigrated to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia;
there were c.30,000 speakers of Cape Breton Gaelic in the 1930s, though the number
is tiny today. There has been a steady decline in numbers everywhere during the
past century, despite a modern revivialist movement. »>Celtic.

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Scouse /skavus/ The colloquial name for the variety of English heard in Liverpool.
The name derives from a kind of sailor’s stew (lobscouse) popular on Merseyside.
»> dialect.

script 1. The graphic form of the units of a writing system (e.g. the Roman vs. the
Cyrillic alphabet). The term is used in a general way, to include the properties of
different systems: hieroglyphic writing, syllabaries, and alphabets are all scripts.
»> graphology; transcription. 2. In the study of narrative discourse, an encoding of
the relations which typically connect events (e.g. the sequence of events which take
place during a visit to a restaurant). The matching of events in a text with events in
a script allows inferences to be made about information not explicitly mentioned
in the text. »discourse analysis; narrative.
Sea Islands Creole English An English-based creole used along the south-eastern
coast of the USA; also called Gullah (though many find this name demeaning). It
has many linguistic features in common with West African varieties. Estimates of
the number of speakers vary between 100,000 and 250,000. >>creole.

Seaspeak A variety of English devised for unambiguous maritime communication.

It was introduced in the 1980s through a project called Essential English for Inter-
national Maritime Use. Its recommendations relate mainly to communication by
radio, and include procedures for initiating, maintaining, and terminating conver-
sations, as well as a recommended grammar, vocabulary, and structure for messages
on a wide range of maritime subjects. Following the success of this project, other
kinds of standardized language system are currently being investigated, notably
Police Speak (initially for use by the French and British police forces in relation
to the Channel Tunnel) and EmergencySpeak, for the emergency rescue services.
»>English; variety.

secondary articulation A vowel-like articulation which occurs at the same time

as a primary consonantal articulation. Cases include palatalization (adding a high
front tongue position), velarization (raising the back of the tongue), pharyngealiz-
ation (narrowing the pharynx), and labialization (adding lip rounding). »»articul-
ation; coarticulation; consonant; rounding.

second language A language which is not a person’s mother tongue, but which
is learned in order to meet a communicative need. Immigrants commonly learn the
language of their host nation as a second language. Often, a country chooses to give
a language official status as a second language, using it as a medium of government,
law, education, or the media — a role played, for example, by English or French in
many countries of Africa. The developing branch of applied linguistics known as
second language acquisition studies what goes on in the minds of learners as
they develop their control of any language other than their first. »>first language;
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.
second person >person.

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secondary stress >stress.

secondary vowel >cardinal vowels.

secret language >argot; idioglossia.

segment A minimal discrete unit in the sound system of a language, defined

physically or auditorily, and generally classified as a vowel or consonant; an analo-
gous use is found in the study of writing systems. The process of analysing speech
into segments is segmentation. Segmental phonology analyses speech into
contrastive units — traditionally, segmental phonemes; this contrasts with supra-
segmental, nonsegmental, or plurisegmental phonology, where speech is
analysed into features that extend over more than one segment (e.g. intonation,
vowel harmony). » consonant; phonology; vowel.

segmentator In instrumental phonetics, a device which plays back a piece of

tape-recorded speech a small section at a time, so that it can be analysed in detail.
The size of the segment to be replayed can vary from less than a second to several
seconds. »»experimental phonetics.

selectional feature In generative grammar, a syntactic feature which specifies

restrictions on the permitted combinations of lexical items within a given grammati-
cal context; also called a selectional restriction or selectional rule. For example,
a verb that requires an animate subject noun phrase (e.g. sleep) would have the
restriction stated as part of its feature specification. »»collocation; generative
grammar.

self-repair >repair.

semantic component >semantic feature.

semantic differential A technique devised by American psychologist Charles

Osgood (1916- ) and others to find out the emotional reactions of speakers to lexical
items. Subjects are asked to rate words in terms of a seven-point scale with opposed
adjectives at each end —for example, ‘good—bad’, ‘active—passive’, or ‘tense—relaxed’.
The word bus, for instance, might be rated strongly with respect to ‘bad’, ‘active’,
and ‘tense’ — by someone who did not take much pleasure from bus-commuting.
When the responses of many subjects are obtained, it is possible to draw conclusions
about the main affective dimensions in terms of which a language’s concepts are
organized, and to make comparisons between cultural groups. »»connotation.

semantic feature A minimal contrastive element of a word’s meaning; in some

approaches called a semantic component. Girl, for example, might be analysed
into such features as ‘young’, ‘female’, and ‘human’. In child language acquisition,
the semantic feature hypothesis (SFH) claims that the order of appearance of
achild’s lexical items is governed by the type and complexity of the semantic features
they contain. »»acquisition; component; lexicon.

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semantic field theory The view that the vocabulary of a language is a system of
interrelated lexical networks, and not an inventory of independent items; also called
lexical field theory. Examples include the fields of vehicles, fruit, clothing, colour,
and parts of the body. Not all aspects of experience neatly divide up into semantic
fields, however, and it is always necessary to consider context before assigning a
lexical item to a field - for example, hospital relates to both the semantic field of
health (as in I was in hospital last week) and that of buildings (as in The hospital needs
a new roof). »>lexicon; semantics.

semantic paraphasia >paraphasia.

semantic relations >sense.

semantics The study of meaning in language. Structural semantics applies the

principles of structural linguistics to the study of meaning through the notion
of semantic relations (also called sense relations), such as synonymy and
antonymy. In generative grammar, the semantic component is a major area of
the grammar’s organization, assigning a semantic representation to sentences,
and analysing lexical items in terms of semantic features. The theory of semantic
fields views vocabulary as organized into areas within which words (lexical items)
interrelate and define each other. »meaning; prototype; semantic feature/field
theory/triangle; sense. 2
semantic triangle A particular model of meaning proposed by C. K. Ogden
and IJ. A. Richards in the 1920s. It claims that meaning is essentially a threefold
relationship between linguistic forms, concepts, and referents. >»»meaning;
reference 1.
semasiology /simasi:'pledi:/ >onomasiology; semiotics.
semeiology /semi:'vladi:/ >semiotics.
semeiotics >semiotics. —
semi-auxiliary verb >auxiliary verb.

semi-bold >bold.
semicolon A punctuation mark whose typical function is to coordinate clauses, in
much the same way as does the conjunction and. It plays an important contrastive
role when commas are used within the same sentence, as it then keeps the different
levels of sentence organization apart. We first went to France, remembering to visit
Helen; then to Germany, where we saw Paul; and finally to Spain, where we bumped into
Peter. Intelligibility would be diminished if such a sentence were punctuated only
with commas. »>colon; comma; punctuation.

semiconsonant »>consonant.

semilingual Descriptive of people who have acquired two or more languages, but

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semiology

who lack a native level of proficiency in any of them. The situation is likely to arise
when someone has moved between countries a great deal in their early years.
Semilingualism has been little studied, and is controversial, as it suggests that there
are people who do not have a true mother tongue; however, many people do claim
to be semilingual. »>bilingualism.

semiology sy /semi:'pladi:/ »>semiotics.

semiotics /semi:'ptiks/ The study of signs and their use, focusing on the mechanisms
and patterns of human communication and on the nature and acquisition of know-
ledge; also sometimes spelled semeiotics, and also called semiology or semei-
ology — though these terms have a different intellectual history. ‘Semiology’ relates
primarily to a continental European tradition deriving from Ferdinand de Saussure;
‘semiotics’, primarily to an Anglo-American tradition deriving from US philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Language is viewed in semiotics as one type of
sign system, along with such other systems as bodily gestures, clothing, and the arts.
Other terms for the field include semasiology and significs. »communication;
kinesics; proxemics; Saussurian; sign 1.

semi-productive >productivity.

semi-sentence A sentence whose grammaticality is doubtful, but where there is

sufficient plausibility of interpretation to disallow a definite judgement of ungram-
maticality. An example is The wall was arrived before by the army. >>grammatical.

Semitic A large group of Afro-Asiatic languages, spoken by c.170 million people

across the whole of North Africa, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, throughout the
Saudi Arabian peninsula, and in parts of Ethiopia. The languages are recorded from
the 3rd millennium sc. The chief member of the group is Arabic; other important
languages are Hebrew and Amharic. »Akkadian; Amorite; Arabic; Aramaic; Maltese;
Moabite; Phoenician; Syriac; Tigrinya.

semivowel A sound functioning as a consonant at the margins of a syllable, but

lacking the phonetic characteristics normally associated with consonants (such as
audible friction); instead, its quality is phonetically that of a vowel, though of shorter
duration. Examples include [w] and [j] in English, and [r] in some Slavic languages
(e.g. Trst = Trieste). The term is often used as an equivalent to semiconsonant.
»>consonant; vowel.

Senegal (population in 1995 estimated at 8,314,000) The official language is

French. About 35% of the people speak Wolof as a first language, and a further 45%
as a second language. There are c.30 other local languages, notably Dyola, Fulacunda,
Malinke, Serer, and Soninke. French is used for international purposes. »»French.

sense The meaning of a linguistic expression. Sense relations (or semantic

relations) are the relations of meaning which exist between words, such as sameness

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or Oppositeness of meaning. »»antonymy; hyponymy; meaning; reference 1;

synonymy.
sensorineural >deafness.

sentence (S) The largest structural unit in terms of which the grammar of a language
is organized. It is an independent unit which can be given both a formal and a
functional classification (though with varying terminology). Formal classifications
recognize such types as declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamative;
functional classifications recognize such types as statement, question, and command.
Most analyses recognize a classification into simple vs. complex and compound
sentence types, in terms of the number and kind of subject—predicate constructions
they contain. Another widespread distinction is into favourite or major sen-
tences, which are the productive patterns in a language, and minor sentences,
which lack productivity. »complex sentence; holophrase; major sentence; pro-
ductivity.

sentence adverb »>adverb.

sequence The observable succession of units in an utterance or text. The notion

includes both linear relationships (where the dependencies are between successive,
adjacent units) and nonlinear relationships, such as agreement between words that
are separated. Sequence of temses refers to the dependencies between tense forms
in successive clauses: the use of a particular tense form in one clause requires the
use of a particular tense form in another, as in He tells me that he’s leaving vs. He told
me that he was leaving. In psycholinguistics, sequencing refers to the influence that
successive structures exercise upon each other. In language teaching, this term refers
to the order in which a graded series of items is presented to the learner. »>language
teaching; method; order; psycholinguistics; string; tense.
Serbian The name increasingly being used since the mid-1990s for the Slavic
language spoken in Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) by c.7.5 million people;
before the civil war, considered a variety of Serbo-Croatian. It is also found in the
Serb Republic enclave within Bosnia and Herzegovina, and through emigration in
several other European countries. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. »»Serbo-
Croatian; Yugoslavia.

Serbo-Croatian The name traditionally given to a member of the South Slavic

group of languages, spoken by c.20 million people in the republics which formerly
(pre-1991) comprised Yugoslavia, with some speakers in adjoining countries; also
called Serbo-Croat or (less usually) Croato-Serbian. Since the civil war, the term
has virtually gone out of use in the Balkan states, having been replaced by names
which reflect the identities of the individual countries and the growing linguistic
differences between them - Serbian, Croatian, and (increasingly) Bosnian. The tra-
ditional term will still be encountered in linguistic descriptions outside the Balkans,
as it provides a convenient label for the group of languages as a whole (cf. the use

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serif

of Scandinavian for Swedish, Norwegian, etc.) and for identifying varieties which do
not fall neatly into one or other of the socio-political categories. Substantial numbers
of Serbo-Croatian speakers, in one or other of its varieties, are found in the USA,
Canada, Australia, and Germany. The earliest texts date from the 12th century.
»>Bosnian; Croatian; Serbian; Slavic; Slovene; Yugoslavia.

serif /'serif/ In typography, a small terminal stroke at the end of the main stroke of
a letter. Typefaces which lack this feature are called sams serif or samserif /'san
'serif/. »>typography; figure below.

Sesotho »>Sotho.

set expression A group of words standing in a fixed association; also called a fixed

* LANGUAGE
Examples of serifs

language
* LANGUAGE
language
A serif (Times Roman) and sans-serif (Helvetica) typeface.

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 shorthand

or frozen expression. Examples include restricted collocations (e.g. run amok),

idioms, catch phrases, proverbs, aphorisms, and other stereotyped forms. »>catch
phrase; formula.

Setswana »>Tswana.

setting A global configuration of the vocal organs which underlies the articulatory
or phonatory performance of a speaker. Articulatory settings are reflected in
tendencies to habitual articulatory postures, such as marked lip rounding or low
tongue-body position. Phonatory settings include the habitual use of a whispery
or creaky mode of phonation. »>articulation; creaky voice; phonation; vocal organs.

sexist language Language which reflects and maintains a social attitude towards
men or women. The notion applies almost entirely to the perceived linguistic biases
which are said to constitute a male-orientated view of the world, fostering unfair
sexual discrimination, and leading to a denigration of the role of women in society.
The most commonly cited examples of the linguistic features involved are the use
of the 3rd person pronoun he to refer generically to males and females (If a student
wants a comment, he should . . .), and the generic use of the suffix -man, as in chairman.
»> generic; inclusive language.

Seychelles (population in 1995 estimated at 71,100) The official language is Creole

French (spoken by c.96% of the population), with French and English auxiliary
official languages, and used for international purposes. »>creole; English; French.

SFH An abbreviation of semantic feature hypothesis.

SGML An abbreviation of Standard Generalized Markup Language.

shadow pronoun >pronoun.

Sheldru /'feldru:/ An Anglo-Irish creole, used by Irish travellers and their descend-
ants mainly in Ireland (c.6000), England (30,000) and the USA (c.50,000); also called
Shelta. It is based on English grammar, with (often modified) Irish vocabulary.
»>creole.

Shelta /‘felta/ >Sheldru.

Shona /'faune/ A member of the Bantu group of Benue-Congo languages, spoken
by c.7 million people chiefly in eastern Zimbabwe (c.6 million), and also in nearby
parts of Mozambique and Botswana. Shona is widely used as a lingua franca in the
region. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »Benue-Congo; lingua franca.

shorthand A system which enables writing to take place at speed; technically

known as brachygraphy (‘short writing’), tachygraphy (‘quick writing’), or
stenography (‘narrow writing’). Shorthand systems, known since the 1st century
BC, use special symbols or abbreviations for the usual letters and words of speech.
Famous systems include those of Isaac Pitman (1813-97), widely used in Britain,

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shwa

2000 Pitmanscript Gregg Teeline

amateurs EEE OTE = MISTS

thieves " Pew» A Wai

fatened = Vy fax’ Bis 4.
neighbour Pog AS apt oe

SAE CE IN Cu/
Shorthand: Five words transcribed in Pitman 2000, Pitmanscript, Gregg and
Teeline.

and John Robert Gregg (1867-1948), mainly used in the USA. It is best known
for its use in press reporting and in secretarial work, though in recent years the
development of voice-recording equipment has somewhat reduced the demand for
professional shorthand skills. »stenotypy; writing.

shwa /fwa:/ The neutral vowel, [a], heard in English at the beginning of such words
as amazing; also spelled schwa, and sometimes called the indefinite vowel.
»>central sound; vowel.

Siamese >Thai.

sibilant /'stbilant/ A fricative sound made with a narrow, groove-like stricture in

the blade of the tongue, while approaching the back part of the alveolar ridge.
Sibilance is a particular characteristic of [s] and [z], and is also a feature of [f] and
[3]. »>fricative; groove.

Sierra Leone (population in 1995 estimated at 4,719,000) The official language is

English. There are c.20 local languages, notably Mende and Temne. An English-based
creole, Krio, is spoken by most of the population as a second language with c.10%
using it as a first language. All three are important lingua francas— Mende especially in
the south, Temne in central areas, and Krio generally. English is used for international
purposes. »>creole; English.

sight translation >translation.

sight vocabulary Words which can be recognized as wholes by someone learning

to read. Grammatical words, many of which are irregular in spelling (the, of, etc.),
are commonly presented in this way (often using flash cards) in the early stages of
learning to read. »look-and-say.

sigmatism /'sigmatizm/ A distinctive use of [s]. The notion is chiefly used in a

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 simple

clinical context, where it refers to an abnormal pronunciation of [s], as in a lisp. It

is also sometimes used in poetics, where it refers to a repetitive use of [s] to create a
particular effect. »>lisp; poetics; speech defect.

sign 1. A feature of language or behaviour which conveys meaning, especially when

used conventionally within a system (such as speech, writing, gesture, dance); also
called a symbol (but many writers make a distinction between these terms). The
term was particularly used by Ferdinand de Saussure to summarize the two-way,
arbitrary relationship which exists between a vehicle (a signifier, French signifiant)
and a meaning (a signified, French signifié). The relationship itself is known as
signification. »iconicity; Saussurian. 2. >sign language.

Signifiant/signifié /signifi:'d, signifi:'el/ >sign 1.

significant >contrast; distinctive.

signification >sign 1.

significs >semiotics.

sign language A system of gestures, made with the hands and other body parts,
used to replace speech as a mode of communication on all occasions of interaction.
Sign languages which are used within deaf communities, or which permit communi-
cation to develop naturally between deaf people and hearing people (as in home
sign systems), are sometimes referred to as primary sign languages. These are
distinguished from the alternate sign languages used among hearing people
(such as certain religious orders). A further distinction is often drawn between these
naturally occurring sign languages and contrived sign languages - the sign
systems invented by educators to convey spoken language to the deaf. »American
Sign Language; Amer-Ind; cherology; cued speech; deafness; finger spelling; Paget—
Gorman Sign System; tick-tack.

silent pause >pause.

silent way An approach to language teaching, devised by American educator Caleb

Gattegno, that aims to provide an environment which keeps the amount of teaching
to a minimum, and encourages learners to develop their own ways of using the
language elements introduced. The method uses gesture, mime, charts, visual aids,
and other devices (especially Cuisiniére rods, of different shapes and colours) to help
students to talk to each other. As students say more, the teacher says less (hence the
name of the approach). »humanistic.

simile /'stmali:/ A figurative expression which makes an explicit comparison, typi-

cally using such words as as or like. Examples include as tall as a mountain and ran
like the wind. »>figurative language.

simple >compound; progressive.

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simultaneous translation »>translation.

Sindhi /'sindi:/ A language belonging to the North-western group of Indo-Aryan

languages, spoken by c.17 million people in Pakistan and by c.2.5 million in north-
west India. An official regional language in Sindh province, Pakistan, it holds a _
similar regional status in India. It is written in the Persian form of the Arabic alphabet
in Pakistan, and in the Devanagari alphabet in India. »Devanagari; Indo-Aryan.

Singapore (population in 1995 estimated at 2,963,000) The official languages are

Malay (spoken by c.15% of the population), several varieties of Chinese (c.60%),
English (c.9%) and Tamil (c.4%). There are c.20 other languages, including Japanese,
Korean, Malayalam, Panjabi, and Thai. English is the chief lingua franca, and is used
for international purposes. »Chinese; English; lingua franca; Malay; Tamil.

Singhalese /s1ngo'li:z/ >Sinhala.

sing-song theory >la-la theory.

singular >number.

Sinhala /sin‘ha:lo/ A language belonging to the Western group of Indo-Aryan

languages, spoken by c.13 million people in Sri Lanka, where it is an official language
along with Tamil; also called Sinhalese or Singhalese. It is written in the Sinhala
syllabic script. Early inscriptions date from the 3rd century Bc, and a substantial
Buddhist literature is found from c.1000 ap. The language was brought to the island
by colonists from northern India (c.S5th century Bc), and its geographical isolation
led to its developing along rather different lines from other Indo-Aryan languages
— notably due to the influence of Tamil, a Dravidian language. The passing of the
Sinhala Only Bill in Ceylon in 1956 resulted in violent riots by the Tamil minority,
and led to Tamil being given special status in 1958. »»Dravidian; Indo-Aryan; Tamil.

Sinhalese /smo'li:z/ »Sinhala.

Simitic /si'ntttk/ »Sino-Tibetan.

Sino-Tibetan /'sarnov ti'betn/ A family of c.270 languages whose classification and

membership is controversial, including various languages of China, Tibet, Myanmar
(Burma), and nearby territories. Some scholars include the Tai and Miao-Yao groups
within the family. The Sinitic group of Chinese languages is spoken by over 1140
million people, in China (c.1120 million) and Taiwan (c.21 million), with many
more throughout south-east Asia, and through emigration all over the world. The
Tibeto-Burman group of c.275 languages is widely distributed in Myanmar, Thai-
land, Vietnam, Laos, China, and India, its chief members being Burmese and Tibetan.
It is spoken by c.50 million people. »Burmese; Chinese; Tibetan.

Siouan /'su:on/ »Macro-Siouan.

sister language »>family of languages.

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 slit

situational context »>context 2.

situational syllabus >notional syllabus.

skimming >rapid reading.

slang Informal, nonstandard vocabulary, usually intelligible only to people from

a particular region or social group; also, the jargon of a special group, such as doctors,
cricketers, or sailors. Its chief function is to mark social identity — to show that one
belongs — but it may also be used just to be different, to make an effect, or to be
informal. Such ‘in-group’ language is subject to rapid change. »»argot; back slang;
jargon; rhyming slang; standard.

slant >solidus.

slash >solidus.

Slavic /'slavik/ A branch of the Balto-Slavic family of languages, spoken by c.300

million people; also called Slavonic. It is usually divided into three main groups.
South Slavic (c.30 million speakers), found in Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Yugoslavia, Slovenia, and parts
of Greece, includes Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian and Slovene. West
Slavic (over 50 million speakers), found in the Czech and Slovak republics, Poland,
and the eastern part of Germany, includes Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, and Polish. East
Slavic (over 200 million mother-tongue speakers, with many more as a second
language) includes Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian. Old Church Slavonic is
found in texts from the 9th century, and its later form (Church Slavonic) is still used
as a liturgical language in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Cyrillic alphabet is
used to write all the East Slavic languages, as well as several others in the region (e.g.
Bulgarian). Other languages use the Roman alphabet. The choice of alphabet has
considerable cultural and political implications; in particular, Serbian is written in
the Cyrillic alphabet, and Croatian in the Roman alphabet (with some diacritics),
and this helps motivate the nationalist arguments that these are separate languages.
»> Balto-Slavic; Belorussian; Bosnian; Bulgarian; Croatian; Cyrillic; Czech; Glagolitic;
Lekhitic; Macedonian; Polish; Russian; Serbian; Serbo-Croatian; Slovak; Slovene;
Sorbian; Ukrainian.

Slavonic /slo'vonik/ »>Slavic.

slip of the tongue An involuntary departure from the speaker’s intended pro-
duction of a sequence of language units - as when someone says /ki:m krerks/ for
cream cakes. Sounds, syllables, morphemes, words, and sometimes larger units of
grammar are affected. The kinds of error provide important evidence concerning
the underlying neuropsychological processes involved in speech production. »>mala-
propism; misarticulation; speech production; spoonerism.

slit >groove.

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Slovak

Slovak /'slauvak/ A member of the West Slavic group of languages, spoken by c.5
million people, chiefly in the Slovak Republic, where it is an official language, and
in nearby parts of Slovenia, Hungary, and Ukraine. There are also many immigrant
speakers in the USA and Canada. It is closely related to Czech, most dialects of the
two languages being mutually intelligible. Written in the Roman alphabet, a standard
literary language dates from the mid-19th century, though traces of Slovak can be
found from as early as the 11th century. »»Czech; Czechoslovakia; Slavic.

Slovene /'slavvizn/ A member of the South Slavic group of languages, spoken by

c.2.2 million people chiefly in the republic of Slovenia (where it is the official
language), and in nearby parts of Austria and Italy; also called Slovenian. It is
written in the Roman alphabet. Written remains date from the 11th century, but
a standard written language emerged only in the 19th century. There is a close
relationship with varieties of Serbo-Croatian. »»Serbo-Croatian; Slavic; Slovenia.

Slovenia (population in 1995 estimated at 2,000,000) The official language is

Slovene, spoken by most of the population. Several languages from nearby territories
are also spoken in the country, such as German, Hungarian, and Italian. Many
people also speak one of the varieties of Serbo-Croatian. English is increasingly being
used for international purposes. »>Serbo-Croatian; Slovene.

