Documents for "Language and Linguistics":

• A first letter of the alphabet. A is a usual symbol for a low central vowel, as in father; the English long a ( ā ) is pronounced as a diphthong of ĕ and y. The corresponding letter of...

• Aa [from a word for "water" of the same Indo-European root as Lat. aqua ], name of many small streams of N Europe and Switzerland. Aa, or a derivative of it, is a component part of hundreds of European...

• abbreviation in writing, arbitrary shortening of a word, usually by cutting off letters from the end, as in U.S. and Gen. (General). Contraction serves the same purpose but is understood strictly to be the...

• ablative [Lat.,=carrying off], in Latin grammar, the case used in a number of circumstances, particularly with certain prepositions and in locating place or time. The term is also used in the grammar of some languages (e.g., Sanskrit, Finnish) for a case...

• ablaut [Ger.,=off-sound], in inflection , vowel variation (as in English sing, sang, sung, song ) caused by former differences in syllabic accent. In a prehistoric period the corresponding inflected forms of the language (known through internal reconstruction) had differences in accent rather...

• accent in speech, emphasis given a particular sound, called prosodic systems in linguistics. There are three basic accentual methods: stress, tone, and length. In English each word has at least one...

• accusative [Lat.,=accusing], in grammar of some languages, such as Latin, the case typically meaning that the noun refers to the entity directly affected by an action. The term is used for similar, but often not identical, features in the grammar of other languages. Thus in the...

• acronym see abbreviation.

• active see voice.

• adjective English part of speech , one of the two that refer typically to attributes and together are called modifiers. The other kind of modifier is the adverb. Adjectives and adverbs are functionally distinct in that adjectives...

• adverb see part of speech ; adjective.

• African languages geographic rather than linguistic classification of languages spoken on the African continent. Historically the term refers to the languages of sub-Saharan Africa, which do not belong to a single...

• Afrikaans member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages ). Although its classification is still disputed, it is generally considered an independent language rather than a dialect or variant of Dutch (see Dutch language ). Afrikaans is spoken by close to 8 million people in the Republic of South Africa, where it is an official language, and by about 1.5 million people in Namibia, where it is the common language of...

• Afroasiatic languages formerly Hamito-Semitic languages , family of languages spoken by more than 250 million people in N Africa; much of the Sahara; parts of E, central, and W Africa; and W Asia (especially the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, Syria, Jordan,...

• agglutination in linguistics: see inflection.

• Akkadian extinct language belonging to the East Semitic subdivision of the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages ). Also called Assyro-Babylonian, Akkadian (or Accadian) was current in ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq) from about 3000 BC until the time of Jesus. The earliest surviving inscriptions in the language...

• Algonquian branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic family of North America. See Native American languages.

• alphabet [Gr. alpha-beta, like Eng. ABC], system of writing , theoretically having a one-for-one relation between character (or letter) and phoneme (see phonetics ). Few alphabets have achieved the ideal exactness. A system of writing is called a syllabary when one character represents a syllable rather than a phoneme; such is the kana, used in Japanese to...

• Altaic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages ). Some scholars still consider Altaic an independent linguistic family. Spoken by over 130 million people, who occupy parts of a territory that stretches from E Europe across the Central Asian...

• American Indian languages see Native American languages.

• Amharic language of Ethiopia belonging to the South Ethiopic group of South Semitic languages, which, in turn, belong to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages...

• Anatolian languages subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see The Indo-European Family of Languages , table); the term "Anatolian languages" is also used to refer to all languages, Indo-European and non-Indo-European, that were spoken in Anatolia in ancient times. The progress made in the identification, decipherment, and analysis of...

• aorist see tense.

• apostrophe see punctuation ; abbreviation.

• Arabic languages members of the West Semitic group of the Semitic subdivision of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages ). The Arabic languages comprise North Arabic (or simply Arabic) and South Arabian (or Himyaritic or South Arabic); South Arabian differs sufficiently from North Arabic to be considered a separate...

