Glossary of Linguistic Terms

gender In Old English, each noun has a gender: namely, masculine, feminine, or neuter. These grammatical genders are not directly related to natural genders:
e.g., wif (‘woman’) is neuter. This grammatical category has been lost in ModE, except for the personal pronouns he, she, and it. genitive See case.
Germanic A branch of the Indo-European family to which English belongs. English is a member of the West Germanic division, together with German, Dutch, etc. The other two divisions are North Germanic (e.g., Danish, Norwegian) and East Germanic (Gothic).
glide A sound transition from one vowel to another (e.g., a diphthong as in toy or eight) or from one consonant to another (e.g., cat pronounced as /kyat/ and boy as /bway/ in some Caribbean varieties).
grammar The structure of a language esp. in contrast with vocabulary and pronunciation. A grammatical account is prescriptive or normative when given as correct usage, and descriptive when presented as a refl ection of actual usage.
grammaticalization A historical process in which lexical words or phrases take on grammatical functions usu. from repeated usage: e.g., the auxiliary wanna from want to; the adverbial/adjectival ending –ly from OE lic (‘body’); the prepositional phrase in view of.
grapheme A unit or character in a writing system: e.g., , . See further “Note on Phonetic Symbols and Orthography.”
Great Vowel Shift Traditionally refers to a series of sound changes, beginning in the ME period and ending in ca. 1600, through which long vowels were raised and/or diphthongized: e.g., food from [fo:d] to [fu:d], house from [hu:s] to [haυs].
Gullah English-based creole language spoken in coastal South Carolina and Georgia.
h-dropping Non-realization of [h-] in the initial position of a word: e.g., heir (with h-dropping) as opposed to hereditary (without h-dropping). H-dropping is a common feature both historically and dialectally. headword Refers to items listed at the beginning of dictionary entries.
high vowel A vowel articulated with the highest point of the tongue close to the top of the mouth: e.g., /i, u/. See further “Note on Phonetic Symbols and Orthography.”