Slovenian /sla'vi:nian/ >Slovene.

slowed speech A therapeutic technique used in the treatment of stuttering. Stutter-

ers are taught to pronounce the syllables of words in a smooth and fluent manner,
but at a very slow speed (usually c.40 syllables a minute, to begin with). They then
gradually increase their speed of utterance, while trying to maintain fluency. The
technique is generally quite successful, though it forms only one part of an overall
approach to fluency therapy. »>stuttering.

social dialect >dialect; social dialectology.

social dialectology The application of dialectological methods to the study of

social structure, especially the relationship between linguistic features and such
factors as Class, sex, age, profession, and ethnicity. The emphasis is on group member-
ship as a determinant of dialectal competence. »»dialect.

sociohistorical linguistics A branch of linguistics which studies the forms and

uses of language in society, and how particular linguistic functions and types of
variation develop over time within specific languages, speech communities, social
groups, and individuals. »>linguistics; variety.

sociolect A linguistic variety defined on social (as opposed to regional) grounds,

such as a social class or occupational group. It is also called a class dialect or social
dialect. »>dialect; lect.

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sociolinguistics A branch of linguistics which studies the ways in which language

is integrated with human society (specifically, with reference to such notions as race,
ethnicity, class, sex, and social institutions). The subject is often distinguished from
the sociology of language, which tends to operate from the viewpoint of sociology,
and (especially in Europe) from sociological linguistics, which aims to see lan-
guage as an integral part of sociological theory. »>interactional sociolinguistics;
linguistics; pragmalinguistics; social dialectology; sociohistorical linguistics; vari-
able; cartoon below.

sociological linguistics >sociolinguistics.

sociology of language »>sociolinguistics.

sociopragmatics »>pragmalinguistics.

soft palate >palate.

soft sign >hard sign.

‘No, that’s not my name. The National Geographic people gave it to me.’
solecism

solecism /spla'sizm/ A minor deviation from what is considered to be linguistically

correct. English examples include splitting an infinitive (to boldly go) and ending a
seritence with a preposition (the person I gave it to). »pleonasm; prescriptivism.

solid >hyphen.
solidus /'splidas/ An oblique stroke typically used to indicate alternatives (as in
either/or) or certain kinds of abbreviation (as in c/o for ‘care of’); also called a slash,
slant, oblique, or virgule. It also has several minor uses, such as in dating (6/7/
41) and classification (Section B/36/2). »>punctuation.

soliloquy >monologue.
Solomon Islands (population in 1995 estimated at 367,000) The official language is
English. There arec.60 local languages belonging to the Austronesian and Indo-Pacific
families. Solomon Islands Pidgin (Pijin) is an English-based variety used by about a
third of the people. »»English; pidgin.
Somali /sa'mazli:/ A member of the Cushitic language family, spoken by c.8.5
million people, chiefly in Somalia (where it is an official language, along with Arabic),
and also in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. It is written in the Roman alphabet.
>> Cushitic; Somalia.

Somalia (population in 1995 estimated at 8,565,000) The official languages are

Somali (spoken by c.70% of the population, c.6 million) and Arabic. Italian is still
used in parts of the south. There are c.10 other African languages, such as Maay and
Swahili. English and Arabic are used for international purposes. All speaker estimates
in the region are uncertain, following the civil unrest of the 1990s. »»Arabic; Somali.

Songhai or Songai /spn'gai/ A Nilo-Saharan language spoken by c.2 million people

over a wide area, from Mali to Nigeria, in the area around the River Niger, and not
clearly related to any of the other languages in the region. It is written in the Roman
alphabet. >»Nilo-Saharan.
sonorant /'spnorent/ >obstruent.

sonority The overall loudness of a sound, relative to others of the same pitch,
stress, and duration. Sounds are said to have an inherent sonority, which accounts
for the impression of a sound carrying further (see illustration at decibel). The
centre of a syllable is defined as the place where sonority is greatest — the sonority
peak. »phonetics; syllable.

Sorbian /'so:bian/ A member of the West Slavic group of languages, spoken by

c.70,000 people chiefly in Lusatia, Germany (south-east of Berlin), where it has
official status as a regional language; also called Lusatian or Wendish. It is written
in the Roman alphabet, and texts date from the 15th century. High Sorbian is spoken
around Bautzen, near the Czech border; Low Sorbian is spoken around Cottbus, near
Poland. »>Slavic.

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sort A special character of type, such as an individual letter, numeral, or punctuation

mark. A special sort is a character which cannot be typeset along with the rest of
the text, because it is not included in the standard font of type. »>font; typography.

Sotho or Sesotho /'su:tu:/ Amember of the Bantu group of Benue-Congo languages,

spoken by c.4 million people, c.2.7 million in South Africa (where it is one of the 11
official languages) and also in Lesotho (where it is an official language, along with
English). The language is sometimes called Southern Sotho, to distinguish it from
Northern and Western varieties. Sesotho sa Leboa is also one of South Africa’s official
languages. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Benue-Congo; Lesotho; Tswana.

sound change A change in the phonological system of a language over a period

of time. A sound shift is a series of related sound changes at a particular stage of a
language’s history (e.g. the English Great Vowel Shift). In comparative philology, a
regular change is called a soumd law. Many types of sound change have been
recognized in comparative philology. »»apocope; assimilation; convergence 2; dis-
similation; epenthesis; functional change 2; haplology; law; metathesis; Neogram-
marians; philology; phonology; syncope; umlaut; vowel shift.

sound spectrograph »>spectrograph.

sound symbolism A direct association between the form and meaning of language.
This can take place when phonetic sounds reflect sounds in the external world
(onomatopoeia), as in cuckoo, murmur, and splash. Other properties, such as size
or light, may also be suggested (phonesthetics), as in glitter, slimy, and swerve.
»>eurhythmy; phonesthetics.

sound system >phonology.

source In translating and interpreting, the language from which a message origin-
ates, called the source language. There is a contrast with the target language,
into which the translation takes place. »>interpreting; translatology.

South Africa (population in 1995 estimated at 37,900,000) Eleven languages were

recognized as official in the new constitution formulated in 1993: Afrikaans, English,
Ndebele, Sesotho sa Leboa, Sesotho, Swati, Xitsonga, Setswana, Tshivenda, Xhosa,
and Zulu. About 20 other African or immigrant languages are used in the area,
including Tamil, Tsonga, Tswana, and Urdu. There are many immigrants who speak
various European languages. English is used for international purposes. >»Afrikaans;
English; Ndebele; Tswana; Xhosa; Zulu.

Spain (population in 1995 estimated at 38,734,000) The official language is Spanish,

spoken by c.73% of the population. Basque (c.1.5%, in the Basque Provinces), Catalan
(c.20%, first and second language speakers in Catalonia), and Galician (c.8%, in
Galicia) are official regional languages. Other varieties include Aragonese, Asturian,
and Extremaduran. There are unclear but large numbers of Romani speakers.

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Spanish, English, and French are all used for international trade and tourism.
>> Basque; Catalan; Galician; Spanish.

Spanglish »>Spanish.

Spanish A member of the Romance family of languages, spoken by c.270 million

people as a first language, chiefly in Mexico and Central America (c.82 million),
Spain (c.28 million), the USA (c.22 million), the Caribbean (c.18 million, chiefly in
Cuba), Argentina (c.33 million), Bolivia (c.3.5 million), Chile (c.14 million), Colombia
(c.34 million), Ecuador (c.12 million), Paraguay (c.100,000), Peru (c.20 million),
Uruguay (c.3.1 million), and Venezuala (c.21.5 million). A further c.80 million speak
it as a second language. It is written in the Roman alphabet. Rapidly increasing in
numbers and status in the USA, it was probably the world’s most rapidly growing
language in the 1990s. The earliest written materials date from the 10th century, a
Spanish literature emerging in the 12th century with the popular epic Cantar de Mio
Cid (‘Song of my Cid’). The golden age is the 17th century, at its peak in the Don
Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes. The modern standard language is based on the
dialect of Castile, which became the official language of all Spain after the merging
of the Spanish kingdoms in the 15th century; and Spanish is often called Castilian
as a result, especially in Latin America. Several Spanish-based creoles survive in
countries which were once colonies of Spain, and several mixed (‘Spanglish’) varieties
exist in locations where Spanish and English are in contact, such as ‘Tex-Mex’ in
south-west USA. »>creole; Judaeo-Spanish; Romance.

speaker recognition A branch of phonetics which investigates the way individuals

can be identified or discriminated by analysis of their voices. In speaker verifica-
tion, a sample of a speaker's speech is used to check a claimed identity. »>phonetics;
speech recognition; voiceprint.

special language >English for Special Purposes; Language(s) for Special Purposes.

spectrograph An instrument which provides a visual representation of the acoustic

features making up the sounds of speech; also sometimes called a sonagraph (trade
name). It uses a three-dimensional record on paper or screen (a spectrogram) in
which time is displayed horizontally, frequency vertically, and intensity by the
density of the marks. »»experimental phonetics.

speech act A communicative activity defined with reference to the intentions of

a speaker while speaking and the effects achieved on a listener. In this context, the act
itself is called a locutionary act; the intentional aspect is the act’s illocutionary
force; and the impact on the listener is the act’s perlocutionary effect. A wide
range of speech acts has been proposed, such as directives (e.g. commanding),
commissives (e.g. promising), and expressives (e.g. apologizing). »»felicity con-
ditions; indirect speech act; performative.

speech chain A model of communication in which the communicative act is seen

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PRODUCTION TRANSMISSION RECEPTION

Neurological

Neurological

Physiological
Physiological Anatomical
Anatomical

Speech chain: the steps in the communication chain.

as an interrelated sequence of stages between a speaker and a receiver. Three main

stages are recognized: speech production — acoustic transmission — speech reception.
Within production, it is possible to distinguish a neurological stage (the formulation
of speech in the brain and its transmission using the nervous system), a physiological
stage (the use of the muscles controlling the vocal organs), and an anatomical stage
(the physical structure of the vocal organs themselves). Similarly, under the heading
of reception, sounds are transmitted from the ear (anatomy) through the bones of
the middle ear and cochlea (physiology) to the acoustic nerve and brain (neurology).
»>communication; speech perception/production.

speech community A regionally or socially definable human group, identified by

the use of a shared spoken language or language variety. It can vary in size from a
tiny cluster of speakers to whole nations or supranational groups (such as the
Russian-using speech community in Asia). »language 1; variety.

speech defect A regular, involuntary deviation from the norms of pronunciation,

such as a lisp or a weak [r]; also called a speech impairment or impediment. A
more serious and systematic problem, involving a disruption in the linguistic system
which underlies spoken language, would be a speech disorder. »>language pathol-
ogy; lisp; rhotacism; sigmatism.
speech disguise >argot.
speech disorder >language pathology; speech defect.
speech event A communicative exchange made meaningful by culturally-specific
structures of participants, genres, codes, and other elements. Usage in a language is
organized through the higher-level patterning of speech events. Examples of highly
structured speech events are debates and interviews. Much less structured are conver-
sations. »ethnography of speaking.

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speech pathology >language pathology.

speech perception The process whereby a listener extracts a sequence of discrete
phonetic and linguistic units from the continuous acoustic signal of speech. The
term also applies to the study of the neuropsychological mechanisms governing
this ability. »»dichotic listening; motor theory; psycholinguistics; speech chain/
recognition.

speech play >verbal play.

speech production The activity of the respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory

systems during speech, along with the associated neural programming required for
their coordination and use. A contrast is usually drawn with the receptive aspects of
spoken communication, such as speech perception and recognition. »>articulation;
imitation; neurolinguistics; phonation; slip of the tongue; speech chain/perception/
recognition; timing.

speech rate »>rate of speech.

speech reading A method of visually interpreting a speaker who cannot be heard,
by following the movements of the mouth; also called lip reading. It is typically
practised in an expert way by deaf people, but everyone can find it necessary to
speech-read some words on occasion (e.g. in a noisy environment). »»cued speech;
deafness; homophenes.

speech recognition The initial stage of the decoding process in speech perception.
In recent years it has developed into a branch of phonetics which uses research in
acoustic phonetics and speech perception to develop a computer system capable of
responding to a wide range of forms of spoken input; also called automatic speech
recognition (ASR). »>phonetics; speaker recognition; speech perception.

speech science The study ofall the factors involved in the production, transmission,
and reception of speech; also called speech sciences or speech and hearing
science. As well as phonetics, the study includes such subjects as anatomy, physi-
ology, neurology, and acoustics, as applied to speech. »»phonetics.

speech stretcher A device which presents a slowed but undistorted recording of

speech. It is helpful in identifying sounds which might otherwise be lost in the speed
of normal speech, in studying the transitions between adjacent sounds, and in
monitoring such features as intonation. »»experimental phonetics.
speech surrogate A communication system which replaces the use of speech.
Examples include drum languages and whistle languages. »>alternative commun-
ication system; drum language; whistled speech.

speech synthesis The process of generating artificial speech signals, using a model
of the linguistically important acoustic or articulatory properties. Acoustic domain
analogs or terminal analogs replicate the acoustic properties of the vocal tract

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 Sprachgeftihl

in terms of its output; articulatory analogs replicate the anatomical geometry of

the tract between the larynx and the lips. The devices involved are called speech
synthesizers. »experimental phonetics; text-to-speech system.

speech therapy The commonly used name of the profession which diagnoses and
treats disorders of communication, especially of spoken language. A practitioner in
the UK is now officially known as a speech and language therapist (though
this label has not supplanted the former name of speech therapist in popular
use); in the USA, the term is speech (and language) pathologist. The varying
clinical situation in Europe has produced several designations (though they do not
all have the same professional responsibilities), such as orthophonist, logopedist,
and phoniatrist. »>language disorder/pathology.

speed reading »>rapid reading.

spelling The rules which govern the way letters are used to write the words of
speech; also, a particular sequence of letters in a word. A language where there is a
close (one-to-one) correspondence between sounds and letters is said to be spelled
phonetically. A spelling reform movement is devoted to improving the regularity
of the relationship between sound and spelling in a language. »>graphology 1;
haplography; phonetic spelling; spelling bee/pronunciation.

spelling bee A pastime which takes the form of a spelling competition. The concept
emerged in mid-19th century USA, the term bee referring to a social get-together for
a specific purpose (e.g. spinning, or, for that matter, making honey). »>spelling;
verbal play.

spelling pronunciation The pronunciation of a word based on its spelling.

Examples include pronouncing says as /seiz/, instead of the usual /sez/, and pronoun-
cing the /t/ in often ‘because it’s there’. »>spelling.

spirant /'spairant/ >fricative.

split >convergence 2.

split infinitive >infinitive.

spondee /'spondi:/ >foot.

spoonerism A slip of the tongue which involves the exchange of (usually initial)
sounds to produce an unintentionally humorous or embarrassing result. The term
derives from the name of William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), warden of New
College, Oxford, to whom several famous examples are attributed (e.g. dear old queen
becoming queer old dean). »>slip of the tongue.

Sprachbund /'fpra:xbunt/ >areal linguistics.

Sprachgefiihl /'{pra:xgafy:l/ >intuition.

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spread

spread >rounding.
square brackets >brackets.

Sri Lanka (population in 1995 estimated at 18,100,000) ‘The official language is

Sinhala (spoken by c.72% of the people), with Tamil (c.17%) an official regional
language. About 50,000 use a Malay-based creole, especially in the cities, and
c.100,000 have English as a first language. English is used for international purposes.
»>creole; Sinhala; Tamil.

stage name A new personal name adopted for public use by someone in the world
of entertainment. Famous examples include Dirk Bogarde (otherwise Derek Gentron
Gaspart Ulric van den Bogaerde) and Greta Garbo (originally Greta Gustafsson). If the
concept of ‘stage’ is suitably extended, the notion includes such examples as Stalin
(‘steel’, for I.V. Dzhugashvili). »nickname; onomastics; pseudonym.

stammering >stuttering.

standard A prestige variety of language used within a speech community, providing

an institutionalized norm for such purposes as the media and language teaching.
Linguistic forms or dialects that do not conform to this norm are often called
substandard or (more usually, within linguistics) nonstandard. Standardiz-
ation is the natural development of a standard language in a speech community,
or an attempt by a community to impose one dialect as a standard. »language
planning; national language; standard English.

standard English The variety of English used as a standard throughout the

English-speaking world; in Britain often called ‘BBC English’ or ‘Oxford English’,
though these terms relate more to the use of Received Pronunciation than to the
use of grammar and vocabulary. Since the 1960s, particular attention has been paid
to the emergence of differing national standards in areas where large numbers of
people speak English as a first or second language: there are important regional
differences between the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa, the West
Indies, India, West Africa, and several other parts of the English-speaking world. It
remains to be seen how it will be possible to resolve the tension between the
demand for mutual intelligibility among these nations and the demand for linguistic
distinctiveness as a marker of national identity. »English; New Englishes; Received
Pronunciation; standard.

Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) The basis of a scheme

currently being developed in literary and linguistic computing for putting texts into
machine-readable form, using a single encoding system. The scheme avoids the need
for researchers to write special programs to convert texts from one encoding format
into another. »computational linguistics.

Standard Theory The model of generative grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky

in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), viewed at the time as the leading statement

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 stenotypy

concerning the aims and form ofa transformational grammar. The model was revised
in the early 1970s, when it came to be known as the Extended Standard Theory
(EST) - the extension being primarily in relation to the semantic rules, some of
which were allowed to operate with surface structure as input. A further revision in
the mid-1970s, following developments in the notion of movement rules, was called
the Revised Extended Standard Theory (REST). »Chomskyan; generative
grammar; transformation.
starred form »>asterisk.

statement A major sentence function, declarative in form, used chiefly to assert

or report information. In English it typically contains a subject before a verb, as in
The door is open. Statements are usually contrasted with questions, commands,
and exclamations. »>declarative; indicative; sentence.

state verb >dynamic verb.

Static verb >dynamic verb.

Statistical linguistics A branch of linguistics which studies the application of
probabilistic techniques in linguistic theory and description. Examples include the
analysis of frequency and distribution of linguistic units in texts, and the relationship
between word types and tokens. »>lexical density; linguistics; quantitative linguis-
tics; p. 320.

Statistical universal >universal.

stative verb /'steitiv/ >»dynamic verb.
status planning >language planning.

steganography /stega'nvgroafi:/ The use of techniques to conceal the existence of

a message. For example, a message might be reduced in size to a microdot, and
hidden in a postage stamp. Such techniques are common in the field of intelligence.
»>cryptography.

stem The element of word structure to which inflectional affixes are attached. It
may consist solely of a root morpheme (a simple stem, e.g. girl), or of two root
morphemes (a compound stem, e.g. blackbird), or of a root morpheme plus a deriva-
tional affix (a complex stem, e.g. manli + ness). »morphology; root 1.
stenography /sta'nvgrafi:/ >shorthand.
stenotypy /'stenatarpi:/ A mechanical system for producing a shorthand version
of speech. It was invented in 1906 by W.S. Ireland, an American court reporter, and
is mainly used to record the verbatim proceedings of law courts and legislative
meetings. It has a keyboard of 22 keys which the operator strikes using both hands
simultaneously, producing a set of abbreviated words printed without noise on a
roll of paper. The left-hand fingers type consonants occurring before vowels, and

319
stereotype

Rank French German Written English Spoken English

1 de der the the

2 le (a.) die of and
3 la (a.) und to |
4 et in in to
5 les des and of
6 des den a a
7 est Zu for you
8 un (a.) das was that
9 une (a.) von is in
10 du fiir that it
11 que (p.) auf on is
12 dans mit at yes
13 il sich he was
14 a dak with this
15 en dem by but
16 ne sie be on
17 on ist it well
18 qui im an he
19 au eine as have
20 se DDR his for

Statistical linguistics: The 20 most-frequently occurring words in studies

of newspaper writing in English, French and German, and in a corpus of
English conversation, using material gathered in the 1960s. (a = article,
Pp = pronoun).

these are printed on the left of the paper; the right-hand fingers type consonants
occurring after vowels, and these appear on the right. The thumbs type the vowels,
which appear in the centre. »»shorthand; writing.

stereotype 1. In grammar, a sequence of words which resembles a productive

grammatical structure, but which in fact has been learned as a single unit and has
little or no productivity; examples include proverbs, quotations, aphorisms, and
many idioms. »>formula; idiom; productivity; set expression. 2. In semantics, the
set of characteristics which describes a prototype; for example, a stereotyped feature
of cars is that they have four wheels. The theory of stereotype semantics holds
that word meaning includes a stereotype of the object designated by the word.
>> prototype; semantics.

stet An instruction to a printer or reader that an altered or deleted piece of text is

to be retained in its original form. In proof-correction, the convention is to use a
row of dots or dashes below the wrongly corrected word(s). The term is from Latin,
meaning ‘let it stand’. »>proof; typography.

