| A | B |
|---|
| Black English Vernacular | (BEV)(76) A rule-governed dialect of American English with roots in southern English. BEV is spoken by African American youth and by many adults in their casual, intimate speech—sometimes called ebonics. |
| Call Systems | (59) Systems of communication among nonhuman primates, composed of a limited number of sounds that vary in intensity and duration. Tied to environmental stimuli. |
| Cultural Transmission | (61) A basic feature of language; transmission through learning. |
| Daughter Languages | (77) Languages developing out of the same parent language (protolanguage); for example, French and Spanish are daughter languages of Latin. |
| Descriptive Linguistics | (65) The scientific study of a spoken language, including its phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax. |
| Diglossia | (72) The existence of "high" (formal) and "low" (familial) dialects of a single language, such as German. |
| Displacement | (62) A linguistic capacity that allows humans to talk about things and events that are not present. |
| Focal Vocabulary | (69) A set of words and distinctions that are particularly important to certain groups (those with particular foci of experience or activity), such as types of snow to Eskimos or skiers. |
| Historical Linguistics | (77) Subdivision of linguistics that studies languages over time. |
| Kinesics | (63) The study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions. |
| Lexicon | (65) Vocabulary; a dictionary containing all the morphemes in a language and their meaning. |
| Morphology | (65) The study of form; used in linguistics (the study of morphemes and word construction) and for form in general—for example, biomorphology relates to physical form. |
| Phoneme | (66) Significant sound contrast in a language that serves to distinguish meaning, as in minimal pairs. |
| Phonemics | (66) The study of the sound contrasts (phonemes) of a particular language. |
| Phonetics | (66) The study of speech sounds in general; what people actually say in various languages. |
| Phonology | (65) The study of sounds used in speech. |
| Productivity | (61) The ability to use the rules of one's language to create new expressions comprehensible to other speakers; a basic feature of language. |
| Protolanguage | (77) Language ancestral to several daughter languages. |
| Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis | (68) Theory that different languages produce different ways of thinking. |
| Semantics | (71) A language's meaning system. |
| Sociolinguistics | (72) Study of relationships between social and linguistic variation; study of language in its social context. |
| Style Shifts | (72) Variations in speech in different contexts. |
| Subgroups | (77) Languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related. |
| Syntax | (65) The arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences. |
