Linguistics reference data
Language structure, phonetics, and semantics.
Topic guide
What Linguistics covers
Linguistics reference data describes how languages are built and related: the families that group them by common ancestry, the parts of speech and syntactic terms that describe sentence structure, the morphological processes that form words, and the phonetic spelling alphabet used in radio and aviation. Most of these terms have a core meaning everyone accepts, and edges that linguists argue about: whether a word is an adjective or a determiner, where one language ends and a dialect begins, whether two families are related at all. The goal here is accurate working definitions with examples.
Key ideas
- Language family
- A group of languages that descend from a common ancestor, shown by systematic sound and vocabulary correspondences.
- Isolate
- A language with no demonstrated relatives, such as Basque.
- Morpheme
- The smallest unit of meaning in a language, such as 'un-', 'happy' and '-ness' in 'unhappiness'.
- Syntax
- The rules for combining words into phrases and sentences.
- Phoneme
- A sound unit that distinguishes meaning in a language, such as /p/ and /b/ in 'pat' and 'bat'.
- Descriptive vs prescriptive
- Descriptive grammar records how people actually speak; prescriptive grammar says how they should.
- Typology
- The classification of languages by structural features such as word order, rather than by ancestry.
Common pitfalls
- Assuming similarity means relationship. Languages can share words through borrowing or chance without being related.
- Counting languages as if the boundary were clear. Language versus dialect is partly political and social.
- Treating English parts-of-speech categories as universal; other languages have different word classes.
- Equating a writing system with a language. One language can be written in several scripts and one script can write several languages.
Using it from an agent
- Give an example word or sentence with each linguistic term; it makes the definition checkable.
- State whether a classification, such as a language family, is the mainstream view or debated.
- For pronunciation, distinguish the spelling alphabet (NATO code words) from the phonetic alphabet (IPA).
Start with: Parts of Speech · Language Families
Datasets in Linguistics
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Language Families
Major language families of the world.
17 entries -
Morphological Processes
Ways in which words are formed and modified.
14 entries -
NATO Phonetic Alphabet
International radiotelephony spelling alphabet.
26 entries -
Parts of Speech
Traditional grammatical categories of words.
12 entries -
Syntactic Terms
Basic terms for sentence structure.
19 entries
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