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 strong form

stop A type of consonant involving a complete closure of the oral tract at some
point, such as [p], [t], and [g]. Stops using inward-flowing air are often referred to as
suction stops; stops using outward-flowing air as pressure stops. »>continuant;
manner of articulation; plosive.

stranded Descriptive of an element that is left unattached after a grammatical

analysis moves it out of a construction, or after the rest of the construction has been
moved. For example, a preposition is commonly left stranded when the noun phrase
within the prepositional phrase has been moved, as in That’s the girl you gave it to
(compare That’s the girl to whom you gave it). »>preposition; transformation.
stratificational grammar A linguistic theory devised in the 1960s by US linguist
Sydney M. Lamb (1929-_ ). It models language as a system of several related layers
or strata of structure. »>linguistics.

stress The relative perceived prominence of a unit of spoken language. A stressed

syllable is usually produced by an increase in articulatory force, increased rate of air
flow, and greater muscular tension in the articulators. It is characterized phonetically
by greater intensity than is found in adjacent unstressed syllables, but higher pitch
and longer duration are also typically involved. Several degrees of stress can be
recognized, most commonly primary, secondary, and weak stress, all three
heard in the word antigravity (where grav is primary, an is secondary, and the other
syllables are weak). A sequence of syllables constituting a rhythm unit, containing
one primary stress, is a stress group. Sentence stress or contrastive stress is
the use of stress to express a contrast of meaning in a sentence: The tape ISN’T broken.
Many pairs of words and word sequences can also be distinguished using lexical
stress or word stress (e.g. record as noun Vs. record as verb). A language where the
stresses fall at roughly regular intervals within an utterance is a stress-timed
language. »>accent 2; isochrony; loudness; strong form; syllable.

stress-timed language »>isochrony.

stricture An articulation which restricts the airstream to some degree. It can range
from a complete closure to a slight narrowing. »>articulation.
Strine A jocular name for Australian English, derived from the rapid colloquial
pronunciation of ‘Australian’ as /strain/. The concept received particular attention
in the 1960s, when Afferbeck Lauder’s Let Stalk Strine was published. Several books
in the genre followed, poking fun at other accents. »>dialect; English; Scouse.

string A linear sequence of elements, displaying a particular length and structure,

such as a sentence, phrase, or complex word. A substring is any part of a string
which is itself a string, such as a phrase within a clause. In formal analysis, a string
may also consist of just a single element, or even of no element at all (the empty
or null string). »formal grammar; sequence.
strong form One of two possible pronunciations of a word (typically, a grammatical

321
strong verb

word) in connected speech, which results from the word being stressed. The notion
contrasts with a weak form, where the word is unstressed (e.g. and vs. ’n’). »>stress.

strong verb A verb which changes its root vowel when changing its tense, as in
sing vs. sang. The term contrasts with weak verb, where the past tense is formed
by adding an inflection, as in kick vs. kicked. The distinction is important in the
Germanic languages. »>ablaut; root 1.

structural Descriptive of any approach to the analysis of language which pays

explicit attention to the way linguistic features can be described in terms of patterned
organization (structure). Structuralism in a broad sense developed out of Ferdi-
nand de Saussure’s notion of a language as a system of signs. It led eventually to the
theory that any human institution or behaviour (e.g. religion, literature, dance) can
be analysed in terms of an underlying network of relationships, with the structural
patterns related to basic modes of thought. In a narrow sense, structuralism refers
to the emphasis on the processes of segmenting and classifying utterances promoted
by Leonard Bloomfield in the 1930s, and to the school of thought which emerged,
called structural or structuralist linguistics. Structuralists saw language pri-
marily as a system of formal patterning, especially in grammar and phonology, and
paid little attention to the meaning which the patterns conveyed. The 1960s saw
a reaction to this ‘logocentric’ view. »Bloomfieldian; linguistics; logocentrism;
Saussurian; structure.

structural ambiguity »ambiguous.

structuralism »>structural.

structural semantics >semantics.

structural syllabus »>notional syllabus.

structural word »>grammatical word.

structure A network of interrelated units, in which the significance of the parts

emerges only with reference to the whole. More narrowly, the term is applied to an
isolatable section of this network, such as a particular grammatical area — for example,
‘the structure of the pronoun system’. More narrowly still, it refers to a sequential
pattern of linguistic elements at a given level, as in such notions as ‘phonological
structure’ and ‘clause structure’. »>structural.

stuttering A disorder of speech fluency, marked by a lack of ability to communicate

easily, rapidly, and continuously; also called stammering, especially in the UK.
The most widely recognized symptom is the abnormal repetition of sounds and
syllables, especially at the beginnings of words, but there is a wide range of other
symptoms, such as the abnormal lengthening of sounds, the inability to release a
sound which is being articulated (known as ‘blocking’), erratic stress and rhythm,
and the use of circumlocutions to avoid words which the speaker knows are difficult

322
 subordination

to pronounce. »>blocking; feedback 2; prolongation; slowed speech; speech therapy.

style »>stylistics.

stylistics The study of any situationally distinctive use of language, and of the
choices made by individuals and social groups in their use of language; alternatively,
the study of the aesthetic use of language, in all linguistic domains. Each of these
notions may be referred to as style. The study of style is sometimes called applied
Stylistics, especially when there is an emphasis on the use of style in literary and
nonliterary texts. In its literary applications, the subject brings together the insights
and methods of linguistics and literary criticism; in this context, it has also been
called literary linguistics or linguistic criticism. A contrast is often drawn
between literary stylistics, the study of the linguistic characteristics of literature
as a genre and of the style of authors, and general stylistics, the study of the
whole range of nondialectal varieties of a language. The quantification of stylistic
patterns is the province of stylostatistics or stylometry. The study of the express-
ive or aesthetic function of sound is sometimes called phonostylistics. »>diction;
metrics; poetics; variety.

stylometry /star'lomatri:/ »stylistics.

stylostatistics »>stylistics.

subject (S) A major element of sentence or clause structure, traditionally associated

with the ‘doer’ of an action, as in The dog chased the cat, where the dog is traditionally
described as the grammatical subject. A distinction is often drawn between the
grammatical and the logical or underlying subject, illustrated by the dog in The
cat was chased by the dog. In languages which make inflectional distinctions between
subject and object, the case of the subject is often called the subjective, contrasting
with objective. A subjective genitive occurs when the underlying structure of
the genitive construction is that of subject + verb (e.g. the playing of the footballers =
‘footballers play’). This contrasts with the objective genitive, where the underlying
structure is verb + object (e.g. the building of the castle = ‘build the castle’). »>clause;
genitive; object; topic.

subjective genitive >subject.

subjunctive A grammatical feature typically found in verb forms, sentences, or

clauses, occurring in subordinate clauses to express such attitudes as tentativeness,
vagueness, and uncertainty. The term is used in English linguistics in relation to
such constructions as ifhe were going, formulae such as So be it, and clauses introduced
by that (especially in American English), such as I insist that he leave. »>mood.

subordinating conjunction »>conjunction.

subordination The process or result of linking linguistic units so that they have
different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other, and usually being

323
subscript

a constituent of the other; subordinate is sometimes contrasted with superordi-

nate. A subordinate or dependent clause is illustrated by the when-clause in
John left when the bus arrived; the marker of linkage is when, a subordinator or
subordinating conjunction. »>clause; coordination.

subscript A small letter, numeral, or other symbol set beside and/ or below the
foot of a full-size written character; also called an inferior. It contrasts with a
superscript, which is set beside and/ or above the top of a full-sized character; also
called a superior. »>typography.

substance The undifferentiated raw material out of which language is constructed

—the sound waves of speech (phonic substance) and the marks of writing (graphic
substance). This contrasts with form, the abstract pattern of relationships imposed
on this substance by a language. »>form 1; graphetics; phonetics.

substandard »standard.

substantive /‘sabstantiv/ In some descriptive grammars, a word class which includes

nouns and noun-like items (e.g. the rich). It also sometimes includes pronouns.
»> noun; word class.

substantive universal >universal.

substitution The process or result of replacing one item by another at a particular

place in a structure. In grammar, the structural context in which this replacement
occurs is a substitution frame (e.g. The — is outside), and the set of items which
can be used at a given place is a substitution class. In language teaching, exercises
to improve the ability of learners to carry out this process of replacement are
substitution drills. »>drill; paradigm.

substitution frame »>frame.

substrate /'sabstreit/ A linguistic variety or set of forms which has influenced the
structure or use of a socially dominant variety or language within a community;
also called a substrate language or a linguistic substrate or substratum. An
example is the influence of Celtic on the Latin of ancient Gaul. It contrasts with a
superstrate or superstratum, where the influence is in the other direction (such
as the influence of Norman French on Old English). »language contact.

substring »string.

suction stop »stop.

Sudan (population in 1995 estimated at 31,173,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken by over half the population, and widely used as a lingua franca. There are
c.120 other languages, notably Dinka, Hausa (important as a lingua franca), Nuba,
Nuer, and Zande. There is an Arabic-based creole in certain areas. English is used for
international purposes. »»Arabic; creole; lingua franca.

324
 supraglottal

suffix >affix.

suggestopedia or suggestopaedia /sadzestau'pi:dia/ A method of foreign language

teaching developed by a Bulgarian teacher, Georgi Lozanov, in the 1970s, based on
suggestology, the science of suggestion. The approach takes the view that the brain
(especially the right hemisphere) has great unused potential which can be exploited
for language learning. Suggestopedia uses music, visual images, and relaxation exer-
cises to put the learner into a state of mind where language learning can take place
quickly and effectively. »humanistic.

Sumerian /su:'mietian/ The oldest known language to be preserved in written form,

spoken in southern Mesopotamia (part of modern Iraq) until the 2nd millennium
Bc. Inscriptions date from c.3100 Bc, written in cuneiform script, and there are
several later literary and religious works. It continued in use as a written form long
after its spoken form had become extinct (having been supplanted by Akkadian
c.2000 Bc). The existence of Sumerian was not recognized until cuneiform was
deciphered in the 19th century. Attempts to relate it to other languages have so far
proved unsuccessful, »Akkadian; cuneiform; isolate.

Sundanese or Sunda /'sunda/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages,

spoken by c.27 million people in the western part of Java, Indonesia. Written records
date from the 14th century, and use the Roman alphabet. »»Austronesian.

superfix A vocal effect which extends over more than one sound segment in an
utterance (e.g. pitch, loudness); also called a suprafiix. The notion is particularly used
in the context of a specific grammatical structure, such as a questioning intonation
contour. »>intonation.

superior >subscript.

superlative >degree.

superordinate Descriptive of a linguistic unit higher in a hierarchy than another,

subordinate unit. For example, in I know where she went, the clause I know (or I
know X) is the superordinate clause. »hierarchy; subordination.

superscript >subscript.

superstratuma /'su:pastreitm/ >substrate.

suppletion /sa'pli:{n/ In morphology, a relationship between forms which cannot

be accounted for by a general rule, because the forms involved have different roots.
An example is the relationship between go and went. »morphology; root 1.

suprafix >superfix.

supraglottal Descriptive of the entire area of the vocal tract above the glottis.
»> glottis.

325
suprasegmental

suprasegmental >phonology.

surface structure In transformational grammar, the final stage in the syntactic

representation of a sentence, which provides the input to the phonological
component of the grammar; contrasts with deep structure. The term surface
grammar is sometimes used informally for the superficial properties of a sentence.
»>syntax; transformation.
Suriname or Surinam (population in 1995 estimated at 414,000) The official
language is Dutch. There are c.10 Amerindian languages spoken by small numbers,
and three English-based creoles — Guyanese, Saramaccan, and Sranan (the last used
by c.30% as a first language, and by a further 60% as a second language). Immigrant
languages include Hindi (c.38% of the population), Javanese (c.15%), and Chinese.
English is used for international purposes. »>creole; Dutch; lingua franca.

Survey of English Usage A survey of the grammatical repertoire of adult educated

native speakers of British English, begun in London in 1960 by Randolph Quirk.
The corpus comprises 200 texts of spoken or written material, classified according
to stylistic type. The Survey is still housed at University College London, though
the research unit there has considerably broadened the scope of its enquiries, includ-
ing work on computational parsing and international varieties of English. »>corpus;
International Corpus of English; London—Lund Corpus of Spoken English; Quirkian;
p. 326.

Swahili /swa‘hi:li:/ A Bantu language spoken by c.5 million people as a mother

tongue, mainly in Tanzania and Kenya; also called KiSwahili. It is used as a lingua
franca throughout East Africa by c.30 million, and has official status in Tanzania
and Kenya. It is written in the Roman alphabet, though the oldest preserved writing
(from the 18th-century) uses Arabic. The language has been greatly influenced by
Arabic, from which it has taken a great deal of vocabulary (the name swahili is itself
from an Arabic word meaning ‘of the coast’). »»Bantu; lingua franca.
Swaziland (population in 1995 estimated at 900,000) The official languages are
English and Swati (Swazi), the latter spoken by c.90% of the people (and also used
as an official language in South Africa). Zulu and Tsonga are also found. English is
used for international purposes. »>English.

swearing >taboo language.

Sweden (population in 1995 estimated at 8,889,000) The official language is

Swedish, spoken by c.93% of the population. Other languages include Estonian,
Finnish (c.5%), Latvian, Romani, Syriac, Turkish, and several varieties of Same
(Lappish, c.11,000 speakers in total). English is used for international purposes.
>> Swedish.
Swedish A North Germanic language, a member of the East Scandinavian group,
spoken by c.9 million people in Sweden, by c.300,000 in Finland, where it is also an

326
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official language (alongside Finnish), and by others in Estonia, the USA, and Canada.
Apart from early runic inscriptions, the first Swedish texts emerge out of common
Old Norse in the 13th century. A standard language was established by the end of
the 18th century, fostered by the Swedish Academy (founded in 1786), based on the
dialect of the Stockholm area, and written in the Roman alphabet. »>Icelandic; rune;
Scandinavian; Sweden.

switching »>code switching.

Switzerland (population in 1995 estimated at 6,990,000) The official languages

are German (Swiss German, spoken by c.64% of the population), French (c.19%),
Italian (c.7%), and Rhaetian (Romansch, c.0.6%). German, French, and English are
used for international trade and tourism. »»French; German; Italian; Rhaetian.

syllabary /'silabari:/ A writing system in which the graphic symbols represent

syllables, usually a consonant—vowel sequence. Such systems have been found from
the earliest times (e.g. Mycenaean Greek), and in modern times can be illustrated
from Amharic and Japanese. The number of graphemes in a syllabary can vary from
c.50 to several hundred. »»grapheme; Japanese; kana; syllable; writing.

syllabic >syllable.
syllabic writing »syllabary.
syllable The minimal unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds, acting
as a unit of rhythm. It usually consists of an obligatory mucleus (typically, a
vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Structural
classifications also recognize a division between an initial onset and a following
rhyme (or rime), with the latter further subdivided into a peak followed by a
coda. Onset corresponds to initial margin, peak to nucleus, and coda to final margin.
For example, in the syllable /kat/, /k/ is the onset, /a/ the peak, and /t/ the coda;
/at/ is the rhyme (rhyming with /pat/, /sat/, etc.). A syllable ending in a vowel is an
open syllable; one ending in a consonant is a closed or checked syllable. The
division of a word into syllables is syllabification. A segment which can act as a
syllable nucleus is described as syllabic (e.g. the /n/ of button /"batn/). »consonant;
isochrony; open 2; phonology; vowel.

syllable-timed language >isochrony.

symbol >sign 1.

synchronic linguistics /s1n'kronik/ »diachronic linguistics.

syncope /'sinkapi:/ The deletion of a vowel within a word; often contrasted with
apocope. An example is the British pronunciation of secretary as /'sekritri:/. The
term is sometimes also used for internal consonant deletion. The process is common
in the study of historical sound change; for example, Latin domina ‘lady’ became
Italian donna. »»apocope; sound change.

328
 synthetic language

syncretism /'sinkratizm/ The merging of forms following the loss of inflections;

more generally, identity between two forms of the same lexical item (e.g. jumped as
past tense and past participle). »convergence 2; inflection 1.

syndeton /'sindatn/ The use of conjunctions to link parts of a syntactic construction,

as in They left hastily and angrily. It contrasts with asyndeton /'ersindatn/, which
describes the omission of conjunctions —a type of construction often used to achieve
an economical or dramatic form of expression, as in They left hastily, angrily, sadly.
Both terms come from the Greek rhetorical tradition. »»conjunction; rhetoric.

synecdoche /si'nekdaki:/ A figure of speech in which the part is used for the whole
or the whole is used for the part; the term is from Greek ‘taking up together’. An
example of the first type is the use of wheels for car (I’ve got a new set of wheels); of
the second type is the use of creature for people (Those poor creatures). >»>figurative
language.

synesthaesia /sinas'9i:33/ »phonesthetics.

synesthesia /sinas'6i:3a/ »phonesthetics.

synonymy /siI'nvnemi:/ The relationship of sameness of meaning between lexical

items. Items are synonyms if they are close enough in meaning to allow a choice
to be made between them in some contexts, without this affecting the meaning
of the sentence as a whole; an example is a nice range/selection/choice of flowers.
»>antonymy; sense.

syntactic blend >blending.

syntactic frame >frame.

syntagm /'smntam/ A string of related constituents, usually in linear order; also

called asyntagma. The sequential relationships between the constituents at a given
level of analysis are syntagmatic relations, contrasting with paradigmatic
relations. »>paradigm; syntax.

syntax The study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form
sentences; contrasts with morphology, the study of word structure. More generally,
the study of the interrelationships between all elements of sentence structure (includ-
ing morphemes), and of the rules governing the arrangement of sentences in
sequences. In generative linguistics, the syntactic component contains rules
for the generation of syntactic structures. These structures are analysable into
sequences of syntactic categories or syntactic classes, established on the basis
of the formal relationships that linguistic items have with each other. The study of
the field as a whole is syntactic theory. »>ellipsis; endocentric construction; formal
grammar; generative grammar; grammar 1; morphology; morphosyntax; valency.

synthetic language »>typology of language.

329
Syria

Syria (population in 1995 estimated at 14,325,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken by c.80% of the population. Other languages include Adygey, Aramaic,
Armenian (c.3%), Azerbaijani, Domari (Romani), Kurdish (c.6%), and Syriac. French
is used for international purposes. »»Arabic.

Syriac /‘siri:ak/ A variety of eastern Aramaic, an important Christian liturgical

language between the 2nd and 7th centuries Ap, spoken at first in south-east Asia
Minor, where it developed a scholarly and literary tradition that remained until the
14th century. It was at first chiefly used for the translation of Greek Christian
writings, including the Bible, and later for many Greek medical and scientific texts.
Written records date from the 1st century, in a distinctive script which eventually
developed variant forms (used by different sects). The language is still used in the
liturgy of the Syrian Jacobite Church, and also (though to a much lesser extent) in
the Syrian Catholic Church. »»Aramaic.

system A network of patterned relationships which makes up the organization of

language. It can be divided into a hierarchically ordered arrangement of sub-systems
(finite sets of formally or semantically connected units), such as the tense system,
the pronoun system, and the vowel system. A system with a determinate number
of members is a closed system; new members are not normally created. »>hierarchy;
paradigm; structure. ;

system architecture A computing term used in computational linguistics, refer-

ring to the set of superordinate principles which define the operations of a language
processing system. System architectures specify the components of such a system,
the structural relations between the components, and the flow of control from one
to another component during processing. »computational linguistics.

systematic phonemics A level of representation in generative phonology which

sets up a single underlying form capable of accounting in a regular way for the
phonological variations that relate grammatical structures (e.g. divine, divinity). The
units in these representations are called systematic phonemes, as opposed to the
autonomous phonemes of traditional phonemic phonology, which are established
without reference to grammatical structure. »»generative grammar; phoneme; sys-
tematic phonetics.

systematic phonetics A level of representation in generative phonology which

provides a narrow phonetic transcription of the systematic features of pronunciation
(i.e. excluding those attributable to performance factors). »»performance 1; system-
atic phonemics; transcription.

systemic grammar A grammatical theory developed by Michael Halliday from

scale and category grammar, in which the notion of paradigmatic relationship or
system is made the central explanatory principle. Grammar is concerned to establish
a network of systems of relationships which will account for all the semantically
relevant choices in the language. The emphasis of the theory is on the way language

330
 syZygy

functions in the act of communication, and on the choices which speakers make as
they interact in speech situations. >>Firthian linguistics; scaleand category grammar;
system.
syzygy /'sizidzi:/ A word game devised by Lewis Carroll, in which one word is worked
into another by steps; a type of word-chain. For example, ‘Send MAN on ICE’ is
achieved through MAN-PERMANENT-ENTICE-ICE. »»word game.

331
T
T An abbreviation of transformation.

taboo language Words which people may not use without causing offence, because
they refer to acts, objects, or relationships which are widely felt to be embarrassing,
distasteful, or harmful. Verbal taboos are usually related to sex, the supernatural,
excretion, and death, but in some cultures they extend to other aspects of domestic
life (such as in-laws, private names, and certain animals). Polite society devises
alternative forms of language to refer to these areas. Several types of taboo expression
can be distinguished. Profanity is a relatively mild notion, the choice of language
conveying disrespect for what people hold sacred (usually something or someone
religious). Blasphemy is much more serious, being the expression of gross irrever-
ence towards the divine. Obscenity is language which arouses disgust because of
its crude reference to sexual functions. All of these are loosely included under the
heading of ‘swearing’ or ‘bad language’. The term expletive is used in official
contexts. »avoidance languages; circumlocution; euphemism.

tachistoscope /ta'kistaskoup/ A device used chiefly in reading research which gives

a very brief exposure to a visual image, such as a letter. The term comes from the
Greek word tachys ‘brief, swift’. »reading.

tachygraphy /ta'kigrafi:/ >shorthand.

tacit knowledge /'tasit/ >intuition.

Tadzhik or Tajik /‘tadik/ A member of the Iranian group of languages, spoken

by c.4.4 million people in Tadzhikistan (where it is an official language), Uzbekistan,
and nearby territories. The largely Muslim population writes the language in the
Arabic alphabet, but Cyrillic is also used in the republics of the former USSR.
»>Iranian; Tadzhikistan.

Tadzhikistan (population in 1995 estimated at 5,367,000) The official languages

are Tadzhik (spoken by c.62% of the population) and Russian (c.5%). Other languages
include Uzbek (c.16%), Farsi, and Pashto. »»Russian; Tadzhik.

tag 1. A structure used in tag questions, typically consisting of an auxiliary verb

plus a pronoun, attached to the end of a statement in order to convey a negative or
positive orientation (e.g. It’s outside, isn’t it?). Some grammarians also recognize tag
statements (e.g. That was nice, that was). »»question. 2. A grammatical label

332
 Tamil

attached to a word in a computer corpus to indicate its class. The procedure is known
as tagging. »>corpus; word class.
Tagalog /to'ga:leg/ >Pilipino.

tagmemnics /tag'mi:miks/ A system of linguistic analysis developed by US linguist

Kenneth Pike (1912-__), in which language is seen as comprising the three modes
of phonology, lexicon, and grammar. The relationship of phonology to phoneme
and of lexicon to morpheme is paralleled by grammar to tagmeme — a functional
slot within a construction frame, where a class of substitutable items can occur.
>»»>frame; morpheme; phoneme; substitution.

Tahitian /ta'‘hi:jn/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken by

c.125,000 people in the Society Islands, especially Tahiti (where it is an official
regional language), New Caledonia, and New Zealand, and widely used as a lingua
franca throughout French Polynesia. It is written in the Roman alphabet. >>Austrone-
sian; lingua franca.
Tai /ta1/ A family of c.60 languages found in south-east Asia, in an area centred on
Thailand, and extending north-east into Laos, north Vietnam, and China, and
north-west into Myanmar (Burma) and India. The spelling ‘Tai’ is to avoid confusion
with the main language of the family, Thai. There are three main groups, spoken in
the south-western, central, and northern areas by a total of c.75 million people.
Most speakers belong to the south-western group. Chief languages include Thai,
Lao, Shan, Yuan, Nung, and Tho. The relationship between Tai and other families
is unclear: links have been proposed with both the Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian
families. Speaker estimates for all languages, in this part of the world, are highly
speculative. »Austronesian; Lao; Sino-Tibetan; Thai.

Taiwan (population in 1995 estimated at 21,419,000) The official language is

Chinese, spoken by almost everyone, chiefly Taiwanese (Southern Min, 67%), with
Hakka (11%) and Mandarin (20%) also used. There are c.20 other (mainly Austrone-
sian) languages, spoken by small numbers. English is used for international purposes.
»> Chinese.
Talaing /ta'lamy/ >Mon.
tamber/tambre »>timbre.
Tamil /‘tamil/ A member of the Dravidian family of languages, spoken by c.65
million people, chiefly in India (where c.59 million use it as the official state language
of Tamil Nadu), Sri Lanka (c.3 million), Malaysia, and many parts of the Far East,
eastern and southern Africa, and the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is
written in the Tamil alphabet, found in inscriptions dating from the 3rd century Bc,
with a literary tradition from the 1st century aD, thus (apart from Sanskrit) providing
the oldest literature in India. Present-day Tamil is found written in the Grantha
alphabet, used for Sanskrit texts, and in an everyday version called Vattelluttu

333
Tanzania

(‘round script’). The language is found in two main varieties, in a relationship of

diglossia. »>diglossia; Dravidian; Sanskrit.

Tanzania (population in 1995 estimated at 31,363,000) The official language is

Swahili (spoken by over 90% of the population as a second language). There are over
120 local languages, notably Nyamwezi (c.930,000), Makonde (c.900,000), Gogo
(c.1.3 million), Haya (c.1.2 million), Sukuma (c.5 million), and Chagga (c.1 million).
Swahili is an important lingua franca. English was a joint official language until
1967. »>English; lingua franca; Swahili.

tap >>flap.

target A hypothetical articulatory state, called a target articulation, used as a

reference point when describing speech production in dynamic terms. An analogous
construct in speech perception is the auditory target, proposed to explain the
ability of the listener to identify the common factors in different accents and voices.
»> articulation; speech perception/production.

target language A language or variety that is the goal of a linguistic operation.

Examples include a language into which one is translating, or a language which is
being taught to foreigners. »>source.

Tasmanian »>Indo-Pacific.

Tatar /'ta:to/ A member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic family of languages,
spoken by c.8 million people chiefly in Russia (c.6 million) in the Tatar region (where
it is an official language), and also in parts of Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and China.
It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and there is a literary language based on the
dialect of the Kazan area. »>Turkic.

ta-ta theory >ding-dong theory.

tautology An unnecessary repetition of a word or idea in speech or writing;

repeating something a second or third time without cause. In the philosophy of
language, it refers to such self-defining sentences as A bachelor is an unmarried man;
also called analytic sentences. »»>pleonasm.

taxonomic linguistics An approach to linguistics which is predominantly or

exclusively concerned with procedures of segmentation and classification. In the
history of ideas in linguistics, it contrasts with generative linguistics, which
stresses the role of underlying structure in linguistic analysis. » generative grammar;
linguistics.

Teaching English as a Foreign Language »Teaching English to Speakers of

Other Languages (TESOL).

Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) /'ti:svl/ The

teaching of English to anyone who does not have it as a mother tongue; used thus

334
 telic verb

chiefly in American English. Annual TESOL conventions are now a major feature
of the English-teaching world in many countries. In British usage, a distinction is
widely drawn between two types of situation. (1) English may be taught in countries
where it is not the mother tongue, but none the less has a widespread special status
within the community (being used for communication in such areas as education,
broadcasting, business, law, or government); in this context it is referred to as
Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL). There are over 60 such
countries, including India, the Philippines, and Ghana. The TESL notion has also
been used to describe the teaching of English to immigrant and other groups who
live within a country where English is the first language — people who need to speak
English at work or in school, but who speak their mother tongue at home. (2) English
may be taught in countries where it is not the mother tongue nor does it have any
special status, as in Japan, France, Sweden, and most other countries; in this context
it is referred to as Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). »English;
language teaching.

technique >method.
technography A writing system devised for a specialized field. Examples include
phonetic transcription, chemical notation, Seer eae symbols, and computer
machine code. »>writing.

