Quiz #5 on Ch. 8: Language

______ is apparently unrelated to any other language in the world.

Basque

The language of Madagascar is related to the language of Africa.

False

A creole language is...

a pidgin that has survived long enough to become a native language.

The spread of Austronesian languages to Madagascar required primarily knowledge of_____

sailing and navigation

In polyglot states,

states grant legal equality to more than one languages.

The family of languages known as the Indo-European family contains languages spoken by approximately _____ of the world population.

50%

There are approximately______ languages on the earth today.

6,000

The language of the Koran is...

Arabic

The following language has become a lingua franca of approximately 335 million people as a first language, 375 million as a second language and 600 million as a foreign language.

English

The official language of Nigeria is...

English

The predominant world lingua franca is...

English

All languages are written with alphabets.

False

Finnish and Estonian are Dravidian languages.

False

Swahili is a mixture of West African languages and Arabic that serves as a lingua franca in much of West Africa today.

False

The English languages has a very complex grammar.

False

The isolation of groups of people has little to do with the formation of different languages.

False

There is only one official languages in Canada -- English.

False

The speaking of Native American languages in Bolivia and Peru is prohibited by law.

False.

Which of the following European languages are most common in Africa today?

French and English

Which of the following languages is NOT part of the Uralic language family?

Gaelic

The language with the most native speakers in the world is...

Mandarin Chinese

American English evolved from influences of European settlers as well as...

Native American languages

Which of the following is true concerning lingua francas?

Swahili is a lingua franca of East Africa

"Philological nationalism" is the that "mother tongues" have given birth to nations.

True

American English contains terms adopted from Native American languages as well as African languages.

True

Any isolated group of people develops a language of its own over time.

True

Colonization resulted in the creation of many pidgins and creole languages throughout the tropics.

True

Linguistic cultural integration often reflects the historical dominance of one group over the other.

True

Orthography has to do with systems of writing.

True

The Cyrillic alphabet is the Greek alphabet as it was augmented and taught by the Greek Orthodox missionary Saint Cyril.

True

The Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union have all abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet and converted to the Roman alphabet.

True

The major non alphabetic forms of writing are Chinese and Japanese.

True

The most important factor in the divergence (separation) of languages is isolation.

True

The principal official languages of Africa are often those of the continents former European rulers.

True

There is an obvious north-south split in languages regions in France; thus, many isoglosses roughly bisect France because word use varies by region and by word.

True

English is one of more that twenty official languages recognized in India.

True (there are currently 22 official languages in India.

Dialects of languages usually diverge more in the way they are spoken than in the way they are written.

True.

The hearth area for Indo-European languages was probably located in...

Turkey

The global spread of English is primarily the result of...

colonization by the British Empire

Lines that are used to show the presence of linguistics features on maps are known as...

isoglosses

Languages that are related by descent from a common protolanguage make up a...

language family

Official policies and social attitudes may target____ as potentially disloyal or dangerous to the rest of the nation.

minority language speakers

Philological nationalism is the idea that____have given birth to nations.

mother tongues

The way any languages is spoken and written according to formal rules of diction and grammar is called a(n)...

standard language