Discover the Science of Language

The second edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics is published on August 23rd, so this month Ask Oxford presents our readers with a small selection of entries from this wholly revised and updated dictionary.

English West Germanic. Old English ('Anglo-Saxon') is attested from the 7th century ad, with an extensive literature before the Norman conquest in the 11th century. After the conquest, Middle English was heavily influenced by French, most noticeably in large and central areas of vocabulary. A standard form, based mainly on eastern dialects spoken in London, developed increasingly from the end of the Middle Ages.
The expansion of English to other continents began in earnest in the 17th century, with the successful colonization of the eastern seaboard of North America. Subsequently spread by colonization both directly from Britain and from the USA and existing colonies, across North America, in Australia and New Zealand, in southern Africa, and elsewhere. Also promoted as a second language throughout most of the British Empire and in countries similarly occupied by the USA; hence an official language in e.g. India or Nigeria. As a second language it has several regional varieties (Indian English, West African English, Singapore English, etc.); also dominant as an international language, increasingly in forms based on American English, since the mid-20th century.

grammar Any systematic account of the structure of a language; the patterns that it describes; the branch of linguistics concerned with such patterns.
Often restricted to relations among units that have meaning. Hence opp. phonology: e.g. singing is a grammatical unit, as are sing and -ing, while [s] or the syllable [si] are phonological. Also opposed, though again not always, to a dictionary or the lexicon. E.g. the meanings of sing belong to its entry in the lexicon; the role of -ing to grammar, where it is described for verbs in general. When limited in these ways, the study of grammar reduces to that of morphology and syntax.
Applied by Chomsky in the 1960s to the knowledge of a language developed in the minds of its speakers. A grammar in the widest sense was thus at once a set of rules etc. said to be internalized by members of a speech community, and an account, by a linguist, of such a grammar. This internalized grammar is effectively what is later called I-language.

Indo-European Family of languages including, at historically its western limit, most of those spoken in Europe and, at its eastern limit, the major languages of all but the southern part of the Indian subcontinent. Usually divided into eleven main branches: in the order in which they are first attested, Anatolian (now extinct), Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic (represented by the modern Romance languages), Celtic, Germanic (which includes English), Armenian, Tocharian (extinct), Slavic (Slavonic), Baltic (represented by Latvian and Lithuanian), and Albanian. Groupings larger than these are problematic to varying degrees: the safest hypothesis is that of a common Balto-Slavic.
The comparative method has its origin in the intensive study of Indo-European, especially in German-speaking universities, from the early 19th century. The size and complexity of the family, in comparison with many others that can be established with the same certainty, reflects in part the early date at which the forms in several branches can be compared.

national language One which is a source or sign of identity for a nation. Potentially distinguished from an official language: e.g. until the mid-1980s Luxembourg had two official languages (French and German), but the national language was then, as it is now, Luxembourgish.

pidgin A simplified form of speech developed as a medium of trade, or through other extended but limited contact, between groups of speakers who have no other language in common: e.g. the simplified forms of English, French, or Dutch which are assumed to be the origin of creoles in the West Indies. Distinguished in principle at least from less established forms of similar origin, sometimes described as 'jargons' or 'pre-pidgins'.
Pidginization (sc. of a base language such as English) is the process by which a pidgin is formed; creolization is in turn the process by which they are seen as developing into creoles.

second language 1. The second language that a person acquires. Thus especially of bilinguals: e.g. a speaker of Welsh may have learned or begun to learn it, as a first language, before learning English, as a second language. 2. A language which is not native to a community but has an established role, for certain purposes or at a certain social level, within it. Thus especially in collocations such as 'Teaching English as a Second Language' (TESL).

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