TEFL (informally /'tefl/) An abbreviation of Teaching English as a Foreign

Language.

teknonymy /tek'npnimi:/ The custom of naming a parent after a child, found in

certain primitive tribes, such as ‘mother of the red-haired one’ or ‘father of twins’.
The term (a tekmonymnic) derives from the Greek word for ‘child’. »onomastics.

telegrammatic speech Descriptive of an elliptical style of speech in which gram-

matical words and inflectional endings tend to be omitted; also called telegraphic
speech. The name derives from the written style used in the days when telegrams
were a common method of communication, and people were charged by the word
(e.g. Arriving Monday. Meet train station). This style is still found in any context where
a payment-by-the-word principle applies, such as want-ads in newspapers. The term.
has also been used as an impressionistic description of the simplified speech used
by young children, such as Man kick ball. »>ellipsis.
telestich /ta'lestik/ >acrostic.

teletext /'teli:tekst/ The transmission of graphic data from a central source to a

television screen; also called teletex. The approach is known primarily through its
use by the broadcasting services, where it deals with such topics as news, weather,
and sports results. In Britain, the BBC service is called Ceefax, and the ITV service
Oracle. >»>viewdata.
telic verb /'telik/ A verb expressing an event where the activity has a clear terminal

335
Telugu

point (e.g. kick). The contrast is with an atelic verb, where the event has no such
natural end point (e.g. play). »>aspect; inceptive; verb.

Telugu /'telugu:/ A member of the Dravidian family of languages, spoken by c.73

million people chiefly (c.66 million), in south-east India in Andhra Pradesh (where
it is the official state language). It is written in the Telugu alphabet, with records
dating from the 7th century, and a literary tradition from about the 11th century.
The language is found in two main varieties, in a relationship of diglossia. »>diglossia;
Dravidian.

tempo The linguistic use of speed. There are several contrasts of meaning which
can be marked by an increase or decrease in tempo. For example, speakers may speed
up while expressing interest or uttering a parenthetic remark; they may siow down
while being sarcastic or giving an utterance special emphasis. Contrasts in tempo
are analysed in nonsegmental phonology, along with the study of pitch, loudness,
and rhythm. »>prosody; rate of speech; rhythm.

temporal Descriptive of a word or construction which refers to the time of an

action or event. Temporal conjunctions include after and when; temporal adverbials
include then and three weeks ago; and temporal clauses can be illustrated by when the
clock struck four. »>adverbial; clause; conjunction.

tense 1. The grammatical expression of the time of a situation described in a prop-

osition, relative to some other time; traditionally classified into present, past, and
future, with other contrasts recognized depending on the language. Tense forms are
usually defined as variations in the morphological form of the verb (e.g. I jump vs. I
jumped ), but some analyses allow the use of auxiliary verbs to be classified as tenses
(e.g. I have jumped, I will jump). »>aorist; aspect; auxiliary verb; future tense; historic
present; imperfect; morphology; past/present tense; preterite; verb. 2. >tension.

tension The overall muscular effort used in producing a sound, usually classified
into temse vs. lax, or fortis vs. lenis. Tense sounds are produced with a relatively
strong muscular effort, involving a greater movement of the upper vocal tract away
from the position of rest, and a relatively strong spread of acoustic energy; examples
include high front or high back vowels. Lax sounds are produced with less muscular
effort and movement, and are relatively short and indistinct; examples include
centralized vowels. »»vocal tract; vowel.

term bank A data bank of terminology in a specialized field, compiled to correlate

and standardize terms either within a language or between languages. For example,
the European Union term bank known as Eurodicautom (European Automatic Dic-
tionary) contains a large number of items in the official languages of the EU. Each
term or abbreviation is listed along with a contextual example, equivalent items in
other EU languages, a definition, and bibliographical references. »>lexicography;
translation; vocabulary; p. 337.

336
 text

DO TERM
7% POQ01 -DLL V-26
PRESS L FOR TERMINOLOGY OR X FOR ABBREVIATION
*L
TYPE CODE OF SOURCE LANGUAGE
DG GERMAN DK _DANISH EG ENGLISH FG FRENCH
IT ITALIAN NG DUTCH PT PORTUGUESE SP SPANISH
*EG
TYPE CODE(S) OF TARGET LANGUAGE(S) WITH SINGLE SPACE BETWEEN
(FOR EXAMPLE: DG NG) OR A FOR ANY LANGUAGES
*A
SOURCE LANGUAGE —:EG
TARGET LANGUAGE(S) :DG IT FG NG DK SP PT
SUBJECT CODE ;
PRESS Q OR ANOTHER COMMAND

TYPE YOUR QUESTION

*INFLATION
DOC. = 1. PAGE= "1
BE= BIM TY= TFI74 Ni= 00381228 DATE = 750220 CF = 4
CM EC4 EOB
EG VE INFLATION
PH PRICE INFLATION IS MOST LIKELY TO OCCUR WHEN DEMAND
INCREASES WHILE THE LABOUR SUPPLY 1$ TIGHT AND THE
INDUSTRIAL CAPACITY 1S FULLY UTILIZED...WHEN SOURCES OF
SUPPLY DRY UP..
FG VE INFLATION
PH EXCES DE POUVOIR D‘'ACHAT OU EXCES DES MOYENS DE PAIEMENT.
ON LA CONFOND SOUVENT...AVEC LA SIMPLE HAUSSE DES PRIX.
OR CELLE-C! EST LA CONSEQUENCE DE L’INFLATION ET NON DE
L'INFLATION ELLE-MEME,
PRESS C TO CONTINUE OR GIVE ANOTHER COMMAND

The result of an on-line search for the term inflation in the Eurodicautom
term bank.

terminology The set of technical words used in a particular subject, such as physics,
law, cricket — or language study. Terms can be explained in specialized dictionaries
(such as this one), term banks, glossaries, and other handbooks. »>dictionary; jargon;
term bank; thesaurus.

TESL An abbreviation of Teaching English as a Second Language.

TESOL Anabbreviation of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages.

tetrameter >metrics.

Tex-Mex >code-mixing; Spanish.

text A piece of naturally occurring spoken, written, or signed discourse identified

for purposes of analysis or description. It is often established as a language unit with
a definable communicative function, such as a conversation, a poster, or a road sign.

337
textlinguistics

Not many men speak only Esperanto.

The study of the defining properties of texts — what constitutes their textuality or
texture — is carried on by textlinguistics. »corpus; discourse analysis.

textlinguistics >text.

text retrieval The process of searching a linguistic database for an individual item
of text, such as a word, a phrase, or a dictionary entry. The procedure uses indexes
especially constructed for the purpose. »computational linguistics.

text-to-speech system A system of speech synthesis designed to transform conven-

tional orthographic representations of language into their spoken form. Its applica-
tions include information technology and aids for the disabled, such as reading
machines for the blind. »»speech synthesis.

T forms >T/V forms.

TG An abbreviation of transformational grammar.

Thai /ta1/ The main member of the Tai family of languages, spoken by c.25 million
people, chiefly in Thailand, with some in Vietnam, China, and Laos; formerly called
Siamese. It is written in the Thai alphabet, derived from Devanagari, though the
Roman alphabet is used in China. A literary tradition dates from the 13th century.
»> Devanagari; Tai; Thailand.

Thailand (population in 1995 estimated at 60,100,000) The official language is

standard Thai, spoken by c.40% of the people, with other varieties used by c.50%.
There are c.70 other languages, notably Chinese (chiefly Southern Min, c.1 million),

338
 tick-tack

Malay (c.2.4 million), and Khmer (c.1 million). English is used for international
purposes. >>Thai.

that-clause A clause in English which is introduced by the conjunction that, or in

which that is possible, such as I said (that) it was ready. »>clause.
theme The first major constituent of a sentence, an important element in the
sentence’s thematic structure. The process of moving an element to the front of
the sentence to act as theme is thematization or thematic fronting. »>fronting;
- information structure; topic.

theography The study of the language which people use in order to talk about
God. The study of religious language in general is sometimes called theolinguistics.
>> linguistics.

theoretical grammar »>grammar 1.

thesaurus A book of words and phrases grouped on the basis of their meaning.
The most influential and popular work is the Thesaurus of Peter Mark Roget (1779-
1869), first published in 1852. Roget divided the vocabulary into six main areas:
abstract relations, space, matter, intellect, volition, and affections. Each area was
then given a detailed and exhaustive sub-classification, resulting in c.1000 semantic
categories. The semantic information in a thesaurus complements that found in a
dictionary: in a dictionary, you know a word and wish to discover its meaning; in
a thesaurus, you are aware of a meaning, and wish to discover the relevant word(s).
»>lexicography.
third person >person.
thorn The name of the runic symbol p used in Old English and some Middle English
manuscripts, corresponding to the sounds of th in Modern English. The name is also
used in phonetic transcription to represent the voiceless interdental fricative in such
words as thin - and thorn. »>English; fricative.

Tibetan A member of the Tibeto-Burman group of Sino-Tibetan languages, spoken

by c.1 million people in China, chiefly in the Tibetan region (Xizang), where it has
official status, and by c.250,000 in other countries, especially India and Nepal.
Speaker estimates are highly uncertain, because of the dominant influence of Chinese
in the area in recent decades. It is written in the Tibetan alphabet. Written records
date from the 7th century, and a predominantly Buddhist literature dates from the
13th century. There are several major dialects, which are sometimes viewed as
separate languages. »»>Sino-Tibetan.

Tibeto-Burman »>Sino-Tibetan.

tick-tack A signing system used at dog tracks and racecourses in Britain to circulate
information about the way bets are being placed. The signs indicate the amount of
a bet, a horse or dog number, and the number of a race. A signer acts as an agent

opt)
Tigrinya

for a group of bookmakers who have bought his ‘twist card’, on which the dogs and
horses are given different numbers to those on the official race card. The same set
of tick-tack signs is used by all signers, but only those who have an individual signer’s
twist card will be able to interpret what a number refers to. »>sign language.
Tigrinya /t''grmja/ A member of the Semitic language family, spoken by c.3 million
people in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is written in the Amharic alphabet.
Written texts are of recent origin, and consist largely of missionary and educational
materials. »Ambharic; Semitic.
tilde /‘tilda/ A diacritic [~] typically used in phonetic transcription to mark a nasal
quality. It is also used in some writing systems, such as Spanish sefior, where it
indicates a palatal quality of 7. »»palate; transcription.

timbre (also spelled tamber or tambre) /‘tamba, ‘trmba/ The attribute of auditory
sensation in terms of which a listener can judge the dissimilarity between sounds
of otherwise identical pitch, loudness, and length; sometimes called the ‘colour’ or
‘tonal quality’ of a sound. For example, an oboe and a clarinet playing the same
note with identical loudness and length will still sound distinct, because of their
differences in timbre; and the same kind of distinction applies to speech, in such
areas as voice quality and vowel description. »»prosody; quality 1; voice quality.

timing Temporal constraints on the articulation and sequencing of sounds in

speech production. For example, important matters of timing are involved in the
programming of phonotactic sequences or the coordination of musculature. >>artic-
ulation; phonotactics; speech production.

tip >apical.

Tiv A language spoken around the Benue River in south-eastern Nigeria by c.2.2
million people. It isa non-Bantu member of the Benue-Congo language family, and
is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Benue-Congo.

Tlingit /‘tlmgit/ >Na-Dene.

Toba Batak /'touba ‘batak/ »>Batak.
Tocharian or Tokharian /ta'keorian/ An Indo-European language spoken in the
northern part of Chinese Turkistan during the first millennium ap. It is now extinct.
Documents dating from the 7th century were discovered only in the 1890s, and
translated a decade later. They indicated the existence of two dialect areas— Tocharian
A, spoken in the east, and Tocharian B, spoken in the west. The language, written
in a syllabic script, is largely preserved in various kinds of commercial document
and Buddhist religious text. The relationship between the dialects is unclear, and little
has been deduced about the speakers of the language. » Indo-European; syllabary.
Togo (population in 1995 estimated at 4,074,000) The official language is French.
There are c.40 other languages, notably Ewe (spoken by c.20% of the population as

340
 Tongan

a first language, and widely used as a lingua franca, especially in the south), Kabre,
and Gurma. French is used for international purposes. »»French; lingua franca.

to-infinitive >infinitive.

Tokelau /'taukalau/ (population in 1995 estimated at 1500) The official

language is English. Almost everyone speaks an Austronesian language, Tokelau.
»> English.

Tokharian »>Tocharian.

Tok Pisin /'tok 'pizin/ A pidgin language widely spoken within Papua New Guinea,
especially in the north of the country. Many now use it as a mother tongue (c.50,000),
and as a lingua franca it may be used by over half the population (c.2 million). It is an
English-based pidgin, influenced by local Austronesian languages. »»Austronesian;
Papua New Guinea; pidgin.

tone The linguistic functioning of pitch at word level. Tones are usually classified
in terms of pitch range and direction into high vs. low, and rising vs. falling vs.
level, with more complex sequences (such as rising-falling) often recognized. In a
tone language, tone is one of the features which determines the lexical meaning
of a word. The notion is also used as part of the study of intonation. Here, amuclear
tone is the most prominent pitch level in an intonation unit (also called a tone
unit or tone group). The study of the phonetic properties of tone is tonetics,
and contrastive tones are classified as tomemes, the province of tonemics. The
general study of the forms and uses of tone in language is sometimes called tonology.
»>contour; falling tone; intonation; pitch.

tonemics >tone.

tone of voice. >paralanguage.

tonetics >tone.

tone unit »>contour; tone.

Tonga (population in 1995S estimated at 105,000) The official languages are Tongan,
spoken by most of the population, and English. English is used for international
purposes. »>English; Tongan.

Tongan /'tongen/ A member of the Austronesian family of languages, spoken by

c.103,000 people on Tonga (the Friendly Islands), where it is an official language
(along with English) and by c.20,000 more in Hawaii, New Zealand, and other Pacific
islands. It is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Austronesian; Tonga.

341
tongue

Teeth
Hard palate (alveolar)
ridge

Soft palate

Uvula Tip

Blade

Front

Epiglottis Centre
Back

The main parts of the tongue, in relation to the roof of the mouth.

tongue The organ of articulation most involved in speech sounds — all the vowels
and most of the consonants. Many articulations are classified with reference to the
part of the tongue involved: from front to back, the tip or apex, the blade or front,
the centre or top, the back or dorsum, and the root. »>vocal organs; above.

tongue slip »>slip of the tongue.

tongue twister A text made up of words containing the same or similar sounds,
which has to be said as rapidly as possible. A familiar English example is She sells
sea-shells by the sea shore. Tongue twisters provide an example of an unusual kind of
word game — one which relates to the spoken medium only. »»word game.

tonic >nucleus; tonicity.

tonicity /ta'nisiti:/ The place of greatest prominence in an intonation unit, called

the tonic syllable. The prominence is usually the result of pitch change. For
example, in the sentence. There WAS a cat in the larder, the word was would normally
be said with a strong falling tone, and would be the tonic syllable of that tone unit.
»> intonation; tone.

tonology >tone.

topic >given; paragraph.

toponymy /ta'ponimi:/ >onomastics.

342
 transition

Tosk »>Albanian.

total communication >manualism.

trade language >pidgin.

traditional grammar »>grammar 1.

transcription A method of writing down speech sounds in a systematic and
consistent way; also called a notation, script, or transcript. In a phonetic
transcription, sounds are symbolized on the basis of their articulatory/auditory
identity, regardless of their function in a language; this is sometimes called an
impressionistic transcription. In a phonemic transcription, the only units
to be symbolized are those which have a linguistic function. In an allophonic
transcription, phonetic details are added to the phonemic transcription. A pho-
netic transcription that is relatively detailed is a marrow transcription; one
less detailed is a broad transcription. »>allo-; diacritic; phoneme; phonetics;
phonology; transliteration.
transfer The influence of linguistic features of one language upon another, in such
contexts as bilingualism and language learning; also called tramsference. Positive
transfer makes learning easier, because forms from the native language work correctly
in the foreign language. Negative transfer (or interference) takes place when
the use of a native form produces an error in the foreign language. Subject—verb-
object word order positively transfers into French, most of the time; but with
pronouns, students have to beware that the English pattern (J saw them) does not
transfer into French (Je les ai vu, not *J’ai vu les). »»contrastive analysis; language
learning.

transformation (T) A formal linguistic operation which enables two levels of

structural representation to be placed in correspondence. A transformational
rule (T-rule or transform) consists of a sequence of symbols which is rewritten
as another sequence, according to certain conventions — for example, English state-
ments and questions can be related by transforming the order of the subject and
first auxiliary verb, as in It’s there vs. Is it there?). A grammar which makes use of
these notions is a transformational grammar; and the term is also applied to
the theoretical approach employed. In recent years, transformational grammars
have been contrasted with non-transformational grammars such as relational
grammar and generalized phrase-structure grammar. »>deep structure; generative
grammar; standard theory; syntax.

transient >transition 2.

transition 1. In phonology, the way adjacent sounds are linked. Close transitions
involve an articulatory continuity between successive sounds; open transitions
involve a break in this continuity. »»glide 1; liaison; phonology. 2. In acoustic
phonetics, the acoustic change that takes place as the vocal organs move to and from

343
transitivity

the articulatory positions of consonants, especially plosives. These transitional

features or transients can be seen on a spectrogram. »>articulation; formant;
plosive; spectrograph.

transitivity A category used in the grammatical analysis of clause/sentence con-

structionsto define the types of relationship between a verb and the presence or
absence of object elements. With tramsitive constructions, the verb takes a direct
object (e.g. I saw the book); with intransitive constructions, it does not (e.g. *J
arrived the town). Verbs which take two objects are sometimes called ditransitive.
Verbs that are marginal to one or the other of these categories are pseudo-
intransitive (e.g. The eggs are selling well). »object; unaccusative; verb.

translation The process or result of turning the expressions of one language (the
‘source language’) into the expressions of another (the ‘target language’), so that
the meanings correspond. Several levels of translation exist. In a word-for-word
translation, each word (or morpheme) in the source language is translated by a word
(or morpheme) in the target. The result often makes little sense, especially when
idioms are involved. In a literal translation, the linguistic structure of the source
text is followed, but is normalized according to the rules of the target language. In
a free translation, the linguistic structure of the source language is ignored, and
an equivalent is found based on the meaning it conveys. The three levels can be
illustrated by French ‘translations’ of It’s raining cats and dogs: Il est pleuvant chats et
chiens (word-for-word); Il pleut des chats et des chiens (literal); I] pleut a verse (free).
»>back translation; false friends; interpreting; machine translation; translatology;
transliteration.

translatology The study of translation, subsuming both interpretation of oral

discourse and translation (in a narrow sense) of written discourse. The process of
transferring an oral message from one language to another at the moment of utterance
is variously known as simultaneous interpretation or simultaneous transla-
tion. The oral transference of a written message from one language to another is
sight translation. » interpreting; translation.

transliteration The conversion of one writing system into another. Each character
of the source language is given an equivalent character in the target language — as
in the representation of Russian names in English. Transliteration is commonly
carried out for the names of people, places, institutions, and inventions. Several
systems may exist for a single language. Transliteration needs to be distinguished
from transcription, in which the sounds of the source word are conveyed by letters
in the target language. »»kana; Romaji; Roman alphabet; transcription.

tree In generative grammar, a two-dimensional branching diagram used as a means

of displaying the internal hierarchical structure of sentences as generated by a set
of rules; also called a tree diagram. The internal relationships of nodes within

344
 trope

N will V NP PP
m Renee
¥
rien pcan | SOREOMEN|
take AO
P
[a
NP
ee!
the car to 2 .

the beach
A tree diagram showing a possible analysis of a sentence. In the phase, my friend, the
NP is the mother node of the phrase; D and N are daughter nodes, and are sisters of
each other; M refers to a modal element.

the tree are described using ‘family tree’ terminology (mother, daughter, sister).
>> generative grammar; hierarchy; phrase-marker; above.

trial >dual.

triglossia >diglossia.

trigraph /'traigraf/ A sequence of three written symbols representing one speech

sound. Examples include manoeuvre, where the oeu represents /u:/, and French eau
‘water’, pronounced /o:/. »>digraph.

trill A type of consonant in which there is a rapid vibration at the point of contact
between the articulators; also called a trilled or rolled consonant. An example is
uvular [R]. »consonant; uvular.

trimeter >metrics.

Trinidad and Tobago (population in 1995 estimated at 1,270,000) The official

language is English. About 36,000 people on Tobago speak an English-based creole
widespread throughout the Lesser Antilles, and there is also a French-based creole
used in Trinidad (Trinidadien). There are c.50,000 speakers of Hindi on the islands.
English is used for international trade and tourism. »>creole; English.

triphthong /'trif6pn/ A vowel with two perceptible changes of quality within a

single syllable. Examples include some pronunciations of the words tire /ta1a/ and
hour /ava/ in English. »diphthong; monophthong; vowel.

trisyllable A linguistic unit (typically a word) consisting of three syllables.

»> syllable.

trochee /'trauki:/ >foot.

trope >figurative language.

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Tswana or Setswana

Tswana or Setswana /'tswa:na/ A member of the Bantu group of Benue-Congo

languages, spoken in many dialects by c.3.9 million people, chiefly in South Africa
(c.2.8 million) and Botswana (1 million), where it is one of the official languages.
The language is sometimes referred to as Western Sotho. It is written in the Roman
alphabet. »Benue-Congo; Botswana; Sotho.

TTR »>lexical density.

Tuareg /'twareg, 'tuereg/ >Berber.

Tungus /tun'gu:z/ >Evenki.

Tunisia (population in 1995 estimated at 8,902,000) The official language is Arabic,

spoken by c.98% of the population. There are a few Berber languages, spoken
by unclear numbers, and several thousand speakers of French. French is used for
international purposes. »>Arabic.

Tupian /tu:'pizon/ »Andean-Equatorial.

Turkey (population in 1995 estimated at 62,964,000) The official language is

Turkish, spoken by c.90% of the population. There are c.30 other languages, notably
Adygey, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Kurdish (c.4 million), and Romani.
English is used for international purposes. »>Turkish.

Turkic A group of c.40 languages within the Altaic family, spoken in Asia Minor
and southern Asia by over 100 million people. Major languages in the south-west
include Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Turkmen; in the south-east, Uzbek and Uighur;
and in the north-west, Tatar, Kazakh, Kirghiz, and Bashkir. Many of the languages
are spoken by small numbers, especially in the north-east. Literary forms date from
the 8th century, in the case of the Asian languages. Formerly, the Arabic alphabet
was in general use, but in the present century this has been largely replaced by
Roman (in Turkey) or Cyrillic alphabets. Linguistically, the distinctive feature of
most languages in the family is the use of vowel harmony. »>Azerbaijani; Bashkir;
Chuvash; harmony; Kazakh; Kirghiz; Tatar; Turkish; Turkmen; Uighur; Uzbek; Yakut.

Turkish The chief member of the Turkic group of the Altaic family of languages,
spoken by c.59 million people, chiefly in Turkey (c.55 million), with some in Bulgaria
and other nearby countries, including Turkish Cyprus (where it is an official lan-
guage), and in several European countries as an immigrant language. The language
has three periods, distinguished as Old Turkish (13th-15th centuries), Middle Turkish
(16th-18th centuries), and Modern Turkish thereafter. The golden age of literature
in the language followed the capture of Constantinople (1453). Though Turkish was
previously written in the Arabic alphabet, the Roman alphabet was introduced in
1929 as part of Kemal Atattirk’s modernization programme in Turkey, which included
amovement for language reform. Turkish is well known for its use of vowel harmony:
generally, all the vowels of a word must be either front or back, and there are

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constraints on whether they may be rounded or unrounded. »harmony; rounding;

Turkey; Turkic; vowel.

Turkmen A member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic family of languages, spoken
by c.S.4 million people, chiefly (c.3.4 million) in Turkmenistan (where it is an
official language), parts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and also in Iran, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and Iraq. It has a literary tradition from the 14th century, with a new
standard introduced in the present century. It was traditionally written in the Arabic
alphabet, but in the present century the Cyrillic alphabet came to be used in the
republics of the former Soviet Union, with the Roman alphabet widespread else-
where. »>Cyrillic; Turkmenistan; Turkic.

