Introducing English Linguistics

participle form).
isolating:
Languages that tend to express meaning in separate morphemes. Chinese
is a heavily isolating language lacking any inflections: words tend to be
monosyllabic
. Although English has inflections, it has lost most of its
inflections over time and is moving towards being a more isolating lan-
guage.
language:
English and French are considered languages because they are mutually
unintelligible: a speaker of English cannot understand a speaker of
French, and vice versa. However, the notion of mutual unintelligibility is
somewhat problematic: Swedish and Norwegian are considered lan-
guages, yet they are mutually intelligible. Compare with dialect.
language contact:
Speakers of different languages coming into contact that leads to changes
in one or both languages. English has so many words of French origin
because of contact with speakers of French following the Norman
Conquest.
language family:
A grouping of languages resulting from application of the comparative
method
. English, German, Greek, Latin, and Spanish have enough linguis-
tic similarities that they are considered Indo-European languages. English
and Spanish have some differences too, though, leading English to be fur-
ther sub-classified as a Germanic language and Spanish an Italic language.
lax vowel:
A vowel such as /i/ in bit and // in back that can only occur in a closed