Portal:Language
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A language is a system of symbols, generally known as lexemes, and the rules by which they are manipulated. The word language is also used to refer to the whole phenomenon of language, i.e., the common properties of languages. Though language is commonly used for communication, it is not synonymous with it. The scientific study of language, its historical development, characteristics, and use in society is known as Linguistics. Human language is a natural phenomenon, and language learning is instinctive in childhood. In their natural form, human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for the symbols in order to communicate with others through the senses. Though there are thousands of human languages, they all share a number of properties from which there are no known deviations. Humans have also invented (or arguably in some cases discovered) many other languages, including constructed human languages such as Esperanto or Klingon, programming languages such as Python or Ruby, and various mathematical formalisms. These languages are not restricted to the properties shared by natural human languages.  Ido (pronounced /idɔ/) is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages. Ido was developed in the early 1900s, and retains a sizeable following today, primarily in Europe. Its intended usage parallels the current use of English as a lingua franca, and of French, Latin, and Greek in earlier eras. Unlike English, which is a natural and frequently irregular language, Ido was specifically designed for grammatical, orthographic, and lexicographical regularity, and to favor no one who might otherwise be advantaged in a situation due to native fluency in a widespread language. In this sense, Ido is classified as a consciously-created International Auxiliary Language (conIAL). Of the most widely used conIALs, the first one is Esperanto, Ido's predecessor; it is disputable whether the second place in usage goes to Ido or Interlingua. Find out more...  The grammar of the Japanese language has a highly regular agglutinative verb morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. Typologically, its most prominent feature is topic creation: Japanese is neither topic-prominent, nor subject-prominent; indeed, it is common for sentences to have distinct topics and subjects. Grammatically, Japanese is an SOV dependent-marking language, with verbs always constrained to the sentence-final position, except in some rhetorical and poetic usage. The word order is fairly free as long as the order of dependent-head is maintained among all constituents: the modifier or relative clause precedes the modified noun, the adverb precedes the modified verb, the genitive nominal precedes the possessed nominal, and so forth. Thus, Japanese is a strongly left-branching language; to contrast, Romance languages like Spanish are strongly right-branching, and Germanic languages like English are weakly right-branching. Find out more...
 Languages of Africa: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Kanuri, Maasai, Setswana, Swahili, Turkana, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu, more... Languages of the Americas: Aleut, Carib, Cherokee, Iroquois, Kootenai, Mayan, Nahuatl, Navajo, Quechuan, Salish, more... Languages of Asia: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, Mongolian, Sanskrit, Tamil, Tibetan, Turkish, more... Languages of Austronesia: Austric, Fijian, Hawaiian, Javanese, Malagasy, Malay, Maori, Marshallese, Samoan, Tahitian, Tagalog, Tongan, more... Languages of Europe: Basque, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, more... Constructed languages: Esperanto, Ido, Volapük, more... Agglutinative language, Analytic language, Constructed language, Creole, Context-free language, Extinct language, Dialect, Fusional language, Inflectional language, International language, Isolating language, Language isolate, National language, Natural language, Pidgin, Pluricentric language, Polysynthetic language, Proto-language, Sign language, Spoken language, Synthetic language, Variety (linguistics)  Applied linguistics, Cognitive linguistics, Accent (linguistics), Computational linguistics, Descriptive linguistics, Eurolinguistics, Generative linguistics, Historical linguistics, Lexicology, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Onomasiology, Phonetics, Phonology, Pragmatics, Prescription, Prototype semantics, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, Stylistics, Sociolinguistics, Syntax See also: List of linguists  Alphabets: Arabic alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Latin alphabet, more... Other writing systems: Abjad, Abugida, Braille, Hieroglyphics, Logogram, Syllabary, more.. See also: History of the alphabet, script Linguistics: Computational linguistics • Grammar • Historical linguistics • Morphology • Phonetics • Phonology • Pragmatics • Semantics • Sociolinguistics • Syntax • Writing Languages: Language families • Pidgins and creoles • Sign languages Linguists: By nationality • Grammarians • Historical linguists • Morphologists • Phoneticians • Phonologists • Sociolinguists • Syntacticians • Translators Stubs: Constructed languages • Languages • Linguists • Pidgins and creoles • Typography • Vocabulary and usage • Writing systems |