Turkmenistan (population in 1995 estimated at 4,322,000) The official languages

are Turkmen (spoken by c.80% of the population), and Russian (c.8%). Other lan-
guages include Baluchi and Uzbek. »»Russian; Turkmen.

turn In conversation analysis, a single contribution of a participant in a conver-

sation, preceded and followed by speech from other participants; also called a
conversational turn. In this framework, turn-takimg is seen as a coordinated and
rule-governed aspect of conversational interaction. »»adjacency pair; conversation
analysis.

Tuvalu (population in 1995 estimated at 10,100) The official language is English.

Tuvaluan is spoken by almost everyone. >»>English.

T/V forms Alternative pronoun forms expressing different kinds of orientation to

the addressee. The T forms (so-called from the initial of French fu) are typically
singular and mark familiarity; the V forms (from French vous) are typically plural
and mark politeness. Other languages contrast 2nd and 3rd person pronouns in a
similar way, such as Spanish tu (familiar), Usted (polite). A mutual use of T encodes
intimacy and social closeness; a mutual use of V encodes respect and social distance.
Asymmetrical usage identifies a power or status imbalance. »»address, forms of;
pronoun.

twin language >idioglossia.

type-token ratio >lexical density.

typescript Printed material produced with a typewriter. Traditional typewriters

have the advantage over everyday handwriting, in terms of clarity and speed, but
they lack the range of typographic contrasts available in printing (such as variations
in type size and shape, and the provision of special symbols), and they employ
several idiosyncratic conventions (such as the use of underlining for italics). Modern
word-processors and electronic typewriters have overcome many of these disadvan-
tages. »>typography; writing.

typo A mistake made by a typist or typesetter when composing a line of print;

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typography

technically called a literal. The notion usually applies to single letters or very short
sequences. »>typography.

typography The study of the selection and organization of letter-forms and other
graphic features of the printed page. The subject deals with all matters which affect
the appearance of a page, and which contribute to the effectiveness of a printed
message. These include the shapes and sizes of letters, diacritics, punctuation marks,
and special symbols; the distances between letters and words; the length of lines;
the space between lines; the size of margins; the extent and location of illustrations;
the use of colour; the selection of headings; and all other factors to do with spatial
configuration (or ‘layout’). »»ascender; bold; diacritic; font; graphic translatability;
headline; italics; indention; leading; letter; ligature; point size; punctuation; serif;
sort; subscript; typo; writing.

typological linguistics >typology of language.

typology of language A branch of linguistics which studies the structural similiari-

ties between languages, regardless of their history; also called typological linguis-
tics. Typological comparison is part of an attempt to establish language relationships
especially in cases where there is no historical evidence available to support a
classification on genetic grounds. Several notions have been recognized. An ana-
lytic, isolating, or root language is one in which the words are invariable, and
syntactic relationships are shown by word order, such as Chinese and Vietnamese.
This notion contrasts with a synthetic, fusional, or inflectimg (also called
inflected or inflectional) language, where the words typically contain more
than one morpheme, but there is no one-to-one correspondence between these
morphemes and the linear structure of the word. Examples include Latin, Greek,
and Arabic. An agglutinative or agglutinating language is one in which words
are built up by stringing forms together, often into quite lengthy sequences. Turkish,
Japanese, and Swahili are of this type. An incorporating or polysynthetic lan-
guage is one characterized by long, complex word forms, containing a mixture of
agglutinative and inflectional features, often functioning as entire sentences. This
type (not recognized in all classifications) can be seen in Australian aboriginal
languages. »>genetic classification; inflection 1; language 1; morpheme; root 1; word
order.

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U
Uand non-U A distinction which describes the linguistic demarcation that suppos-
edly exists between ‘upper-class’ (U) and ‘other’ (non-U) usage in British English. It
was introduced in 1954 by British linguist Alan Ross, and popularized by novelist
Nancy Mitford soon after. It reflected distinctive pronunciation and vocabulary, as
well as written language conventions. Examples include U luncheon vs. non-U dinner,
U lavatory vs.non-U toilet, and U sick vs. non-U ill. Although a personal and subjective
account, it drew attention to many kinds of usage variation, and has remained in
the public consciousness ever since. »>variety; cartoon below.

UC An abbreviation of ultimate constituent.

Udmurt /‘vudmvet/ A member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric family of

‘I’ve been calling the drawing-room a lounge again, Father.’

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Uganda

languages, spoken by c.550,000 people, chiefly in the Udmurt region of Russia (where
it has official status); formerly called Votyak. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
»>Finno-Ugric.

Uganda (population in 1995 estimated at 21,368,000) The official language is

English. There are c.40 other languages, notably Ganda (Luganda, c.16% of the
population), Nkole (Nyankore, c.8%), Teso (c.8%), and Rwanda (c.6%). Gujarati and
Hindi each have c.150,000 speakers. Swahili is widely used as a lingua franca, as are
English and Ganda. English is used for international purposes. »English; lingua
franca.

Ugaritic /u:ga'ritik/ A Semitic language known from a wide range of clay tablet
inscriptions dating from the 15th to the 13th centuries Bc, found in 1929 mainly at
Ugarit (a city lying in an artificial mound called Ras Shamra, on the coast of modern
Syria). The writing system is a previously unknown alphabet, written in a cuneiform
script, from left to right, and containing 30 symbols (including three vowel signs).
The texts deal mainly with legends and myths of the Canaanite peoples, and have
provided a fresh perspective on several of the stories in the Old Testament of the
Bible. »alphabet; cuneiform; Semitic.

Ugric /‘ju:grik, 'u:grik/ >Finno-Ugric.

Uighur /'wi:goa/ A member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic family of languages,
spoken by over 7.5 million people, chiefly (c.7.2 million) in the Xinjiang-Uighur
region of China, with some in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan (c.300,000), Kyrgyzstan, and
Afghanistan. The language was formerly written in the Arabic alphabet, with the
Roman alphabet widespread in China since the 1930s, and Cyrillic now used in the
republics of the former Soviet Union. »>Turkic.

Ukraine (population in 1995 estimated at 52,570,000) The official languages are

Ukrainian (spoken by c.60% of the population) and Russian (c.20%). Other languages
include several of those spoken in nearby countries, such as German, Belorussian,
Romanian, and Bulgarian, and there are a number of speakers of Romani. »»Russian;
Ukrainian.

Ukrainian A member of the East Slavic group of languages, spoken by over 40

million people, chiefly (c.31 million) in the republic of Ukraine (where it is the
official language), with many more in Hungary (c.300,000), Kazakhstan (c.900,000),
Moldova (c.600,000), Poland (1.5 million), and other nearby areas. There are also
many immigrant speakers, especially in the USA, Canada, and South America. It is
written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Traces of Ukrainian date from the 13th century, but
the modern standard language did not emerge until the late 18th century. The
language contains a large number of Polish loan words. »»Slavic; Ukraine.
ultimate constituent >constituent.

umilaut /‘amlavt/ A sound change in which a sound is influenced by the vowel in

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 unification

the following syllable. An example is Germanic *gosi, where the final vowel caused
a change of /o:/ to /i:/, resulting in geese. »»sound change.

unaccented syllable >accent 2.

unacceptable »acceptable.

unaccusative Descriptive of an intransitive verb whose subject originates as an

object; also sometimes called an ergative verb. An example is The vase broke (i.e.
someone or something broke the vase). »>transitivity; verb.

uncial /‘anfol/ A form of writing consisting of large, rounded letters. It was especially
used in Greek and Latin manuscripts from the 4th to the 8th centuries ap, and a
later development (half-uncial or semi-uncial) prepared the way for modern
small letters. The name derives from Latin uncialis ‘inch-high’. »>letter; writing.

” UCAeAutem PRACG,
NAN TIBUSETLACTX”
» propernem Nonquerorcquica
oe camen quaerellarem
An uncial script of the fourth centure AD. The Latin reads Vae autem praegnan-
tibus etlactan. (b) A half-uncial script from c. 500 AD. The Latin reads proferrem
non queror quia [igno]ro sed tamen quaerella fam[osa].

uncountable noun >countability.

underextension >overextension.

underlying Descriptive of an abstract level of representation, postulated to explain

the patterns encountered in the empirical data of a language. The notion of under-
lying forms is central to generative grammar, where a stage of underlying structure
is recognized in the derivation of a sentence. »>deep structure; generative grammar.

ungradable »>gradability.

ungrammatical >grammatical.

unification An operation in several grammatical theories whereby two categories

can be combined as long as they do not contain conflicting information. Theories
which permit this operation are known as ‘unification-based’ approaches. »>gram-
mar 1.

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United Arab Emirates

United Arab Emirates (population in 1995 estimated at 2,181,000) The official

language is Arabic, spoken by over a third of the population. There are c.20 other
immigrant languages, including Baluchi, Bengali, English, Farsi, Pashto, Sinhala,
Somali, Swahili, Tagalog, and Telugu. English is used for international purposes.
»> Arabic. i

United Kingdom (population in 1995 estimated at 58,541,000) The official

language is English. Welsh (in Wales) and Scottish Gaelic (in Scotland) have official
regional status. Also found within the British Isles are Manx (in the Isle of Man),
and French (c.15,000 speakers in Jersey and Guernsey). There is some Irish Gaelic in
Northern Ireland. There are over 100 immigrant languages, spoken by c.2 million
people, notably Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Panjabi, Polish,
Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese. Several Romani
varieties are spoken by an uncertain number (perhaps 90,000). »>English.

United States of America (population in 1995 estimated at 262,693,000) The

union language is English. French (Cajun) has official regional status in Louisiana,
and Spanish in New Mexico. There are c.170 Indian languages spoken. The major
immigrant languages are English (c.226 million), Spanish (c.23 million), Arabic (c.3
million), French (c.1.7 million), Chinese (c.1.6 million), Italian (c.1.3 million), and
varieties of German (Hutterite, Pennsylvania, Mennonite, c.1.5 million) — but there
are over 350 languages spoken by significant numbers in the USA today. About 32
million people speak an immigrant language other than (or in addition to) English
at home, according to the 1990 census. About 300,000 people still speak one or
other of the c.170 Amerindian languages (though the number recognized depends
on the classification used), and there are c.1 million speakers of Romani. Several
English-based creoles are in use, especially in the south, along the Atlantic coast (Sea
Islands Creole English, formerly often called Gullah, c.130,000), and in Hawaii; and
there is a French-based creole spoken by c.60,000 in Louisiana. »American Samoa;
Amerindian; creole; English; Guam; Hawaiian Islands; Mariana Islands, Northern;
Marshall Islands; Micronesia, Federated States of; Palau; US Virgin Islands.

universal A property claimed to be characteristic of all languages, or a defining

property of language; also called a language universal. Universal grammar
aims to specify the possible forms of a human grammar, especially the restrictions
on the form such grammars can take. Statistical universals are constants of a
statistical kind, such as a ratio of use between different structures. Implicational
universals are generalized statements of the form ‘If X occurs in a language, then
Y will (or wili not) occur in a language’. Absolute universals are properties that
all languages share, without exception. Relative universals are general tendencies
in language, with principled exceptions. In generative linguistics, formal univer-
sals are the necessary conditions which have to be imposed on the construction of
grammars in order for them to be able to operate (e.g. types of rule, number of
components). Substantive universals are the primitive elements in a grammar,

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required for the analysis of linguistic data (e.g. NP, VP), and classified into phonologi-
cal, syntactic, and other types. The Universal Base Hypothesis states that all
languages can be generated by using the same set of basic rules. »»formalization;
generative grammar; grammar 1; statistical linguistics.

Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights A document drawn up at an

international conference in Barcelona in 1996, proclaiming the equality of language
rights, seen both collectively (in relation to whole communities) and individually
(in relation to the rights of individuals within communities). The document, which
takes its place in a series of political statements dating back to the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, was being seen as an initial step towards the establish-
ment of a United Nations convention on language rights. It drew attention to the
need for principles to be found which would guarantee the promotion of and respect
forall languages and their social use, highlighted the plight of the world’s endangered
languages, and emphasized the need for any universal approach to be based on a
conception of linguistic and cultural diversity. Its statements of inalienable personal
rights included: the right to be recognized as a member of a language community;
the right to the use of one’s own language both in private and in public; the right
to the use of one’s own name; the right to interrelate and associate with other
members of one’s language community of origin; and the right to maintain and
develop one’s own culture. Its statement of collective rights included: the right for
a community’s own language and culture to be taught; the right of access to cultural
services; the right to an equitable presence of its language and culture in the com-
munications media; and the right to receive attention in its own language from
government bodies and in socioeconomic relations. »ecolinguistics; endangered
languages.

universal grammar »>grammar 1.

universal language »artificial language.

universal quantifier >quantifier.

univocalic /ju:ntveu'kalik/ A word game in which the aim is to construct a gram-

matical and meaningful text in which the words contain the same vowel. Short
sentences are not too difficult to compose (We were never seen except when the rest
left), but several lengthy texts have been successfully completed. »»word game.

unjustified >justified.

unmarked >markedness.

unproductive >productivity.

unrounded >rounding.

unvoiced >voicing.

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upper case

upper case >letter.

Uralic /ju:raltk/ A family of c.30 languages whose ancestor (Proto-Uralic) was

spoken in the region of the north Ural Mountains, Russia, over 7000 years ago. Two
main branches of the family are represented today: Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic.
Written records date from the 13th century, but there has been a marked decline in
many of the languages in the present century, chiefly because of the dominant
influence of Russian. About 24 million people now speak Uralic languages. >>Finno-
Ugric; Samoyedic.

urban dialectology >dialectology.

Urdu /'3:du:/ A member of the Midland group of Indo-Aryan languages, spoken by

c.56 million people as a first language in India and Pakistan, and by many others as
an immigrant language in Great Britain and elsewhere. It is an official language,
along with English, in Pakistan (1995 population over 141 million), and a very large
number (perhaps as many as 200 million) use it as a religious language (alongside
Arabic). Urdu displays very little structural difference with Hindi, but there is a
marked cultural difference between them, as Urdu is predominantly the language
of Muslims in the area (as opposed to Hindus), displaying the considerable influence
of Persian and Arabic vocabulary, and written in a form of the Persian Arabic alphabet.
Literary texts are known from the 14th century. »»Hindi; Indo-Aryan; Pakistan.

Uruguay (population in 1995 estimated at 3,187,000) The official language is

Spanish, used by virtually the whole population. English and Spanish are used for
international purposes. »>Spanish.

usage The collective speech and writing habits of a community. The notion is seen
especially within the perspective of individuals’ preferences for alternative linguistic
forms (divided usage). One person’s usage will always be different from another’s,
in certain respects. »>corpus; prescriptivism.

US Virgin Islands (population in 1995 estimated at 113,000) The official language

is English. About half the population use an English-based creole widespread
throughout the Lesser Antilles, and there are some speakers of a Portuguese-based
creole (Papiamentu), and of Spanish. »>creole; English.

utterance A stretch of speech typically preceded or followed by silence or by a

change of speaker. The notion is also used in a loose sense, referring to any stretch
of speech about which no assumptions have been made in terms of linguistic theory
(thus contrasting with the concept of sentence). »sentence.

uvular /‘ju:vjula/ Descriptive of a consonant sound made by the back of the tongue
against the back of the soft palate or uvula. An example is the r sound widely used
in French, as at the beginning of rose. »»palate; tongue.
Uzbek /‘uzbek/_ A member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic family of languages,

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 Uzbekistan

spoken by over 18 million people, chiefly (16.5 million) in Uzbekistan (where it is

an official language), with some in nearby parts of Turkmenistan, Tadzhikistan,
Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and China. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet in the
republics of the former Soviet Union, and in the Arabic alphabet elsewhere. A
literary tradition, largely Islamic in character, dates from the 9th century. »>Turkic;
Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan (population in 1995 estimated at 21,669,000) The official languages
are Uzbek (spoken by c.75% of the population) and Russian (c.7%). There are c.5
other languages, including Crimean Tatar (Crimean Turkish, c.190,000), Karakalpak
(c.400,000), and Arabic. »»Russian; Uzbek.

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V
V An abbreviation of verb.

valency /'verlansi:/ The number and type of bonds that syntactic elements may form
with each other. A valency grammar presents a model of a sentence containing a
fundamental element (typically, the verb) and a number of dependent elements or
valents (also called arguments, expressions, or complements) whose number and
type is determined by the valency attributed to the verb. A monovalent verb has
a valency of 1 (e.g. vanish can take only a subject); a bivalemt verb of 2 (e.g.
scrutinize); a trivalent verb of 3 (e.g. give); and a zero valency (or avalent) verb
takes no complements at all (e.g. rain). Verbs which differ in these ways belong to
different valency sets. »»syntax; verb.

Valentine An expression of love on St Valentine’s Day (14 February). The phenom-

enon is of linguistic interest because of the bizarre language which the usually
anonymous lovers employ to convey their message and hide their real names. Several
national newspapers now devote space to publishing Valentines. »hypocoristic.

Vanuatu (population in 1995 estimated at 167,000) The official languages are

English, French, and Bislama (the last widely used as a lingua franca). There are c.100
other languages (almost all of them Austronesian) spoken by very small numbers.
English and French are used for international purposes. »>Bislama; English; French;
lingua franca.

variable In sociolinguistics, a linguistic unit subject to social or stylistic variation,

with reference to such factors as region, social class, age, and sex; also called a
sociolinguistic variable or variant. The results of this variation are stated in
the form of variable rules, which specify the socio-regional conditions under
which they apply. For example, in one New York study, the use of final /r/ (in words
like car) was found to be affected by socioeconomic group membership: the higher
the group, the more likely its members were to use /r/. »>diffusion; sociolinguistics.

variable word >invariable word.

variant >variable.

variety Any system of linguistic expression whose use is governed by situational

variables, such as regional, occupational, or social class factors. The term is sometimes
used more narrowly, referring to a single kind of situationally distinctive language.
Varieties of English include scientific, religious, legal, formal, conversational, Ameri-

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 verbal duelling

can, Welsh, and Cockney. »>dialect; diglossia; lect; New Englishes; stylistics.

Vatican City (population in 1998 estimated at 1000) The official language is

Italian. Latin has special status as the official language of the Roman Catholic
Church. »>Italian; Latin.

velar /'vi:la/ Descriptive of a consonant sound made by the back of the tongue
against the soft palate or velum, such as [k] and [g]. Any secondary articulation
involving a movement towards the velum is called velarization. Such velarized
sounds havea distinctive back (or ‘dark’) resonance. »consonant; secondary articula-
tion; tongue.

velaric /vi:'larik/ Descriptive of sounds in which the tongue in contact with the
velum initiates an airstream capable of making consonant sounds. An ingressive
flow of air results, used in the production of click consonants. »>click; velar.

velum /'vi:lam/ »>palate; velar.

Venezuela (population in 1995 estimated at 21,547,000) The official language is

Spanish, spoken by almost all the population. There are c.40 other languages, many
spoken by tiny numbers. Spanish and English are used for international purposes.
>>Spanish.

verb (V) A word class, traditionally defined as a ‘doing’ or ‘action’ word, formally
identifiable in many languages as an element displaying contrasts of tense, aspect,
voice, mood, person, and number. Functionally, it is the element which can be used
as the minimal predicate ofa sentence, co-occurring with a subject (e.g. She answered),
and generally dictating the number and nature of other elements in the predicate.
Traditionally, a verb phrase is a group of verbs which together have the same
syntactic function as a single verb (e.g. He left /may have left); also called a verbal
group or verbal cluster. In such sequences, one verb is the main verb or lexical
verb; other verbs are subordinate to it - notably, the auxiliary verbs. A verb
followed by a nonverbal particle is a phrasal verb. In generative grammar, the
term verb phrase has a broader definition, being equivalent to the whole of the
predicate of a sentence. »»aspect; catenative; impersonal; mood; number; person;
predicate; tense 1; voice 1.

verbal apraxia >apraxia.

verbal duelling The competitive use of language, within a gamelike structure,

with rules that are known and used by the participants. It is a ritual dialogue in
which each speaker attempts to outdo an opponent by producing an utterance of
increased verbal ingenuity. An ancient behaviour, it is seen in the ritual cursing and
boasting recorded in several early epic texts. In modern times, it has been observed
in the trading of insults between street gangs in many parts of the world. >>flyting;
verbal play.

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verbal group

verbal group »>verb.

verbal paraphasia >paraphasia.

verbal play The playful manipulation of the elements of language, either in relation
to each other, or in relation to the social or cultural contexts of language use; also
called speech play. Humour is not an essential part of the definition. The notion
includes play languages, puns, jokes, verbal duelling, proverbs, and riddles. »>chrono-
gram; macaronic; play language; proverb; pun; rhopalic; riddle; verbal duelling;
wellerism.

verbless clause A clause in which the verb is omitted (and often the subject as
well). An example is When ready, we left the house. >>clause.

verb phrase >verb.

vernacular The indigenous language or dialect of a speech community. Pidgin

languages are sometimes called contact vernaculars. >»>Black English Vernacular;
pidgin.

Verner’s law A sound change, first worked out by the Danish linguist Karl Verner
(1846-96), which explained a class of apparent exceptions to Grimm’s law. He
found that Grimm’s law worked well whenever the stress fell on the root syllable of
the Sanskrit word; but when it fell on another syllable, the consonants behaved
differently. Voiceless plosives then did not stay as voiceless fricatives, but became
voiced plosives. »>fricative; Grimm’s law; plosive; sound change.

V forms >T/V forms.

vibrato /vib'ra:tau/ A tiny, rapid, controlled rise and fall in the pitch and volume
of the voice, usually heard only in singing. Vibrato adds warmth and richness to
the voice, and is a noticeable feature of the voice of the professional (as opposed to
the amateur) singer. »>voice quality.

Vietnam (population in 1995 estimated at 73,655,000) The official language is

Vietnamese, spoken by c.87% of the population. There are c.70 other languages,
including several varieties of Tai (c.1 million), Muong (c.800,000), Khmer (c.800,000),
and (Yue) Chinese (c.500,000). French is used for international purposes. >>Viet-
namese.

Vietnamese The chief language of the Mon-Khmer family, spoken by c.65 million
people in Vietnam, with perhaps a further million in Cambodia and many thousands
in Western countries through refugee movements following the Vietnam War;
formerly known as Annamnite. It is written in the Roman alphabet introduced by
missionaries in the 17th century, and known as Quoc-ngu (‘national language’). Its
status in the Mon-Khmer group is a matter of dispute: some scholars see it as a
marginal member, while some relate it to the Tai family. Its early history is obscured

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 vocal folds

by the use of Chinese throughout the area, a consequence of rule by China until
the 10th century. »Chinese; Mon-Khmer; Tai; Vietnam.

viewdata The interactive transmission of data between a central source and a local
television set. Computer-stored information is sent through the telephone system,
but viewers are allowed to return data to the computer, thus permitting a wide range
of services, such as shopping and travel booking from home. In Britain, the trade
name of this service, started by British Telecom in 1979, is Prestel. »>teletext.

Virgin Islands »>British Virgin Islands; US Virgin Islands.

virgule /‘v3:gju:l/ >solidus.

visible speech Any system in which speech is represented other than by the usual
writing system (such as the letters of the alphabet). The term is chiefly used for
systems of graphic or manual symbols which have been devised for a particular
teaching purpose (such as in teaching the deaf or the mentally handicapped). In a
19th-century usage, Scottish educator Alexander Melville Bell devised a system of
visible speech for the deaf in which the symbols represented the positions of the
vocal organs. The term is also used loosely for the acoustic representation of speech
shown in a spectrogram, or for symbols based on this representation. »>spectrograph.

