Glossary

Word by Word

Every culture and community develops its own language to some degree. Wycliffe is no different in that. While we've committed ourselves to not using "insider talk" on this website, when other terms would be appropriate and would clearly communicate, sometimes we had to rely on technical terms. Rather than define all of our terms within the text (and annoying those who know the definitions with our redundancy and verbosity) we chose to develop this glossary.

Glossary

A B C D E H L M O P S T U V [A-V]


Word	Definition

Dialect(s)	Different varieties of the same language. Many dialects are mutually intelligible versions of the same language (e.g. Canadian and British English). Some dialects, however, are significantly different from others of the same language.



Diglossia	The coexistence of two forms of the same language in a speech community. Often, one form is the literary or prestige dialect and the other is the common dialect spoken by most of the population.



Discourse	The study of how language operates in paragraphs, sentences and large chunks.



Domains of Use	In language work, the categories or situations in which a language is used (e.g. home, education, religion, government, business, etc.). In some language communities, the language changes according to the “domain” (e.g. men speak one language at home, another at their business, another at church, etc.).