• Aramaic language belonging to the West Semitic subdivision of the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages ). At some point during the second millenium BC, the Aramaeans abandoned their desert existence and settled in Syria, bringing their language, Aramaic, with them. By the beginning of the 7th cent...

• Armenian language member of the Thraco-Phrygian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Indo-European ). There is evidence that in ancient times a distinct subfamily of Indo-European languages existed that is now called Thraco-Phrygian. To it belonged Phrygian (an ancient and now extinct...

• artificial languages languages that are invented by one or more human beings as opposed to languages that develop naturally among peoples. Examples of artificial languages are Volapük, Esperanto , and Ido. See international...

• Assamese language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages.

• Assyrian language East Semitic dialect that evolved from Akkadian after 1950 BC The term Assyrian is sometimes incorrectly used for the Akkadian language as a whole because the first inscriptions in Akkadian to be...

• Athabascan Athapascan, or Athapaskan , group of related Native American languages forming a branch of the Nadene linguistic family or stock. In the preconquest period, Athabascan was a large and extensive group of tongues. Its speakers...

• Athapascan or Athapaskan: see Athabascan ; Native American languages.

• Australian languages aboriginal languages spoken on the continent of Australia. The Australian languages do not appear to be related to any other linguistic family. The exact number of these languages and their...

• Austronesian name sometimes used for the Malayo-Polynesian languages.

• Avestan language belonging to the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. One of the earliest forms of the Iranian languages to survive, Avestan is also the...

• B second letter of the alphabet. Its Greek correspondent is named beta. It is a usual symbol for a voiced bilabial stop. In musical notation it is used to represent a note in the scale. In chemistry...

• Bahasa Indonesia another name for Indonesian, one of the Malayo-Polynesian languages.

• Baltic languages a subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The Indo-European subfamily to which the Baltic languages appear to be closest is the Slavic. Because of this, some linguists regard Baltic and...

• Baluchi language belonging to the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages.

• Bangla see Bengali.

• Bantu languages group of African languages forming a subdivision of the Benue-Niger division of the Niger-Congo branch of the Niger-Kordofanian language family (see African languages ). Bantu contains hundreds of languages that are spoken by 120 million Africans in the Congo Basin, Angola, the Republic of South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Kenya...

• Basque language tongue of uncertain relationship spoken by close to a million people, most of whom live in NE Spain and some of whom reside in SW France. The language has eight dialects. Speakers of Basque are for...

• Belarusian language or White Russian: see Russian language ; Slavic languages.

• Bengali or Bangla , language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages.

• bilingualism ability to use two languages. Fluency in a second language requires skills in listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing, although in practice some of those skills are often...

• brackets see punctuation.

• Brahui Dravidian language of Baluchistan. See Dravidian languages.

• Brythonic group of languages belonging to the Celtic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Celtic languages.

• Bulgarian language member of the South Slavic group of the Slavonic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages ). Bulgarian is the native tongue of some 9 million people, most of whom live in Bulgaria, where it is the official language. It is also spoken to some extent in bordering and nearby countries...

• Burmese language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages ). It is spoken by about 30 million people in Myanmar, where it is both the principal and the official language. Burmese can be described as monosyllabic because root words generally consist of a...

• C third letter of the alphabet. In position and form, but not in meaning, it corresponds to Greek gamma (see G ). In English it is pronounced variously, e.g., in can, cent, church, and loch. In...

• calligraphy [Gr.,=beautiful writing], skilled penmanship practiced as a fine art. See also inscription ; paleography.

• case in language, one of the several possible forms of a given noun, pronoun, or adjective that indicates its grammatical function (see inflection ); in inflected languages it is usually indicated by a series of suffixes attached to a stem, as in Latin amicus, "friend" (nominative); amicum (accusative); amici (genitive); and amico (ablative and dative). In modern English, nouns are marked for two cases—common or nominative (e.g., man ) and possessive or genitive ( man's ). A few pronouns are marked for three—nominative (e.g., he ), objective or accusative ( him ), and possessive ( his ). Old English also inflected for accusative, dative, and sometimes instrumental, cases. In Latin, six cases are indicated by changes in inflection—nominative, genitive, dative, accusative,...