Visigothic /'vizi:gp01k/ »>Gothic.

vocabulary The set of lexical items (‘words’) in a language; also called the lexicon.
Estimates of vocabulary size, either for a language as a whole or for an individual
speaker, are notoriously unreliable, chiefly because there are so many variables which
need to be taken into account; the scale of the task, moreover, is daunting. The
largest dictionaries of English contain well over half a million words, but do not
include a great deal of the regional vocabulary found in local and international
dialects, nor much of the vast field of scientific nomenclature (such as in natural
history). Estimates of an individual’s active vocabulary are also highly variable, as
so much depends on interests and educational background. They generally range
from 20,000 to 50,000 words, with passive vocabulary estimates tending to be two
or three times larger. »>active knowledge; etymology; lexicon; semantics; term bank.
vocal abuse Overuse of the muscles of the larynx and pharynx, resulting in a voice
disorder. The problem may arise from excessive shouting, or from straining the voice
over a period of time (such as in trying to talk in a noisy environment). »>dysphonia;
vocal nodule.
vocal-auditory channel >communication; speech chain.

vocal cords >vocal folds.

vocal folds Two bands of muscular tissue within the larynx, which vibrate in
response to an airstream; also called vocal cords, vocal bands, or occasionally
vocal lips. The vocal folds are important in the production of voiced sounds,

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vocal fry

variations in pitch, and several voice qualities. »>glottal; larynx; phonation; voice
quality; voicing.

vocal fry >creaky voice.

vocalization An utterance viewed solely as a sequence of sound, without reference

to its internal linguistic structure, if any. For example, infant vocalization refers
to a prelinguistic period of utterance by very young children. »>babbling.
vocal nodule A small localized swelling on the vocal folds; also called a vocal
node. Vocal nodules are often found as a result of people overusing their voice
(continually shouting in a noisy environment, for example), and result in a hoarse
or breathy voice quality which may not disappear without speech therapy or surgical
intervention. »>dysphonia; speech therapy.

vocal organs The physiological structures actively involved in the process of

speaking; also called the organs of speech. They are usually grouped into three
systems: the respiratory system, containing the lungs and trachea; the Jarynx, enclosing
the vocal folds; and the supralaryngeal system, comprising the movable organs in
the mouth (primarily the tongue, lips, lower jaw, soft palate), the relatively fixed
structures in the mouth (primarily the teeth and hard palate), the pharynx, and the
nasal cavity. »>larynx; pharynx; tongue; vocal tract; p. 361.

vocal tract The whole of the air passage above the larynx, the shape of which is
the main factor affecting the quality of speech sounds; generally divided into the
nasal and oral tracts. The term is sometimes used in a more general way for the whole
of the respiratory tract involved in speech sound production (including lungs and
larynx). »>cavity; larynx; vocal organs; p. 361.

vocative case One of the ways in which an inflected language makes a word change
its form, in order to show its relationship to other words in the sentence. The vocative
is the case used when a noun phrase (typically, a single noun or pronoun) is used
in the function of direct address. In non-inflecting languages, the term refers to any
noun phrase used in this function (often with a distinctive intonation), such as the
last item in the sentence The dog isin the garden, Hilary. »>case; inflection 1.

voice 1. A category used in grammatical description, chiefly with refererice to the

verb, to express the way a clause may alter the relationship between subject and
object without changing the meaning of the sentence. When the grammatical subject
is the actor, in relation to the verb, the clause is said to be active; when it is the
goal or recipient of the action denoted by the verb, it is said to be passive. The
transformation of a sentence from an active to a passive is called passivization.
The term middle is sometimes used (especially in grammars of Classical Greek) for
actions which seem to fall between these two possibilities, such as ‘I hurt myself’.
»>clause; verb 2. >voicing.

voice box >larynx.

360
 (a)

Nasal cavity

Hard palate

Alveolar
ridge Soft palate
Oral cavity
Uvula
Tongue Palastine
tonsil
Frenulum
Pharyngeal
Epiglottis cavity

Opening of
Mandible esophagus

Trachea

(b)
Pharyngopalatine
arch
Hard palate

Glossopalatine
arch
Soft

pase Palatine
tonsil

Tongue
Uvula

The main features of the vocal tract: (a) side view; (b) front view of oral cavity.
voice disorder

voice disorder An involuntary, abnormal voice quality which interferes with

communication or draws unfavourable attention to the speaker’s voice (e.g. by being
inappropriate in relation to the age, sex, or physical size of the speaker). Voice
disorders may result from physical or psychological factors (often, from a combi-
nation of both), and may affect all aspects of phonation (pitch, loudness, timbre)
as well as the resonance characteristics of the voice. Examples include a young man
with a persisting high-pitched voice, a teacher with a hoarse voice which fails to
carry in class, and someone with an unpleasant nasal quality in speech. »»dysphonia;
voice quality.

voiceless >voicing.

voice mutation The change of voice which accompanies the development of

secondary sex characteristics during puberty. There is a rapid growth of the larynx,
and the child voice differentiates into male and female types. The effect is particularly
noticeable in boys, where the voice is lowered by about an octave. It is common to
refer to this as the voice ‘breaking’, but in fact the change is a gradual transition,
usually taking between 3 and 6 months to complete. »>larynx; voice quality.

voice onset time (VOT) The point in time at which vocal fold vibration starts,
following the release of a closure. The notion is particularly important in relation
to the contrast between voiced and voiceless plosives. A voiceless plosive has a
noticeable VOT gap (an average of 0.06 sec. after [p], in one study), which is minimal
or absent in the case of voiced plosives. »>plosive; vocal folds.

voiceprint A visual representation of the acoustic features of a person’s voice, as

analysed by a sound spectrograph. Voiceprinting was devised in the 1960s, on _
analogy with fingerprinting, and the claim was made that a voiceprint is unique to
an individual. Although introduced as evidence in some court cases (primarily
in the USA), the technique has remained controversial, but more sophisticated
approaches are now being developed following electronic and computational
advances. »»spectrograph; speech recognition; voice quality.

voice qualifier >paralanguage.

voice quality Those aspects of a person’s speech which result from the particular
mode of vibration of the vocal folds used by that speaker. More generally, all the
personal attributes of a voice, regardless of whether they result from actions of the
vocal folds or of other organs. »>paralanguage; quality 1; speech recognition; timbre.

voicing The vibration of the vocal folds in response to an airstream passing between
them. Sounds which use vocal fold vibration are voiced; those which do not are -
voiceless or unvoiced. Voiced sounds may be devoiced under certain conditions,
such as the final /d/ of /dad/ in English. »»devoiced; vocal folds.

Volapiik /vola'pyk/ A language invented by Johann Martin Schleyer in 1880; the

362
 Vulgar Latin

name means ‘world speak’. Based largely on English and German, it was the first
large-scale proposal of its kind. »>artificial language.

Voltaic /vol'tenk/ A group of c.70 languages belonging to the Niger-Congo family,

spoken in several countries around the Upper Volta River in West Africa; also called
the Gur group of languages. They include Bobo, Dagbani, Lobi, Senari, and More
(its chief member). »»More; Niger-Congo.

VOT An abbreviation of voice onset time.

Votyak /‘vauterak/ >Udmutt.

vowel (V) In phonetics, a speech sound produced by a relatively open configuration

of the vocal tract, so that there is no audible friction, such as [a] or [i]; in phonology,
a unit of the sound system which typically occupies the nucleus of a syllable, as in
/kat/ and /si:t/. In both approaches, the term contrasts with consonant (as it does
when it is used correspondingly with reference to the writing system). »>consonant;
diphthong; front sound; high vowel; monophthong; postvocalic; rounding; syllable;
triphthong.
vowel gradation >ablaut.
vowel harmony >harmony.

vowel quadrilateral >cardinal vowels.

vowel shift A series of changes in vowel values in the history of a language. A

famous example in English (the English Vowel Shift or Great Vowel Shift)
took place soon after 1400, when the six long vowels began to change their values
in a systematic way. Chaucer would have pronounced the vowel in the middle of
the word time like that in modern team; see would have sounded more like say; fame
like farm (without the 7); so like saw; do like doe; and now like noo. The Great Vowel
Shift resulted in a major barrier to intelligibility between Middle and Modern English.
Since the 1980s, however, reanalysis of the textual evidence has suggested that
several different factors may have been causing the sound changes of this period,
and that the notion of a single interlinked ‘shift’ of vowels may be illusory. »sound
change; vowel.
VP An abbreviation of verb phrase.
Vulgar Latin >Latin.

363
W
Wade-Giles >Chinese.

Wales >United Kingdom; Welsh.

Washoe /‘wovfau/ A female chimpanzee who was taught to use a selection of signs
from American Sign Language in the late 1960s, as part of a series of experiments
on the relationship between human language and animal communication. She
acquired over 130 signs in just over four years, several of which she began to combine
to express a small set of meaning relations. Several other chimpanzees have since
been studied in similar ways. Explanations of the behaviour (whether the learning
is essentially imitative or cognitive) have proved to be controversial. »>language
learning; cartoon below.

weak form »>strong form.

‘First the sign language. Then the knife and fork. Then the toothbrush. Don’t you
ever know when to stop?’

364
 whisper

wellerism A kind of saying derived from a verbal mannerism used by Sam Weller
in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. It takes the form of a comment followed by an analogy
introduced by as someone/something said ..., and generally making use of a pun: I
can see the point, as Macbeth said to his dagger. »»verbal play.
well-formed >grammatical.

Welsh A member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic family of languages, spoken
by c.500,000 people in Wales, where it has official status (along with English). Wales
was monoglot until the 16th century, when the Act of Union with England (1536)
led to a rapid decline in numbers of Welsh speakers. Revivals in the 18th and 19th
centuries led to Welsh being taught in schools, and the present century has seen
this revival continue on an unprecedented scale, with some evidence of a reduction
in the rate of decline. The majority of first language users come from the north-west
quarter of the principality, where some counties operate a bilingual language policy.
A Welsh-speaking television channel was introduced in the 1970s. Literary remains
date from the 6th century, and there was a renaissance in classical bardic verse in
the 18th century, still influential in the literary sections of the modern eisteddfod.
The language is written in the Roman alphabet. In 1865 a Welsh settlement was
established in Patagonia (Argentina), which led to c.3000 speakers by 1900, though
the language has all but disappeared today, under the influence of Spanish. »>Celtic.

Wendish /‘wendi{/ >Sorbian.

Wernicke’s aphasia /'v3:nike/ A type of aphasia which arises from damage to
Wernicke’s area, located in the upper part of the temporal lobe of the brain; named
after German neurologist Karl Wernicke (1848 — 1905). It is characterized by difficulty
in understanding, and by the use of speech which is fluent but empty of meaning.
»>aphasia; jargon; language areas.

West Atlantic A group of about 60 languages belonging to the Niger-Congo family,

spoken in the extreme western part of the bulge of Africa, in Senegal, The Gambia,
Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The northern branch includes
Dyola, Serer, Wolof, and Fula (c.15 million speakers, the most widespread member);
the southern branch includes Kissi, Limba, and Temne. »>Fula; Niger-Congo; Wolof.

Western Samoa >Samoa.

wh-form /‘dablju: 'ettf fo:m/ A class of items in English, generally beginning with
wh- (e.g. why, what, where, how) used in a variety of constructions. Wh-questions
include such sentences as Why did you do that? or Whatelse did you buy?. Wh-relatives
are found in relative clauses, such as The bus which was late... Wh-complements
are found in complement clauses, such as I know what you want. Several other types
of construction also contain wh-forms, and any clause which is introduced by a
wh-word is a wh-clause. »>clause; complement; question; relative.

whisper Speech produced without vocal fold vibration. It will be heard in everyday

365
whistled speech

communication in certain contexts (e.g. a conspiratorial whisper, a stage whisper),

and is also a feature of certain kinds of voice disorder. »dysphonia; vocal folds;
voice disorder.

whistled speech A stylized form of communication in which whistling substitutes

for normal speech, usually between people who are at a distance from each other.
It has been found in several Central and South American tribes, and occasionally
elsewhere, and is normally used only by and between males. The whistling patterns
closely correspond to the patterns of tone and rhythm in spoken language. Whistled
dialogues tend to contain a small number of exchanges, and the utterances are short.
>>speech surrogate; tone.
White Russian >Belorussian.

whole word method >look-and-say.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee >Sapir—Whorf hypothesis.

Wolof /‘waulof/ A West Atlantic language spoken by over 2.6 million people as a
first language chiefly in Senegal, with some in nearby Gambia. It is used as a lingua
franca throughout the region, and is written in the Roman alphabet. »>West Atlantic.

word The smallest unit of grammar which can stand alone as a complete utterance.
It is a unit of expression in both spoken and written language, with several possible
definitions. The orthographic word is the unit bounded by spaces in the written
language. The phonological word is the corresponding unit for speech, bounded
by (real or potential) pauses or juncture features. At a more abstract level, a word is
a grammatical unit consisting of morphemes (minimally, one free morpheme) and
functioning within phrases, clauses, and sentences. »>lexeme; word class/game/order.

word blindness >dyslexia.

word chain A word game in which words are derived from other words through
a series of steps. Many techniques have been proposed, such as changing a fixed
number of letters or adding extra parts. A common type is to use overlapping
elements in compounds, such as EGGCUP-CUPCAKE-CAKESTAND-STANDPIPE
...»word game.

word class A group of words which share the same syntactic and morphological
properties; traditionally called a part of speech. The notion can also be included
within the broader concept of form class. »»adjective; adverb; article; class;
classifier; conjunction; determiner; closed class; form 2; interjection; noun; parti-
ciple; particle; preposition; verb.

word ending »>inflection 1.

word-finding problem The inability to retrieve a desired word while speaking.

While everyone has a word-finding difficulty, from time to time, the term is chiefly

366
 word square

used for the severe difficulty in word retrieval encountered by many people suffering
from aphasia. »>aphasia.

word formation »>affix; morphology.

word game Any form of game, puzzle, or competition in which an aspect of

language provides the basis of the challenge. The task may involve knowledge of
or ingenuity with spelling (e.g. Hangman, Scrabble), pronunciation (e.g. tongue
twisters), vocabulary (e.g. crosswords), or any combination of linguistic features.
Often, other forms of activity are incorporated, such as drawing (rebus) or mime
(charades). »>acrostic; anagram; crossword; doublet 2; grid game; lipogram; palin-
drome; pangram; rebus; syzygy; tongue twister; univocalic; verbal play; word chain;
word square.

word order The sequential arrangement of clause elements or words in a sentence.

In English, for example, the normal order of clause elements is Subject- Verb-—Object,
whereas in Welsh it is Verb—Subject-Object. The six possible options (SVO, VSO,
VOS, etc.) provide the basis of an important system of classification in the syntactic
typology of languages. At a lower level, many specific grammatical contrasts can be
signalled by variations in word order, such as English statement vs. question (It is
raining vs. Is it raining?). Some unusual orders are conventional, not allowing any
contrast; an example is the inversion which follows such words as hardly and barely
— Hardly had she left when ..., where the alternative order *Hardly she had left is
ungrammatical. »>inversion; order; typology of language.

word square A word game in which the aim is to complete a square of letters,
using words of equal length, which read in horizontal, vertical, and occasionally
diagonal directions. Usually the words read the same in each direction, but in a

PRE
“P *A’R VE
R
E
P
A
R
=
—~aAZ2P>
SO
mob>rece:e
A-—-<_zemr~o
-mo0O<<cm OmaAaanmr
mcZz=—oam
A seven-letter word square:

367
writing

‘double word square’ they read differently. Word squares using words of up to nine
letters have been completed. »word game.
writing The process or result of recording spoken language using a system of
visual marks on a surface. The concept includes the particular writing system (or
orthography) which is available for a language, the choice and mastery of a
particular medium of expression (usually handwriting or typing), and the product
which emerges (the piece of writing, or composition). An additional sense reflects
the profession of someone who writes creatively —a ‘writer’. »>alphabet; chirography;
cursive; diplomatics; epigraph 1; graphology 1; letter; linear; orthography; paedogra-
phy; paleography; shorthand; steganography; syllabary; technography.
wynn A letter p used in Old English with a sound value corresponding to Modern
English [w]. >»English.

368
Xx
X-bar theory A system of generative linguistic analysis developed as an alternative
to traditional accounts of phrase-structure and lexical categories. In this approach,
the rules of phrase-structure grammar are more constrained, and more phrasal
categories are recognized. In particular, within the noun phrase, intermediate cate-
gories are established larger than the noun but smaller than the phrase; each level
of phrasal expansion is called an X-bar, normally written X or, for greater typo-
graphic ease, X’. »>generative grammar; phrase-structure grammar.

xenoglossia /zena'glpsia/ The speaking of a foreign language which has not been
previously learned or heard. Xenoglossic claims are sometimes made in the practice
of Pentecostal Christianity, though more usually the ability to ‘speak in tongues’ is
not considered to involve a real foreign language. The phenomenon awaits scientific
attestation — difficult to achieve, given the problems of eliminating alternative
explanations (such as a speaker having heard the foreign language before). »>glos-
solalia.

x height In typography, the height of the small letter ‘x’. The x-height of a lower-case
alphabet is the height of the printing surface of a lower-case x — in other words, a
lower-case letter without ascender or descender. The notion is useful in relating the
heights of letters to each other. »»ascender; typography.
Xhosa /'ko:s2/ A Bantu language spoken by over 6.8 million people in the south-
eastern part of South Africa; also spelled Xosa and formerly known as Kaffir. It
belongs to the Nguni sub-group of languages, and is written in the Roman alphabet.
It is largely mutually intelligible with Zulu, but its speakers consider it to be a separate
language. An interesting feature of Xhosa is its use of click consonants, borrowed
from the Khoisan languages (one of which is used in local pronunciation of the
name, the Xh representing a lateral click). It is one of the 11 official languages of
South Africa. »Bantu; click; Khoisan; Zulu.

Xosa >Xhosa.

369
be
Yakut /ja'kut/ A member of the Turkic branch of the Altaic family of languages,
spoken by c.360,000 people in the Yakut region of north-east Siberia (where it is an
official language). It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Because of its geographical
isolation, the language displays many differences from other Turkic languages, and
is classified as a separate branch of that group. »>Turkic.

Yao »Miao-Yao.

Yemen (population in 1995 estimated at 13,510,000) The official language is

Arabic, spoken by over 95% of the people. Other languages include Hindi and
Somali. English is used for international purposes. »»Arabic.

Yeniseyan /jena'seten/ A family of languages generally placed within the Paleosiber-

ian grouping, nowrepresented by only one language, Ket (or Yenisey-Ostyak), spoken
by less than 1000 people along the Yenisey River. It is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.
Kott, Arin, and Assan, also in this family, are now extinct. »»Paleosiberian.

yes/no question >question.

Yiddish A West Germanic language spoken by c.3 million people in central and
eastern Europe, the USA (c.1.2 million), and Israel (c.215,000), by most as a second
language; sometimes called Judaeo-German. It is identified with the Jewish people
who emerged in central Europe from around the 9th century (the Ashkenazim), and
is linguistically a mixture of Semitic and Germanic, with the addition of other
features (Slavic, in particular) as it spread throughout eastern Europe. It has written
records from the 12th century. The modern literary language is based on the Eastern
Yiddish dialect, and is written in the Hebrew alphabet. It was proclaimed a national
Jewish language in 1908, and has become a lingua franca for Jews all over the world.
Yiddish literature has flourished in the present century, in both Europe and the
USA, despite severe oppression by Germany in the 1940s and the Soviet Union in
the 1950s, and in 1978 the American Yiddish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-
91) won the Nobel Prize for Literature. »Germanic; Hebrew.

yogh /jauk, jog/ A symbol § used in Old and Middle English to represent a range
of sounds, such as [g], [j], and [x]. Its values in Middle English, for example, included
[j] (as in year) and [x] (as in the middle consonant of Scots nicht, English night).
»>English.

yo-he-ho theory The nickname of one of the speculative theories about the origins

370
 Yurak

of language: it argues that speech arose because, as people worked together, their
physical efforts produced communal, rhythmical grunts, which in due course
developed into chants, and thus language. The main evidence is the use of universal
prosodic features (but these provide only a small part of language structure). »>origins
of language.

Yoruba /'jpraba/ A Kwa language spoken by c.20 million people, chiefly in south-
west Nigeria (c.18.8 million), where it has official status, with some further speakers
in Benin and Togo. There is a large oral literature of poetry, myths, and proverbs.
The modern language is written in the Roman alphabet. Formerly classified as a Kwa
language, it is now usually placed within Benue-Congo. »»Benue-Congo; Kwa.

Yucatec /‘jurkatek/ >Mayan.

Yugoslavia (population in 1995 estimated at 10,494,000, for Serbia and Monten-
egro) The official language is Serbian (formerly considered a variety of Serbo-
Croatian), spoken by c.75% of the population. Albanian (c.1.5 million) has official
status in the autonomous province of Kosovo, and Hungarian (c.450,000) in Voivod-
ina. There are also considerable numbers speaking Romanian (c.250,000), Romani
(c.150,000), Slovak (c.100,000), Turkish (c.200,000), and other European languages.
English is used for international trade and tourism. »»Bosnian; Croatian; Mace-
donian; Serbian; Serbo-Croatian; Slovene.

Yukaghir /jurko'gia/ A family of languages generally placed within the Paleosiberian

grouping, now represented by only one language, Yukaghir (or Odul), spoken prob-
ably by less than 200 people in the Yakut region of north-east Siberia. It is written
in the Cyrillic alphabet. Omok and Chuvan, also in this family, are now extinct.
»>Paleosiberian.

Yupik /‘ju:prk/ >Eskimo.

Yurak /ja'tak/ >Nenets.

BA
LZ.
Zaire >Congo, Democratic Republic of.

Zambia (population in 1995 estimated at 9,846,000) The official language is

English. There are c.35 other languages, notably Bemba (spoken by c.25% of the
population), Tonga (c.12%), and Nyanja (c.12%). A Xhosa-based pidgin, Fanagalo,
is widely used in towns and mining areas as a lingua franca, and there is also a
Swahili-based pidgin, Settla. English is used for international purposes. >»>English;
lingua franca; pidgin.

zero An abstract unit with no physical realization in the stream of speech; also
called a null element. The term is commonly used for the absence of a morpheme
in contexts where one would normally occur; for example, in English a zero article
can be identified where there is no definite or indefinite article before a noun. A
zero morph is sometimes proposed to handle singular/plural alternations in such
nouns as sheep, where no change is involved. »>infinitive; morpheme.

zero infinitive >infinitive.

zeugma /'zju:gmo/ A type of figurative language in which a word is made to govern

two other elements in such a way that a different sense relationship is obtained in
each case. The effect is usually semantically incongruous. An example is They arrived
in a bus and a bad mood. The term is from Greek, where it meant a ‘yoking’ or
‘bringing together’. »>figurative language.

Zimbabwe (population in 1995 estimated at 11,365,000) The official language is

English. There are c.20 other languages, notably Shona (spoken by over half the
population) and Ndebele (c.13%). English is used for international purposes.
»>English.

zoésemiotics /zaveusemi:'ptiks/ The study of the properties of anima] communi-

cation. The subject developed as part of a comparative zoological approach to
communication, with the initial aim of identifying the main points of connection
between language and other communicative systems. Several ‘design features’ of
communication were investigated, such as displacement, productivity, and duality
of structure. The subject later became a domain in its own right, as a branch of
semiotics investigating the diverse methods (e.g. movement, colour, sound, touch,
smell) used as communication within different species, such as the ‘dancing’ of
honey bees, the courtship rituals of herring gulls, and the whistle patterns of dolphins.

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 Zyryan

‘Well, dialect jokes, mainly — corgis, alsatians, beagles.’

»> discrete; displacement; duality of structure; feedback 1; interchangeability; prevari-

cation; productivity; semiotics.

Zulu A Bantu language spoken by over 9 million people, chiefly (c.8.8 million) in
South Africa, especially in the part of Natal formerly known as Zululand (now
KwaZulu), with some in nearby countries. It belongs to the Nguni sub-group of
languages, and is largely mutually intelligible with Xhosa, but is considered by its
speakers to be a separate language. Like Xhosa, it uses click sounds borrowed from
the neighbouring Khoisan languages, and its vocabulary shows considerable influ-
ence from Afrikaans and English. It is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa,
and is written in the Roman alphabet. »»Bantu; click; Xhosa.

Zyryan /'zirien/ >Komi.

373
INDEX OF LANGUAGES

This index is a listing of all the locations where names of individual languages or
varieties are referred to in the book, whether they are treated as separate entries or
mentioned within entries. Variant forms and spellings are included. It does not
include the names of families of languages, nor of scripts. The list under English
does not include those entries where English has been used as the language of
illustration. The arrangement of the index is letter-by-letter.

