Chapter 5 Languages Practice Test – Flashcards

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What was an important influence for new English words in America?
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new inventions, American Indians, new physical features and animals
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according to the Anatolian hearth theory, Indo-European languages diffused across Europe
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With the diffusion of agriculture
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How has Switzerland remained at peace with four or five different languages within their borders?
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Switzerland has a decentralized government
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Which is the first and second most spoken language in the world?
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Mandarin, English
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The language spoken by the greatest number of people in the world is
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Mandarin
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What countries speak Austro-Thai?
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Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam
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English is classified as a Low Germanic language because the people who migrated to England came from the northern lowlands.
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True
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Icelandic has probably changed less over time than any other Germanic language.
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True
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Immigrants to which American coloines had the most diverse backgrounds?
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Middle Atlantic
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The Icelandic language has changed less than any other Germanic language because of
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Iceland's relative isolation from other places
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Recent evidence points to the first speakers of the Indo-European
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Kurgans
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The most widely spoken language in Brazil is
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Portuguese
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If two groups who speak the same language are isolated from one another for a long period, the two groups will speak languages that are so different that they will be classified as separate languages.
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True
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A creolized language is
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a mix of indigenous and colonial languages
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The language family encompassing the languages of the People's Republic of China is
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Sino-Tibetan
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Which of the following is not a Romance language?
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Bulgarian
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The language spoken by soldiers stationed throughout the Roman Empire was known as
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Vulgar Latin
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Chinese is part of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
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True
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Approximately three-gourths of the Chinese people speaks Cantonese.
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False
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Dravidian is part of the Indo-European language family.
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False
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English is part of which language branch?
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Germanic
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Collectively, Indic languages constitute the world's second largest language group.
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True
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Physical boundaries such as mountains or oceans are strong intervening obstacles creating barriers to communication between people living on the opposite sides.
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True
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The most popular language in China is Cantonese.
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False
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Celtic languages
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were threatened by extinction in England, are still spoken by people in France, and have been revived in some parts of the British isles
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From where did the four Scandinavian languages derive?
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Old norse
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As in Hindi, the five different Chinese languages are written the same way.
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True
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English was spread around the world through the establishment of British colonies.
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True
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Nearly half the people in the world speak an Indo-European language
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True
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Romanian is a Balto-Slavic language
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False
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The global distribution of languages results from a combination of which two geographic processes?
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interaction,isolation, diffusion, and migration
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Which of these languages are the North Germanic Group?
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Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Swedish
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Lingua Franca languages include
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Hindustani, Swahili, and Russian
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When people who speak a given language migrate to a different location and become isolated from other members of their tribe
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isolation usually results in the differentiation of one language into two
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English is the most important language in North America primarily because of
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The diffusion of English colonies
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Basque is the only non-Indo-European language currently spoken in Europe
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False
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Urdu is the most important language of
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Pakistan
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Which group of the Germanic family is extinct?
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East Germanic
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The Angles, Jutes, and Saxons were Celtic tribes who invaded England 1500 years ago.
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False
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Which language family transcends (in importance) the number of speakers because its languages were used to write the holiest books of three major world religions: the Bible (New and Old Testaments), and the Quran?
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Afro-Asiatic
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English is an official language in countries which contain one-third of the people of the world.
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True
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Which Romance languages are primarily spoken in southwestern Europe and Latin America?
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Portuguese
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Americans pronounce words differently than the British primarily because people changed their accents after moving to the American colonies.
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True
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The two most important languages in South America are
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Portuguese and Spanish
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The first speakers of the language that evolved into English were tribes that lived in present-day
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Denmark
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In the Korean language, Chinese and Japanese words are the principal sources for creating new words to describe new technology and concepts.
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True
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After Russian, Ukranian and Belorusian are the two most important East Slavic languages.
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True
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What languages are Low Germanic?
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Flemish, Dutch, Frisian, and Afrikaans
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What is an isogloss?
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A boundary between language religions
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English is part of which branch of the Indo-European family?
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Germanic
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Germanic, Romance, and Latin are all branches of Indo-European
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False
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Which European country(ies) are not dominated by Indo-European speakers?
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Estonia, Hungary, and Finland
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Why are 16 percent of the Chinese population over the age of sixteen unable to read or write more than a few characters of Chinese?
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Large number of Chinese characters
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The Kurgans
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may have been the first speakers of an Indo-European language
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A language group is a collection of languages within a a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary.
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True
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The second-largest language family is
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Sino-Tibetan
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A form of a language spoken in a local area is a
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Dialect
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A literary tradition is
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The written form of a language
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The desire to use native languages other than Russian was a major drive in the breakup of the Soviet Union a decade ago.
