Language Change, Contact and Diversity

The recreation of a foreign-language expression using one’s own lexical material.

A shift in meaning in which a word becomes applicable to more objects.

The reshaping or reinterpretation of an unfamiliar expression through more familiar linguistic material.

The process by which independent words develop grammatical functions.

Deliberate institutional or social intervention in the status, norm, elaboration, or acquisition of languages.

The gradual spread of linguistic change through the lexicon rather than the simultaneous alteration of all relevant words.

A contact language with a reduced and reorganised inventory that initially serves none of the participating groups as a first language.

A deliberately designed language whose sounds, grammar, and vocabulary are planned according to particular communicative or cultural aims.

The reinterpretation of a linguistic structure, even though its audible surface initially remains the same.

A historical or spontaneous shift in the assumed boundary between linguistic constituents.

The historical change in what a word denotes, evaluates, or implies.

A change in word usage or vocabulary influenced by social avoidance and substitution.

A language with extensive international circulation and functions beyond individual states or speech communities.

A Japanese term for expecting a close other to indulgently receive a need or request.

The reduction of alternation within a paradigm by extending a more regular form to additional positions.

A historically shaped administrative register whose fixed formulas and sentence patterns create institutional validity.

Speech addressed to children with distinctive prosody, repetition, vocabulary and dialogic coordination.

A fully developed natural language that emerged from new linguistic configurations in situations of intensive contact.

A metaphorical label for a language without a native everyday speech community that may still be read, learned or used ritually.

Public debate over whether borrowed words enrich, serve, fashion or threaten a language.

Languages whose transmission to future generations has declined so severely that their survival is at risk.

The process by which linguistic features are grouped and evaluated as recognizable social modes of speech.

The recurring process by which a replacement term acquires the stigma of what it was meant to soften.

The use of existing linguistic material for a new function after its original motivation has disappeared.

An age or transmission cohort through which language is acquired, changed, and passed on.

A Swahili expression and East African practice of pulling together for a shared undertaking.

A word formation whose components come from different languages or formative traditions.

A central concept in Sikolohiyang Pilipino describing identity as shared with others.

A critical term for a dominant language whose expansion displaces the use of smaller languages.

Change in linguistic forms, meanings, and uses across time and groups.

The encounter of languages or varieties from which exchange and change emerge.

The practices and judgements through which a community cultivates, criticises and shapes its language use.

The end of intergenerational transmission and living use of a language.

Continued transmission and use of a language despite pressure from more dominant languages.

A cultural sign system in which the choice and arrangement of flowers express messages or attitudes.

A historical code in which the placement and orientation of a stamp on an envelope conveyed additional messages.

Language used by science to specify, justify, test and circulate knowledge within scholarly communities.

The process by which a word formation or combination is established as an independent conventional unit of vocabulary.

A shared language used for communication among people with different first languages.

A word borrowed from another language and integrated into local usage.

Formation of new words with borrowed linguistic material or according to a pattern from another language.

Deliberate mixing of languages or varieties into a stylistically conspicuous form.

A word attributed special transformative power in ritual, narrative or everyday interaction.

A language no longer regularly acquired by children and therefore at risk of losing intergenerational transmission.

Yorùbá praise and invocation poetry making persons, lineages, places or òrìṣà present through names and images.

The deliberate renewal of an endangered or marginalised language.

A language or register with special religious status that sets ritual, text or revelation apart from everyday use.

A linguistic form enabling communication within a group while excluding outsiders through special vocabulary or transformation rules.