Abkhaz: Abkhaz; Georgia American Sign Language:

Accadian: Akkadian American Sign Language
Achehnese: Achinese Amer-Ind: Amer-Ind
Achinese: Achinese; Indonesia Ameslan: American Sign Language
Acholi: Acholi; Lango; Nilo-Saharan Amharic: Amharic; Ethiopia; Semitic;
Adyge: Adygey syllabary
Adygey: Adygey; Jordan; Syria; Turkey Amorite: Amorite
Adyghe: Adygey Andamanese: Indo-Pacific
Afar: Djibouti; Ethiopia Angas: Chadic
Afghan: Pashto Anglo-Frisian: Germanic
African-American Vernacular Anglo-Saxon: English, Old
English: African-American Annamite: Vietnamese
Vernacular English; Ebonics Apache: Na-Dene
Afrikaans: Afrikaans; Germanic; Aquilano: Italy
Namibia; South Africa; Zulu Arabic: affix; Algeria; alphabet;
Afro-American English: Arabic; Aramaic; Australia; auxiliary
African-American Vernacular English language; Bahrain; Belgium;
Ainu: Ainu Cameroon; Caucasian; Chad;
Akan: Akan; Ghana Cyprus; diglossia; Djibouti; Egypt;
Akar: Cote d’Ivoire Ethiopia; France; Fur; Germany;
Akkadian: Akkadian; Sumerian Gibraltar; Greece; Iran; Iraq; Israel;
Akoli: Acholi Jordan; Kabyle; Kuwait; Lebanon;
Albanian: Albania; Albanian; Libya; Maldives; Mali; Maltese;
Bulgaria; Greece; Indo-European; Mauritania; Morocco; Netherlands,
Italy; Macedonia; Yugoslavia The; Niger; Oman; Persian;
Aleut: Eskimo-Aleut pharyngeal; Qatar; root; Saudi
Algonkin: Algonkian Arabia; Semitic; Somali; Somalia;
Aliutor: Luorawetlan Sudan; Swahili; Syria; Tunisia;
Alsatian: France Turkey; typology of language; United

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 Index of Languages

Arab Emirates; United States of Balochi: Baluchi

America; Urdu; Uzbekistan; Yemen Baluchi: Afghanistan; Baluchi; Iran;
Aragonese: Spain Iranian; Oman; Pakistan;
Arakan: Bangladesh; Myanmar Turkmenistan; United Arab Emirates
Aramaic: Aramaic; Lebanon; Syria Bamana: Bambara
Aranda: Australian Bambara: Bambara; Mali; Mande
Arapaho: Algonkian Bamileke: Bamileke; Cameroon
Araucanian: Argentina; Chile; Banda: Adamawa-Ubangi; Central
Penutian African Republic
Araukan: Penutian Baniwa: Brazil
Arin: Yeniseyan Bari: Bari; Nilo-Hamitic; Nilo-Saharan
Armenian: Armenia; Armenian; Bashkir Bashkir; Russia; Turkic
Azerbaijan; Bulgaria; Cyprus; Egypt; Basque: Basque; France; Iberian;
France; Georgia; Greece; Spain
Indo-European; Iran; Iraq; Jordan; Batak: Batak; Indonesia
Lebanon; Syria; Turkey Bats: Nakho-Dagestanian
Ashante: Akan Baule: Cote d’Ivoire
Assamese: Assamese; Bangladesh; Bazaar Malay: Malay; Malaysia
India; Indo-Aryan Beach-la-Mar: Bislama
Assan: Yeniseyan Beja: Cushitic
Assyrian: Akkadian; Iraq Belauan: Belau
Assyro-Babylonian: Akkadian Bella Coola: Salish
Asturian: Spain Belorussian: Belarus; Belorussian;
Atjehnese: Achinese Estonia; Poland; Slavic; Ukraine
Aucaans: French Guinea Bemba: Bemba; Zambia
Avar: Avar; Azerbaijan; Bengali: Assamese; Bangladesh;
Nakho-Dagestanian; Russia Bengali; community language; India;
Avestan: centum language; Iranian Indo-Aryan; United Arab Emirates;
Aymara: Andean-Equatorial; Aymara; United Kingdom’
Bolivia; Peru Berber: Berber Morocco; Tunisia
Azerbaijani: Armenia; Azerbaijan; Bete: Cote d'Ivoire
Azerbaijani; Georgia; Iran; Iraq; Bhojpuri: Bihari; Nepal
Syria; Turkey; Turkic Bhutanese: Bhutan; Dzongkha
Azeri: Azerbaijani Bhutani: Bhutan; Dzongkha
Aztec: Aztec-Tanoan; Nahuatl Bicolano: Philippines, The
Baba Malay: Malay Bihari: Bihari; Indo-Aryan; Mauritius
Babylonian: Akkadian Bislama: Bislama; New Caledonia;
Bahasa Indonesia: Indonesia; Vanuatu ’
Javanese; Malay Bissa: Burkina Faso
Bai: China Black English Vernacular:
Bajan: Barbados African-American Vernacular English
Balanta: Cape Verde; Guinea-Bissau Blackfoot: Algonkian; Canada
Balinese: Balinese; Indonesia Bobo Burkina Faso; Voltaic

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Index of Languages

Bokmal: Norwegian Chechen: Chechen; Georgia;

Bosnian: Bosnia and Herzegovina; Kazakhstan; Nakho-Dagestanian;
Serbo-Croatian Russia
Bouyei: China Cheremis: Mari
Brahui: Afghanistan; Dravidian Cherokee: Macro-Siouan
Braj Bhasa: Hindi Chewa: Malawi; Nyanja
Breton: Breton; Celtic; Cornish; Cheyenne: Algonkian
France Chin: Myanmar
British Sign Language: American Chinese: Australia; Brunei; Cambodia;
Sign Language character; China; Chinese; French
Buginese: Buginese; Indonesia; Guinea; Hong Kong; Indonesia;
Malaysia international language; Japanese;
Bugis: Buginese kana; kanji; Kazakhstan; Kyrgyzstan;
Bulgarian: Bulgaria; Bulgarian; Korean; logogram; Malaysia;
Cyrillic; Greece; Israel; Moldova; Manchu; Mariana Islands, Northern;
Romania; Slavic; Ukraine Mongolia; mutual intelligibility;
Burba: Benin Nauru; Netherlands, The; New
Burmese: Bangladesh; Burmese; Zealand; Panama; Philippines, The;
Myanmar Roman alphabet; root; Singapore;
Burushaski: Burushaski Sino-Tibetan; Suriname; Taiwan;
Buryat: Buryat; Mongolia; Thailand; Tibetan; typology of
Mongolian; Russia language; United Kingdom; United
Byelorussian: Belorussian States of America; Vietnam
Byzantine Greek: Greek Chipewyan: Canada; Na-Dene
Cajun: United States of America Choctaw: Algonkian
Cakchiquel: Guatemala; Mayan Chukchi: Chukchi; Luorawetlan
Cambodian: Khmer Church Slavonic: Slavic
Cameroonian Pidgin: Cameroon Chuvan: Yukaghir
Cantonese: China; Chinese Chuvash: Chuvash; Russia
Cape Breton Gaelic: Scottish Gaelic Circassian: Adygey; Kabardian
Cape Dutch: Afrikaans Classical Greek: Greek
Carib: Belize; Gé-Pano-Carib Cockney: English; Estuary English;
Castilian: Spanish glottal; rhyming slang; variety
Catalan: Andorra; Catalan; France; Comanche: Aztec-Tanoan
Occitan; Romance; Spain Congo: Kongo
Catio: Macro-Chibchan Cook Islands Maori: Cook Islands
Cebuano: Cebuano; Philippines, The Coptic: Egypt; Egyptian
Celtiberian: Celtic Cornish: Breton; Celtic; Cornish; dead
Chagga: Tanzania language
Chakma: Bangladesh Corsican: Corsican; France; Italian
Chamorro: Austronesian; Guam; Cree: Algonkian; Canada
Mariana Islands, Northern Crimean Gothic: Gothic
Chavacano: Philippines, The Crimean Tatar: Uzbekistan

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 Index of Languages

Crimean Turkish: Uzbekistan Dzongkha: Bhutan; Dzongkha

Crioulo: Cape Verde; Gambia, The; Ebonics: Ebonics
Guinea-Bissau; Sao Tomé and Edo: Benue-Congo; Nigeria
Principe Efik: Benue-Congo: Efik; Nigeria
Croatian: Croatia; Croatian; Egyptian, Ancient: demotic;
Serbo-Croatian; Slavic Egyptian; hieroglyphic; Rosetta
Croato-Serbian: Serbo-Croatian Stone
Crow: Macro-Siouan Elamite: Elamite
Cumbric: Celtic EmergencySpeak: Seaspeak
Cuma: Macro-Chibchan Emiliano-Romagnolo: San Marino
Czech: Austria; Czech; Czech Republic; Enets: Samoyedic
Polish; Slavic; Slovak English, creole: Anguilla; Antigua
Dagari: Burkina Faso and Barbuda; Bahamas; Barbados;
Dagbani: Voltaic Belize; Bermuda; British Virgin
Dakota: Canada; Macro-Siouan Islands; Colombia; Costa Rica;
Dalmatian: Romance Dominican Republic; Gambia, The;
Danakil: Djibouti Grenada; Guyana; Hawaiian Islands;
Danish: Danish; Denmark; Eskimo; Honduras; Jamaica; Krio; Montserrat;
Faeroese; Germanic; Germany, Netherlands Antilles; Nicaragua;
mutual intelligibility; Norwegian; Norfolk Island; Panama; Saint Kitts
Scandinavian and Nevis; Saint Vincent and the
Dargwa: Nakho-Dagestanian Grenadines; Sea Islands Creole
Dari: Afghanistan; Persian English; Sierra Leone; Suriname;
Dayak: Malaysia Trinidad and Tobago; United States
Dhivehi: Maldivian of America; US Virgin Islands
Dimotiki: Greek English, Middle: apocope;
Dinka: Dinka; Nilo-Saharan; Sudan convergence; English; Icelandic;
Divehi: Maldivian thorn; vowel shift; yogh
Dolomitic: Rhaetian English, Modern: Afghanistan;
Domari: Egypt; Syria Africa; African-American Vernacular
Dong: China English; Afrikaans; Albania; Algeria;
Duala: Cameroon alphabet; American Samoa;
Dutch: Belgium; dialect continuum; American Sign Language;
digraph; Dutch; France; Germanic; Amerindian; Angola; Anguilla;
Germany; Netherlands, The; Antigua and Barbuda; apical; apico-;
Netherlands Antilles; Papiamentu; Argentina; Australia; Austria;
Suriname auxiliary language; Azores; Bahamas;
Dutch, creole: Guyana Bahrain; Bangladesh; Bank of
Dyalnguy: avoidance languages English; Barbados; Belau; Belize;
Dyerma: Niger Bermuda; Bhutan; Bolivia; Bosnia
Dyirbal: avoidance languages and Herzegovina; Botswana; British
Dyola: Senegal; West Atlantic Virgin Islands; Brown University
Dyula: Dyula; Mande Corpus of American English; Brunei;

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Index of Languages

Bulgaria; Cameroon; Canada; Canary Norfolk Island; Nuclear English;

Islands; Chile; China; Cockney; code Nyanja; Oman; Pakistan; Panama;
mixing; Cook Islands; Costa Rica; Papua New Guinea; Paraguay; Peru;
Croatia; Cuba; Cyprus; Czech Pilippines, The; phonetic spelling;
Republic; Denmark; dental; dialect; Pilipino; Plain English Campaign;
Dominica; Dominican Republic; Poland; Portugal; Puerto Rico; Qatar;
Ecuador; Egypt; El Salvador; Romania; Rwanda; Saint Helena;
endoglossic; English; English as an Saint Kitts and Nevis; Saint Lucia;
International Language; English as a Saint Pierre and Miquelon; Saint
Second Dialect; English for Special Vincent and the Grenadines; Samoa;
Purposes; Equatorial Guinea; Estuary Samoan; SAo Tomé and Principe;
English; Ethiopia; Falkland Islands; Saudi Arabia; Scouse; Seaspeak;
Fiji; Finland; foreign language; second language; Seychelles; Sierra
Franglais; French; Gambia, The; Leone; Singapore; Slovenia; Solomon
Geordie; Germanic; Ghana; Islands; Somalia; South Africa; Spain;
Gibraltar; Greece; Grenada; Grimm’s Sri Lanka; standard English;
law; Guam; Guatemala; statistical linguistics; Strine; Sudan;
Guinea-Bissau; Guyana; Hawaiian Suriname; Survey of English Usage;
Islands; Honduras; Hong Kong; Swaziland; Sweden; Switzerland;
Hungary; Iceland; India; Indonesia; Taiwan; Tanzania; Teaching English
International Computer Archive of to Speakers of Other Languages;
Modern English; International Thailand; Tokelau; Tonga; Tongan;
Corpus of English; international Trinidad and Tobago; Turkey;
language; Iran; Iraq; Ireland; Irish Tuvalu; U and non-U; Uganda;
Gaelic; Israel; Italy; Jamaica; United Arab Emirates; United
Japanese; Jordan; Kenya; Kiribati; Kingdom; United States of America;
Korea, North; Korea, South; Kuwait; Uruguay; US Virgin Islands; Vanuatu;
Kwa; Lancaster—Oslo/Bergen Corpus variety; Venezuela; Volaptik; Yemen;
of British English; Lesotho; Liberia; Yugoslavia; Zambia; Zimbabwe; Zulu
Libya; Liechtenstein; lingual; English, Old: acrostic; analects;
London-Lund Corpus of Spoken apocope; dual; English; eth; flyting;
English; Longman/Lancaster English functional change; haplology;
Language Corpus; Luxembourg; Icelandic; metanalysis; metathesis;
Madeira; Malawi; Malaysia; Maldives; narrowing; rune; thorn; wynn;
Malta; Maltese; Manx; Maori; Mariana yogh
Islands, Northern; Marshall Islands; English, pidgin: Cameroon; Liberia;
Mauritius; Mexico; Micronesia, Motu; Nigeria; Solomon Islands; Tok
Federated States of; Mongolia; Pisin
Montserrat; Mozambique; Myanmar; Epera: Macro-Chibchan
Namibia; Nauru; Nepal; Netherlands, Erse: Irish Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic
The; Netherlands Antilles; New Erzya: Mordvin
Englishes; New Zealand; Nicaragua; Eskimo: Canada; Danish; Denmark;
Nigeria; Niue; non-native varieties; dual; Eskimo; Eskimo-Aleut

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 Index of Languages

Esperanto: artificial language; negative; Dutch; elision;

Esperanto; Ido; language enjambement; false friends; France;
Estonian: Estonia; Estonian; Finland; Franglais; French; French Guinea;
Finno-Ugric; Sweden French Polynesia; future tense;
Ethiopic: Ethiopia Gabon; gender; grave accent;
Etruscan: alphabet; Etruscan Guadeloupe; Guinea; Haiti;
Evenki: Evenki; Manchu-Tungus immersion; international language;
Ewe: Ewe; Ghana; Togo isochrony; Italy; Kwa; Laos;
Extramaduran: Spain Lebanon; liaison; linking;
Faeroese: Danish; Denmark; Faeroese; Luxembourg; Madagascar; Malagasy;
Germanic; Scandinavian Mali; Maltese; Martinique;
Faliscan: Italic Mauritania; Mauritius; minimal free
Fanagalo: Zambia form; Monaco; Morocco;
Fang: Cameroon; Equatorial Guinea; Mozambique; national language;
Gabon “New Caledonia; Niger;
Fante: Akan palato-alveolar; paronymy; particle;
Faroese: Faeroese past anterior; past historic; past
Farsi: Bahrain; Iran; Oman; Persian; tense; Portugal; Puerto Rico;
Qatar; Tadzhikistan; United Arab Réunion; Rhaetian; Romance;
Emirates Romania; Rwanda; Saint Pierre and
Fijian: Fiji; Fijian; New Zealand Miquelon; sandhi; Sango; second
Filipino: Pilipino language; Senegal; Seychelles; sign;
Finnish: alphabet; Estonia; Finland; Spain; statistical linguistics;
Finnish; Finno-Ugric; Mordvin; Switzerland; Syria; Togo; transfer;
Norway; phonetic spelling; Sweden; translation; trigraph; Tunisia; T/V
Swedish forms; United Kingdom; United
Flemish: Belgium; Dutch; Germanic States of America; uvular; Vanuatu;
Fon: Benin Vietnam
Fox: Algonkian French, creole: Dominica;
Franglais: Franglais Dominican Republic; French; French
French: Académie francaise; accent; Guinea; Guadeloupe; Haiti;
acute accent; address, forms of; Martinique; Mauritius; Réunion;
Africa; Algeria; Andorra; auxiliary Romance; Saint Lucia; Seychelles;
language; Belgium; Benin; Trinidad and Tobago; United States
borrowing; Burkina Faso; Burundi; of America
Cambodia; Canada; cedilla; Central Frisian: Frisian; Germanic; Germany;
African Republic; Chad; circumflex; Netherlands, The
clitic; cognate; Comoros; concord; Friulian: Italy; Rhaetian
conditional; Congo; Congo, Ful: Fula; Gambia, The
Democratic Republic of; contraction; Fula: Fula; Guinea; West Atlantic
Corsican; Céte d’Ivoire; dental; Fulacunda: Guinea-Bissau; Senegal
diglossia; discontinuous Fulani: Fula
construction; Djibouti; double Fulfulde: Benin; Burkina Faso;

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Index of Languages

Cameroon; Fula; Guinea-Bissau; linguistics; Switzerland; Ukraine;

Mali; Niger; Nigeria Volaptik
Fur: Fur; Nilo-Saharan German, Swiss: diglossia; Switzerland
Fuuta Jalon: Guinea Gheg: Albanian
Ga-Adangme: Ghana Gilbertese: Kiribati
Gaelic: alphabet; Celtic; flyting; Irish Gilyak: Gilyak: Paleosiberian
Gaelic; Scottish Gaelic Glosa: Glosa
Gagauz: Bulgaria; Moldova; Romania Goajiro: Andean-Equatorial
Galatian: Celtic Gogo: Tanzania
Galician: Portuguese; Spain Gondhi: Dravidian
Galla: Cushitic Gothic: Gothic
Gallinya: Oromo Gourma: Burkina Faso
Gan: China; Chinese Grabar: Armenian
Ganda: Uganda Greek: Albania; alphabet; aorist;
Garhwali: Pahari article; Australia; boustrophedon;
Gaulish: Celtic Bulgaria; chrestomathy; classical
Gbaya: Adamawa-Ubangi; Central language; Cyprus; demotic; diglossia;
African Republic diminutive; diplomatics; Egypt;
Ge’ez: Ethiopia Egyptian; epicene; Greenlandic;
Geordie: Geordie Danish; Denmark; Eskimo;
Georgian: Georgia; Georgian; etymology; Germany; grammar-— —
Kartvelian; Turkey translation method; Greece; Greek;
German, Hutterite: Canada; Grimm’s law; hapax legomenon;
German; United States of heterophemy; heterotopy;
America hieroglyphic; hybrid; Indo-European;
German, Mennonite: Belize; Bolivia; Interglossa; Italy; koine; Linear A;
Brazil; Canada; German; United lipogram; litotes; logogriph;
States of America majuscule; minority; Nubian;
German, Pennsylvanian: Canada; optative; paleography; phatic
German; United States of America communion; rhopalic; Rosetta Stone;
German, standard: accusative case; Sanskrit; syndeton; synecdoche;
Australia; Austria; auxiliary language; Syriac; tachistoscope; typology of
Belarus; Belgium; Brazil; Bulgaria; language; uncial; United Kingdom;
calque; Czech Republic; Denmark; voice; zeugma
dialect atlas; dialect continuum; Grishun: Rhaetian
dieresis; foreign language; France; Guajajara: Brazil
German; Germanic; Germany; Guarani: Andean-Equatorial;
Hungary; international language; Argentina; Brazil; Guarani; Paraguay
isochrony; Italy; Kazakhstan; Guaymi: Macro-Chibchan
Liechtenstein; Luxembourg; Gujarati: Gujarati; India; Uganda;
' Moldova; Namibia; nominative case; United Kingdom .
Paraguay; Poland; Puerto Rico; Gullah: Sea Islands Creole English
Romania; Russia; Slovenia; statistical Gumuz: Koman

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 Index of Languages

Gun: Benin Ibibio: Efik

Gur: Voltaic Ibo: Igbo
Gurage: Ethiopia Icelandic: eth; Faeroese; Germanic;
Gurkhali: Nepali Iceland; Icelandic; Scandinavian
Gurma: Togo Ido: Ido; Novial
Guwal: avoidance languages Idoma: Benue-Congo; Nigeria
Guyanese: Guyana; Suriname Igbo: Benue-Congo; Igbo; Kwa;
Gypsy: Romani Niger-Congo; Nigeria
Haida: Na-Dene Ijaw: Ijo
Haitian Creole French: Dominican Ijo: Ijo; Kwa
Republic; Haiti Ikiribati: Kiribati; Nauru
Hakka: China; Chinese; French Ilocano: Ilocano; Philippines, The
Polynesia; Taiwan Tlokano: Ilocano
Hani: China Iloko: Ilocano
Hausa: Chad; Chadic; Ghana; Hausa; Indonesian: Indonesia; Malay
Niger; Nigeria; Sudan Ingush: Chechen; Nakho-Dagestanian
Hawaiian: Hawaiian Islands Interglossa: Interglossa
Haya: Tanzania Interlingua: Interlingua
Hebrew: alphabet; Aramaic; classical Inuit: Eskimo
language; Hebrew; Israel; Semitic Inuktitut: Eskimo
Hellenistic Greek: Greek; koine Inupiaq: Eskimo
Hiligaynon: Philippines, The Inupik: Eskimo
Hindi: Bihari; community language; Irish Gaelic: Celtic; Ireland; Irish
Devanagari; Fiji; French Guinea; Gaelic; language revitalization
Guyana; Hindi; India; Indo-Aryan; programme; Manx; ogham; United
Kuwait; Mauritius; minority; New Kingdom
Zealand; Rajasthani; Suriname; Italian: assimilation; Australia; Brazil;
Trinidad and Tobago; Uganda; community language; diminutive;
United Kingdom; Urdu; Yemen Ethiopia; false friends; France;
Hindustani: Hindi Italian; Italy; Maltese; minority;
Hirdu: Hindi Monaco; Puerto Rico; Rhaetian;
Hiri Motu: Motu; Papua New Guinea Romance; San Marino; Sardinian;
Hittite: Anatolian Slovenia; Somalia; Switzerland;
Hmong: China syncope; United Kingdom; United
Hopi: Aztec-Tanoan States of America; Vatican City
Hungarian: Austria; definiteness; Iu Mien: Miao-Yao
duration; Finno-Ugric; harmony; Jamaican Creole: Jamaica
Hungarian; Hungary; Mordvin; Japanese: Ainu; Brazil; character;
Romania; Slovenia; Yugoslavia honorific; Japan; Japanese; kana;
Hurrian: Anatolian kanji; Korean; logogram;
Hutterite German: German, postposition; Romaji; Singapore;
Hutterite syllabary; typology of language
Iberian: Iberian Javanese: Indonesia; Javanese;