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True
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A group of languages that share a common origin but have since evolved into individual languages is a
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Language branch
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The Korean language does not use ideograms
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True
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What language families belong to India?
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Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Indo-European, and Sino-Tibetan
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English is classified in the Low Germanic subgroup of the West Germanic group.
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True
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Hebrew is an example of
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A revived language
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Which (in numbers of people) is the world's most extensively spoken language?
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Indo-European
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Why have Japanese and Korean formed distinctive language families?
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Japan is an island and Korea is a peninsular state
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The Flemings and Walloons live in what country?
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Belgium
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Both the Angles and the Normans contributed to the development of the English language, because they
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Invaded England
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A lingua Franca is
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a language that is mutually understood by people who have different native languages
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Speakers of two different Indian languages who wish to communicate with each other can sometimes turn to English as a common language.
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True
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The Flemings and Walloons speak languages belonging to different
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Language branches
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English and German belong to the North Germanic language group.
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False
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Germanic invaders of England included all but which tribe?
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Norman's
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languages related through a common ancestor differences are not as old as in language families scientific evidence can confirm branches derived from the same family what do these distinguish?
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A language branch
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English is part of which language family?
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Indo-European
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Switzerland has four official languages
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True
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African languages are distinguished by the fact that
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few are spoken by more than one million people
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Pronunciation has changed more in England than in the United States.
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True
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The current growth in the use of English has occurred because of
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Expansion diffusion, military conquest, and migration
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When languages are depicted as leaves on trees, the roots of the trees below the surface represent
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Possible prehistoric super families
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Offical languages in Switzerland include all but which of the following?
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Flemish
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New Englanders use a different dialect of English than other Americans because they came from different regions of England
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True
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The most important language family in Sub-Saharan Africa is
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Niger-congo
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A group of languages that share a common ancestor before recorded history is a
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Language family
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The four most frequently spoken branches of Indo-European include all but
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Celtic
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The Chinese government is imposing Mandarin countrywide
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True
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There are as many ways to write Hindi as there are ways to speak it.
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False
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The branch of the Indo-European language family with the most speakers is English.
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False
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The large number of individual languages documented in Africa has resulted primarily from
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Thousands of years of isolation between tribal groups
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A language of international communication is known as a lingua franca.
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True
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Hebrew is an example of an extinct language.
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False
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English is part of which language group?
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West Germanic
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Roman Catholic missionaries devised the Vietnamese alphabet
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True
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A language family is a set of languages that can be shown to derive from a common ancestor.
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True
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The Eastern group of Indo-Iranian language branch is known as Indic.
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True
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Mexican Spanish and Colombian Spanish are dialects of Castillian Spanish.
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True
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In what significant ways does U.S. English differ from that of England?
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Pronunciation, vocabulary, and spelling
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Indo-European divided into different branches because of isolation of different speakers
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True
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Unlike most examples of expansion diffusion of English, recent changes in English have percolated up from common usage rather than directed down to the masses by the elite.
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True
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The first speakers of Indo-European were the Kurgans
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True
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The second most widely spoken language family in Europe is
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Uralic
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Chinese is written in the form of
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Ideograms
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The most frequently spoken Afro-Asiatic language is Arabic.
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True
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Basque is spoken primarily in
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The Pyrenees mountains
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Franglais is
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the use of English in the French language
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Russian is part of what language branch?
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Baltimore-Slavic
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An Indo-European language is spoken in which of these European countries?
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Bulgaria
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Noah Webster primarily conceived the difference in American pronunciation and spelling from that of the British Isles because
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it would establish a uniquely American dialect, it would reduce cultural dependence on England, and it would inspire national pride
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The most widely spoken Indo-European languae is
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English
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When languages are depicted as leaves on trees, the trunks of the trees represent
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Language families
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There is one single Chinese language
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False
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How do the structures of Chinese and Japanese language differ?
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Japanese uses two systems of phonetic symbols
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What is one of the main elements of cultural diversity among the nearly one billion residents of India?
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Language
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British and American English differ in all but which of the following?
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Alphabet
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Dialects developed within England primarily because
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different Germanic invaders settled in different regions
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English is a language in the West Germanic group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family.
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True
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Regional dialects in England can be traced back to the settlement patterns of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
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True
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What treaty ensured that Spanish and Portuguese would be diffused to the western portion of the New World?
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Treaty of tordesillas
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A standard Arabic language has deceloped among the 230 million speakers because
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of the influence of the Quran, newspapers, and radio
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The two largest language families in the world are
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Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European
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The most widely used languages in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh come from the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.
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True
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The three tribes that brought the beginnings of English to the British Isles came from
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Germany and Denmark
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