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Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed ...
English is a West Germanic language in the Indo-European language family, whose speakers, called Anglophones, originated in Early Medieval England. [4] [5] [6] The namesake of the language is the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain.
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology—with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree, or to phylogenetic trees of species used in ...
Spoken language families. The language families of the world. The language families of Africa. Map of the Austronesian. Map of major Dravidian. Distribution of the Indo-European language family branches across Eurasia. Area of the Papuan. Map of the Australian. Distribution of language families and isolates north of Mexico at first contact.
A mixed language, also referred to as a hybrid language, contact language, or fusion language, is a language that arises among a bilingual group combining aspects of two or more languages but not clearly deriving primarily from any single language. [1] It differs from a creole or pidgin language in that, whereas creoles/pidgins arise where ...
Linguistics. Literal and figurative language is a distinction that exists in all natural languages; it is studied within certain areas of language analysis, in particular stylistics, rhetoric, and semantics. Literal language uses words exactly according to their direct, straightforward, or conventionally accepted meanings or denotation.
A language that uniquely represents the national identity of a state, nation, and/or country and is so designated by a country's government; some are technically minority languages. (On this page a national language is followed by parentheses that identify it as a national language status.) Some countries have more than one language with this ...
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...