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Index of Languages

Malaysia; New Caledonia; Suriname Kinyarwanda: Rwanda

Jieng: Dinka Kirghiz: Kirghiz; Kyrgyzstan; Turkic
Jingpo: Myanmar Kirundi: Burundi
Judaeo-German: Yiddish Kissi: West Atlantic
Judaeo-Spanish: Ladino KiSwahili: Swahili
Jula: Dyula Kituba: Congo, Democratic Republic
Kabardian: Kabardian; Russia of; Kongo
Kabre: Togo Koimné: Greek
Kabyle: Algeria; Belgium; Berber; Koma: Koman
France; Kabyle Komi: Finno-Ugric; Komi; Russia
Kaffir: Xhosa Kongo: Angola; Congo; Congo,
Kaffiri: Dardic Democratic Republic of; Kongo
Kaingang: Brazil Konkani: Indo-Aryan; Konkani
Kalenjin: Nandi Korean: China; Japan; Japanese;
Kalmyk: Mongolian; Russia Korea, North; Korea, South; Korean;
Kam: China Mariana Islands, Northern;
Kamas: Samoyedic Singapore
Kamba: Kenya Koryak: Luorawetlan
Kamchadal: Luorawetlan Kotoko: Chadic
Kanarese: Kannada Kott: Yeniseyan
Kannada: Dravidian; India; Kpelle: Liberia
instrumental; Kannada Kreole: Mauritius
Kanuri: Chad; Kanuri; Niger; Nigeria; Krio: Gambia, The; Krio; Sierra Leone
Saharan Kriol: Belize
Karakalpak: Uzbekistan Kru: Liberia
Karelian: Finland Kua: Makua
Karen: Myanmar Kui: Dravidian
Kashmiri: Dardic; India; Kashmiri Kumauni: Pahari
Kashubian: Lekhitic Kuna: Macro-Chibchan
Katharévusa: Greek Kurdi: Kurdish
Kazakh: Kazakh; Kazakhstan; Kurdish: Armenia; Germany; Iran;
Mongolia; Turkic Iranian; Iraq; Kurdish; Lebanon;
Kekchi: Guatemala Syria; Turkey
Kerek: Luorawetlan Kurmanji: Kurdish
Ket: Yeniseyan Kurukhi: Dravidian
Khalka: Mongol Kwadi: Khoisan
Khanty: Finno-Ugric; Khanty Ladin: Rhaetian
Khari Boli: Hindi Ladino: Israel; Ladino; Rhaetian
Khmer: Khmer; Mon-Khmer; Lahnda: Indo-Aryan; Panjabi
Thailand; Vietnam Lakk: Nakho-Dagestanian
Khowari: Dardic Landsmal: Norwegian
Kikongo: Kongo Lango: Acholi; Lango; Nilo-Saharan
Kikuyu: Kenya Languedoc: Occitan

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 Index of Languages

Lao: Lao; Laos; Tai Lii: Myanmar

Laotian: Lao; Laos Luba: Congo, Democratic Republic of
Lappish: Finland; Finno-Ugric; Same; Luganda: Uganda
Sweden Lugbara: Congo, Democratic
Latin: ablative case; absolute Republic of
construction; affix; alphabet; Luo: Kenya; Luo; Nilo-Saharan; Nilotic
analects; assimilation; caesura; case; Luorawetlan: Paleosiberian
centum language; chronogram; Luri: Iran
classical language; cognate; concord; Lusatian: Sorbian
conjugation; copula; cuneiform; Luwian: Anatolian
dative case; dead language; Luxembourgeois: Létzebuergesch
declension; deponent verb; Luxembourgish: Létzebuergesch
dissimilation; epenthesis; epicene; Luya: Kenya
extension; government; grammar-— Lycian: Anatolian
translation method; Grimm’s law; Lydian: Anatolian
hybrid; imperative; imperfect; Maay: Somalia
impersonal; inceptive; indicative; Maba: Maban
Glosa; Italic; Latin; Latinate; Mabuyag: Australian
macaronic; macron; majuscule; Macanese: Hong Kong; Macao
paleography; paronymy; participle; Macedonian: Albania; Bulgaria;
past tense; principal parts; prose; Bulgarian; Greece; Macedonia;
rhythm; Romance; Sanskrit; Macedonian; Slavic
Sardinian; stet; syncope; typology of Madura: Madurese
language; uncial; Vatican City Madurese: Indonesia; Madurese
Latvian: Baltic; Latvia; Latvian; Magahi: Bihari
Sweden Magar: Nepal
Laz: Kartvelian Magyar: Hungarian
Lettish: Latvian Mahri: Oman
Létzebuergesch: Belgium; Maithili: Bilhari; Nepal
Létzebuergesch; Luxembourg Makonde: Tanzania
Lezghian: Lezghian; Makua: Makua; Malawi; Mozambique
Nakho-Dagestanian Malagasy: Comoros; Madagascar;
Libyan, Old: Berber Malagasy
Ligurian: Monaco Malay; Brunei; Indonesia; Malay;
Limba: West Atlantic Malaysia; Netherlands, The;
Lingala: Congo; Congo, Democratic Singapore; Sri Lanka; Thailand
Republic of Malayalam: Dravidian; India;
Lithuanian: Baltic; Lithuania; Malayalam; Singapore
Lithuanian Maldivian: Indo-Aryan; Maldives;
Lobi: Burkina Faso; Voltaic Maldivian
Lombard: Italy Malinke: Gambia, The; Mali; Malinke;
Lomwe: Malawi; Mozambique Mande; Senegal
Low Saxon: Netherlands, The Maltese: Malta; Maltese

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Index of Languages

Malto: Dravidian Mishnaic Hebrew: Hebrew

Mam: Guatemala; Mayan Mixteco: Mexico; Oto-Manguean
Manchu: Manchu; Manchu-Tungus Moabite: Moabite
Mandarin Chinese: China; Chinese; Mohawk: Macro-Siouan
Taiwan Mohican: Algonkian
Mandingo: Malinke Moksha: Mordvin
Mandinka: Gambia, The; Moldavian: Moldavian; Moldova
Guinea-Bissau : Molisano: Italy
Mandyak: Cape Verde; Guinea-Bissau Mon: Mon; Mon-Khmer
Maninka: Guinea; Malinke Mongo: Congo, Democratic Republic
Mansi; Finno-Ugric of
Manx: Celtic; dead language; Manx; Mongol: China; Kyrgyzstan; Mongol;
United Kingdom Mongolia; Mongolian
Mao: Koman Mooré: More
Maori: Cook Islands; Maori; New Mordvin: Finno-Ugric; Mordvin;
Zealand Russia
Mapuche: Penutian More: Burkina Faso; Ghana; More;
Mapudungan: Chile; Penutian Voltaic
Marathi: India; Indo-Aryan; Marathi Morisyen: Mauritius
Marba: Chad Mosi: Chad
Mari: Finno-Ugric; Mari; Russia Mossi: More
Marquesan: French Polynesia Motu: Motu
Marwari: Rajasthani Mubi: Chadic
Marshallese: Marshall Islands Mundari: Munda
Masai: Masai; Nilo-Hamitic; Muong: Vietnam
Nilo-Saharan Murmi: Nepal
Masalit: Maban Muskogee: Algonkian
Mataco: Argentina; Gé-Pano-Carib Mycenaean Greek: Greek; syllabary
Maya: Mayan; Mexico; Penutian Myene: Gabon
Mbai: Chad Nahua: Nahuatl
Mbundu: Angola Nahuatl: Aztec-Tanoan; Mexico
Mende: Mande; Mende; Sierra Leone Nanai: Manchu-Tungus
Mennonite German: German, Nandi: Nandi; Nilo-Hamitic;
Mennonite Nilo-Saharan; Nilotic
Miao: China; Laos; Miao-Yao Nauruan: Nauru
Micmac: Algonkian Navajo: Na-Dene
Mimi: Maban Ndebele: Ndebele; South Africa;
Minchia: China Zimbabwe
Mingrelian: Kartvelian Neapolitan: Italy
Min Nan: China; Chinese Nenets: Nenets; Samoyedic
Minoan: Linear A Nepali: Bhutan; Nepal; Nepali; Pahari
Min Pei: China; Chinese; Taiwan; Newari: Nepal
Thailand Ngala: Congo, Democratic Republic of

384
 Index of Languages

Ngambai: Hausa Ostyak: Khanty

Nganasan: Samoyedic Otomi: Mexico; Oto-Manguean
Ngbaka: Adamawa-Ubangi Paez: Macro-Chibchan
Ngbandi: Central African Republic; Pahlavi: Persian
Sango Paiute: Aztec-Tanoan
Nguni: Xhosa; Zulu Pakhto: Pashto
Nicobarese: Mon-Khmer; Nicobarese Palaic: Anatolian
Nigerian Pidgin English: Nigeria Palauan: Austronesian; Belau
Niuean: New Zealand; Niue Pali: Pali
Nivkhi: Gilyak Panjabi: community language; India;
Nkole: Uganda Indo-Aryan; Pakistan; Panjabi;
Norn: Scandinavian postposition; Singapore; United
Norse, Old: Danish; Germanic; Kingdom
Norwegian; Scandinavian; Swedish Papago-Pima: Aztec-Tanoan
Norwegian: Germanic; Norway; Papiamentu: Netherlands, The;
Norwegian; Scandinavian Netherlands Antilles; Papiamentu;
Novial: artificial language; Novial US Virgin Islands
Nuba: Sudan Parauk: Myanmar
Nubian: Egypt; Nubian Pashayi: Afghanistan
Nuer: Nilotic; Nuer; Sudan Pashto: Afghanistan; Iranian;
Nung: Tai Pakistan; Pashto; Persian;
Nupe: Benue-Congo Tadzhikistan; United Arab Emirates
Nyamwezi: Tanzania Patois: French Guinea; Patwa
Nyanja: Malawi; Mozambique; Pattani Malay: Malay
Nyanja; Zambia Patwa: Dominica; Grenada;
Nyankore: Uganda Guadeloupe; Jamaica; Martinique;
Nynorsk: Norwegian Patwa; Saint Lucia
Occidental: Novial Paumotu: French Polynesia
Occitan: France; Italy; Occitan; Pennsylvanian Dutch: German
Romance Pennsylvanian German: German
Odul: Yukaghir Persian: Caucasian; Iran; Iranian;
Ojibwa: Algonkian; Canada Iraq; Oman; Persian; Urdu
Okanogan: Salish Phoenician: alphabet; Phoenician
Old Church Slavonic: Slavonic Phrygian: Anatolian
Old English: English, Old Pictish: ogham
Old Norse: Scandinavian ' Piemontese: Italy
Omok: Yukaghir Pijin: Solomon Islands
Oriya: India; Indo-Aryan; Oriya Pilipino: Philippines, The; Pilipino
Oromo: Ethiopia; Oromo Pitcairn-Norfolk: Norfolk Island
Oscan: Italic Polabian: Lekhitic
Ossetic: Georgia; Iranian; Ossetic; Police Motu: Motu
Russia PoliceSpeak: Seaspeak
Ostrogothic: Gothic Polish: acute accent; alveo-palatal;

385
Index of Languages

Belarus; Belorussian; Czech Republic; Estonia; France; Germany; Greece;

Germany; Lekhitic; Lithuania; Hungary; Indo-Aryan; Italy;
minority; Moldova; Poland; Polish; Kazakhstan; Latvia; Lithuania;
Russia; Slavic; United Kingdom Macedonia; Netherlands, The;
Ponape: Micronesia, Federated States Norway; Poland; Portugal; Romani;
of Romania; Russia; Spain; Sweden;
Portuguese: Angola; auxiliary Syria; Turkey; Ukraine; United
language; Azores; Belgium; Brazil; Kingdom; United States of America;
cognate; France; Guinea-Bissau; Yugoslavia
Macao; Madeira; Mozambique; Romanian: Albania; Bulgaria; Greece;
Papiamentu; Portugal; Portuguese; Macedonia; Moldavian; Romance;
relexification hypothesis; Romance; Romania; Romanian; Yugoslavia
Sao Tomé and Principe; United Romansch: Rhaetian; Switzerland;
Kingdom Ukraine
Portuguese, creole: Cape Verde; Ruanda: Rwanda
Gambia, The; Guinea-Bissau; Hong Rumanian: Romanian
Kong; Macao; Netherlands Antilles; Rundi: Burundi; Rwanda
Portuguese; Romance; S40 Tomé and Russian: Armenia; Azerbaijan;
Principe; US Virgin Islands Balto-Slavic; Belarus; Bulgaria;
Prakrit: Prakrit Caucasian; Cuba; Cyrillic; Czech
Provencal: Italy; Monaco; Occitan Republic; Estonia; Estonian; foreign
Prussian, Old: Baltic language; Georgia; hard sign;
Pugliese: Italy instrumental; international
Punic: Phoenician language; Israel; Kazakhstan;
Punjabi: Panjabi Kyrgyzstan; Latvia; Lithuania;
Punu: Gabon Moldavian; Moldova; Mongolia;
Quechua: Andean-Equatorial; patronymic; Poland; Russia; Russian;
Argentina; Bolivia; Ecuador; Peru; Slavic; speech community;
Quechua Tadzhikistan; transliteration;
Quekchi: Belize; El Salvador; Turkmenistan; Ukraine; Uzbekistan
Guatemala; Mayan Russian, White: Belorussian
Quiché: Guatemala; Mayan Rwanda: Bantu; Benue-Congo;
Rajasthani: Indo-Aryan; Rajasthani Congo, Democratic Republic of;
Rapanui: Chile Rwanda; Uganda
Rarotongan: Cook Islands; New Rwanda-Rundi: Rwanda
Zealand Ryukyuan: Japan
Rhaetian: Rhaetian; Romance; Saami: Same
Switzerland Samana: Dominican Republic
Rhaeto-Romance: Rhaetian Same: Finland; Finno-Ugric; Norway;
Riff: Berber Same; Sweden
Riksmal: Norwegian Sammorsk: Norwegian
Romani: Albania; Austria; Brazil; Samoan: American Samoa; New
Bulgaria; Croatia; Czech Republic; Zealand; Samoa; Samoan

386
 Index of Languages

Sandawe: Khoisan Shona: Botswana; Mozambique;

Sango: Adamawa-Ubangi; Central Shona; Zimbabwe
African Republic; Chad; Congo; Shoshone: Aztec-Tanoan
Sango Siamese: Thai
Sanskrit: classical language; Sicilian: Italy
Devanagari; Grimm’s law; India; Sindhi: India; Indo-Aryan; Pakistan;
Indo-Aryan; Indo-European; Pali; Sindhi
Panini; Sanskrit; Tamil Singhalese: Sinhala
Santali: Bangladesh; Munda Sinhala: Sinhala; Sri Lanka; United
Sara: Chad Arab Emirates
Saramaccan: Suriname Sinhalese: Indo-Aryan; Maldives;
Sardinian: Italian; Italy; Romance; Sinhala
Sardinian Sioux: Macro-Siouan
Saxon, Low: Netherlands, The Slavonic, Old Church: Czech; Slavic
Scottish Gaelic: Celtic; Scottish Slovak: Croatia; Czech; Polish; Slavic;
Gaelic; United Kingdom Slovak; Yugoslavia
Scouse: Scouse Slovene: Austria; Hungary; Italy;
Sea Islands Creole English: Sea Slavic; Slovene; Slovenia
Islands Creole English; United States Slovenian: Slovene
of America Slovincian: Lekhitic
Selkup: Samoyedic Solomon Islands Pidgin: Solomon
Senari: Voltaic Islands
Senufo: Cote d’Ivoire; Mali Somali: Cushitic; Djibouti; Ethiopia;
Serbian: Cyrillic; Serbian; Somali; Somalia; United Arab
Serbo-Croatian; Slavic; Yugoslavia Emirates; Yemen
Serbo-Croat: Serbo-Croatian Songai: Songhai
Serbo-Croatian: accent; Austria; Songe: Congo, Democratic Republic of
Bosnia and Herzegovina; Croatia; Songhai: Mali; Nilo-Saharan; Songhai
Croatian; Hungary; Macedonia; Soninke: Mali; Senegal
Serbo-Croatian; Slavic; Slovene; Sorbian: Austria; Germany; Polish;
Slovenia; Yugoslavia Slavic; Sorbian
Serer: Senegal; West Atlantic Sotho: Lesotho; Sotho
Sesotho: Lesotho; Sotho; South Spanglish: Spanish
Africa Spanish: acute accent; alphabet;
Sesotho sa Leboa: Sotho; South Andorra; Argentina; auxiliary
Africa language; Belgium; Belize; Bolivia;
Setswana: South Africa; Tswana Canary Islands; Catalan; Chile; code
Settla: Zambia mixing; cognate; Colombia; Costa
Shan: Myanmar; Tai Rica; Cuba; Dominican Republic;
Shawnee: Algonkian Ecuador; El Salvador; epenthesis;
Sheldru: Sheldru Equatorial Guinea; Gibraltar;
Shelta: Sheldru Guarani; Guatemala; Guinea;
Shluh: Berber Honduras; international language;

387
Index. of Languages

Mexico; Nicaragua; Panama; Tamashek: Algeria; Berber; Libya;

Paraguay; Peru; Philippines, The; Mali; Niger
‘phonetic spelling; Portuguese; Puerto Tamil: Dravidian; India; Malaysia;
Rico; punctuation; Romance; Spain; Mauritius; Singapore; Sinhala; South
Spanish; tilde; United Kingdom; Africa; Sri Lanka; Tamil
United States of America; Uruguay; Tarahumar: Aztec-Tanoan
US Virgin Islands; Venezuela Tasmanian: Indo-Pacific
Spanish, creole: Papiamentu; Tatar: Russia; Tatar; Turkic;
Philippines, The; Romance Uzbekistan
Squamish: Salish Tebu: Saharan
Sranan: Netherlands, The; Teda: Chad; Libya
Netherlands Antilles; Suriname Teke: Congo
Strine: Strine Telugu: Dravidian; India; Telugu;
Sukuma: Tanzania United Arab Emirates
Sumerian: Sumerian Tem: Benin
Sunda: Sunda Temne: Sierra Leone; West Atlantic
Sundanese: Indonesia; Sunda Teréna: Brazil
Svan: Kartvelian Teso: Uganda
Swahili: Africa; auxiliary language; Tex-Mex: code-mixing; Spanish
Bantu; Benue-Congo; Burundi; Thai: Laos; Singapore; Tai; Thai;
Comoros; Congo, Democratic Thailand
Republic of; Kenya; Mozambique; Tho: Tai
Niger-Congo; Oman; Somalia; Tibetan: China; Tibetan
Swahili; Tanzania; typology of Ticuna: Brazil
language; Uganda; United Arab Tigrinya: Ethiopia; Tigrinya
Emirates; Zambia Tiv: Benue-Congo; Tiv
Swati: South Africa; Swaziland Tiwi: Australian
Swazi: Swaziland Tlapanec: Hokan
Swedish: digraph; Estonian; Finland; Tlingit: Na-Dene
Germanic; mutual intelligibility; Toba Batak: Batak
Scandinavian; Sweden; Swedish Tocharian: Indo-European;
Sylhet: Bangladesh Tocharian
Syriac: Aramaic; Cyprus; Sweden; Tokelau: American Samoa; Tokelau
Syria; Syriac Tokharian: Tocharian
Tabasaran: Nakho-Dagestanian Tok Pisin: inclusive; Papua New
Tadzhik: Afghanistan; Iranian; Guinea; pidgin; Tok Pisin
Tadzhik; Tadzhikistan Tonga: Zambia
Tagalog: Guam; Pilipino; United Arab Tongan: American Samoa; New
Emirates Zealand; Tonga; Tongan
Tahitian: French Polynesia; Tahitian Tosk: Albanian
Taiwanese: Taiwan Toucouleur: Mauritania
Tajik: Tadzhik Trinidadien: Trinidad and Tobago
Talaing: Mon Truk: Micronesia, Federated States of

388
 Index of Languages

Tshivenda: South Africa Venetic: Italic

Tsonga: Mozambique; South Africa; Vietnamese: Australia; Khmer; Hong
- Swaziland Kong; Laos; Mon-Khmer; New
Tswana: Botswana; South Africa; Caledonia; typology of language;
Tswana United Kingdom; Vietnam;
Tuareg: Berber Vietnamese
Tulu: Dravidian Visigothic: Gothic
Tungus: Evenki Volapiik: Volapiik
Turkish: Altaic; aorist; Belgium; Votyak: Udmurt
Bulgaria; community language; Vulgar Latin: Latin
Cyprus; France; Germany; Greece; Walamo: Omotic
harmony; Macedonia; Netherlands, Walloon: Belgium
The; Romania; Sweden; Turkey; Warlpiri: Australian
Turkic; Turkish; typology of Welamo: Ethiopia
language; United Kingdom; Welsh: actor—action-goal; Celtic;
Uzbekistan; Yugoslavia language revitalization programme;
Turkmen: Afghanistan; Turkic; lingual; minority; mutation; proverb;
Turkmen; Turkmenistan United Kingdom; Welsh; word order
Tuscan: Corsican; Italian Wendish: Sorbian
Tuvaluan: Nauru; Tuvalu Western Desert: Australian
Tuvin: Russia Western Sotho: Tswana
Twi: Akan White Russian: Belorussian
Ubykh: Abkhazo-Adyghian Wolof: France; Gambia, The; Niger-
Udmurt: Finno-Ugric; Russia; Udmurt Congo; Senegal; West Atlantic;
Ugaritic: Ugaritic Wolof
Uighur: China; Kazakhstan; Wu: China; Chinese
Kyrgyzstan; Turkic; Uighur Xiang: China; Chinese
Ukrainian: Cyrillic; Estonia; Xhosa: South Africa; Xhosa; Zambia;
Kazakhstan; Lithuania; Moldova; Zulu
Poland; Slavic; Ukraine; Ukrainian; Xitsonga: South Africa
United Kingdom Xosa: Xhosa
Umbrian: Italic Yakut: Russia; Yakut
Umbundu: Angola Yanomami: Brazil
Urartian: Anatolian Yao (Africa): Malawi; Mozambique
Urdu: Bahrain; Bihari; Hindi; India; Yao (China): China; Miao-Yao
Indo-Aryan; Mauritius; Oman; Yap: Micronesia, Federated States of
Pakistan; Qatar; South Africa; United Yeniseyan: Paleosiberian
Kingdom; Urdu , Yenisey-Ostyak: Yeniseyan
- Urundi: Rundi Yi: China :
Uzbek: Afghanistan; Altaic; Yiddish: Germanic; Hebrew; Israel;
Kyrgyzstan; Tadzhikistan; Turkic; Latvia; Russia; Yiddish
Turkmenistan; Uzbek; Uzbekistan Yoruba: Benin; Benue-Congo;
Venetian: Italy Niger-Congo; Nigeria; Yoruba

389
Index of Languages

Yuan: Tai Zande: Adamawa-Ubangi; Central

Yucatec: Mayan African Republic; Congo, Democratic
Yue: China; Chinese; Costa Rica; Hong Republic of; Sudan
Kong; Vietnam Zapotec: Mexico; Oto-Manguean
Yukaghir: Paleosiberian; Yukaghir Zhuang: China
Yupik: Eskimo Zulu: Bantu; Benue-Congo; Lesotho;
Yurak: Nenets Malawi; Niger-Congo; South Africa;
Zaghawa: Saharan Swaziland; Xhosa; Zulu
Zamboanguenio: Philippines, The Zyryan: Komi
Zan: Kartvelian

390
ILLUSTRATIONS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to include
copyright material in this volume on the pages specified below.

Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd: from D. Crystal, Introduction to Language Pathology

(1981). Used with permission: p 28.

Ray L. Birdwhistell: from Kinesics and Context (Allen Lane 1971). © R.L. Birdwhistell
1971. Used by permission of the author: p. 180.

Blackwell Publishers: from F. Coulmas, The Writing Systems of the World; from D.
Crystal, Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics; and extract from Blackwell proof correc-
tion list. Used with permission: pp. 54, 70, 77, 86, 148, 177, 276.

Cambridge University Press: from D.B. Fry, The Physics of Speech (1979); from Cham-
bers & Trudgill, Dialectology (1980). Used with permission: pp. 23, 81, 171.

The Commission of the European Communities: p. 337:

Croom Helm Ltd: from Sanderson, Linguistic Atlas of England (1978): p. 88.

Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd: from Eric Singer, A Manual of Graphology (1969): p. 140.
Encyclopaedia Britannica International Ltd: p. 306.
International Phonetic Association: International Phonetic Alphabet (revised to 1989).
Used with permission: p. 167.

Punch: cartoons reproduced by kind permission of Punch: pp. 6,17, 39, 44, 63, 97,
122, 147, 164, 197, 213, 234, 243, 270, 280, 311, 338, 349, 364, 373.

Scientific American Inc: after N. Geschwind, ‘Specializations of the human brain’,

September 1979, © 1979 Scientific American Inc. All rights reserved; from ‘The Search
for extraterrestrial intelligence’ by Carl Sagan and F. Drake, May 1975, © 1975
Scientific American Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission: pp. 186, 263.
Studentlitteratur: after A. Zettersten, A Statistical Study of the Graphic System ofPresent-
Day American English (1969). Used with permission: p. 320.
EJDC (formerly British Journal of Disorders of Communication); from Hardcastle &
Morgan, BJDC, 1982, p. 101.
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 THE PENGUIN DICTIONARY
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