substrate language
Conquered tongue's remnants
A substrate language is one that influences a dominant language after being displaced by it.
When a population shifts to a new language, traces of their original tongue persist—in vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar.
Celtic languages left substrate effects on the Latin that became French; indigenous languages shaped the Spanish of Latin America.
The influence flows upward from the abandoned language into the one that replaced it.
- borrowingTemporary taking of another's
- loanwordImported vocabulary item
- loan translationLiteral rendering of foreign idiom
- indigenousOriginating in a region
- creoleNativized pidgin tongue
pidgin · influence · stratum · remnant · native · native speaker · contact · interference · Celtic · Gaulish · pre-Roman · Old World · phonology · lexicon · trace · survival · underlying · ancestral
- language varietiesdialect, idiolect, sociolect, vernacular, accent
- dialectsregional dialect, local dialect, patois, vernaculars, vernacular
- dialect mapsdialect atlas, linguistic atlas, word map
- historical linguisticscognates, Indo-European, Grimm's Law, Proto-Germanic, word origins
- pidginspidgin, pidgin English, pidginization
substrate languagedominant language
Most widely used tongue
colonial language · official language · lingua franca · standard language
substrate, substrates, substratum, substrata, language, languages, linguist, tongue