| Black English Vernacular (BEV) | 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.
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| call systems | Systems of communication among nonhuman primates, composed of a limited number of sounds that vary in intensity and duration. Tied to environmental stimuli.
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| cultural transmission | A basic feature of language; transmission through learning.
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| daughter languages | Languages developing out of the same parent language; for example, French and Spanish are daughter languages of Latin.
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| descriptive linguistics | The scientific study of a spoken language, including its phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax.
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| diglossia | The existence of "high" (formal) and "low" (familial) dialects of a single language, such as German.
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| displacement | A linguistic capacity that allows humans to talk about things and events that are not present.
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| focal vocabulary | 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.
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| historical linguistics | Subdivision of linguistics that studies languages over time.
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| kinesics | The study of communication through body movements, stances, gestures, and facial expressions.
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| lexicon | Vocabulary; a dictionary containing all the morphemes in a language and their meaning.
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| morphology | 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.
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| phoneme | Significant sound contrast in a language that serves to distinguish meaning, as in minimal pairs.
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| phonemics | The study of the sound contrasts (phonemes) of a particular language.
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| phonetics | The study of speech sounds in general; what people actually say in various languages.
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| phonology | The study of sounds used in speech.
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| productivity | The ability to use the rules of one's language to create new expressions comprehensible to other speakers; a basic feature of language.
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| protolanguage | Language ancestral to several daughter languages.
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| Sapir-Whorf hypothesis | Theory that different languages produce different ways of thinking.
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| semantics | A language's meaning system.
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| sociolinguistics | Study of relationships between social and linguistic variation; study of language in its social context.
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| style shifts | Variations in speech in different contexts.
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| subgroups | Languages within a taxonomy of related languages that are most closely related.
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| syntax | The arrangement and order of words in phrases and sentences.
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