• Catalan language member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken by about 8 million people in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, and part of Aragon...

• Caucasian languages family of languages spoken by about 7 million people in the Caucasus region of SE European Russia. The Caucasian languages take their name from the Caucasus Mountains, on the slopes of which their original homeland is believed to have been located. This linguistic...

• Celtic languages subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. At one time, during the Hellenistic period, Celtic speech extended all the way from Britain and the Iberian Peninsula in the west across Europe...

• Changes in English Pronunciation Changes in English Pronunciation   home stones name tongue Old hääm stää´näs nä´mä toong´ge Middle hôm stô´nez...

• Cherokee language belonging to the Iroquoian branch of the Hokan-Siouan linguistic family. See Native American languages.

• Chersonese or Chersonesus [Gr.,=peninsula], name applied in ancient geography to several regions. See Crimea (Chersonesus Taurica or Scythia); Gallipoli Peninsula (Chersonesus Thracica); Malay Peninsula...

• Chinese subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages ), which is also sometimes grouped with the Tai, or Thai, languages in a Sinitic subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan language stock. Chinese comprises a number of variants; those that are mutually...

• Chinook jargon lingua franca of early traders on the Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada. It included Chinook, Nootka, English, and French words, with various borrowings.

• Church Slavonic language belonging to the South Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages ). Although it is still the liturgical language of most branches of the Orthodox Eastern Church, Church Slavonic is extinct today as a spoken tongue. In its earliest period, from the 9th to 11th...

• Click languages see African languages.

• code in communications, set of symbols and rules for their manipulation by which the symbols can be made to carry information. By this extended definition all written and spoken languages are codes...

• colon in writing: see punctuation.

• comma see punctuation.

• communication transfer of information, such as thoughts and messages, as contrasted with transportation, the transfer of goods and persons (see information theory ). The basic forms of communication are by signs (sight) and by sounds (hearing; see language ). The reduction of communication to writing was a fundamental step in the evolution of society for, in addition to being useful in situations where speech is not possible, writing permits the...

• conjugation see inflection.

• conjunction in English, part of speech serving to connect words or constructions, e.g., and, but, and or. Most languages have connective particles similar to English conjunctions. In some languages words,...

• contraction in writing: see abbreviation.

• Cornish language belonging to the Brythonic group of the Celtic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Celtic languages.

• creole language any language that began as a pidgin but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the original mother tongue or tongues. Examples are the Gullah of South Carolina and Georgia (based on English), the creole of Haiti (based on French), and the Papiamento of Curaçao (developed from pidgin Spanish and Portuguese). Similarities among creoles...

• cuneiform [Lat.,=wedge-shaped], system of writing developed before the last centuries of the 4th millennium BC in the lower Tigris and Euphrates valley, probably by the Sumerians. The characters consist of arrangements of wedgelike strokes...

• Cushitic group of languages belonging to the Afroasiatic family of languages. See Afroasiatic languages.

• Cyrillic see alphabet.

• Czech language in the past sometimes also called Bohemian, member of the West Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages ). The official language of the Czech Republic, it is spoken by about 11 million people, of whom over 10 million reside there and close to 1 million of whom are in Slovakia and North America...

• D fourth letter of the alphabet. It corresponds to the Greek delta. It is a usual symbol for a voiced dental or, as in English, alveolar stop. The capital represents in musical notation a note in the...

• Danish language member of the North Germanic, or Scandinavian, group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The official language of Denmark, it is spoken by over 5 million people,...

• Dardic languages group of languages belonging to the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian.

• dash see punctuation.

• dative [Lat.,=giving], in Latin grammar, the case typically used to refer to an indirect object, i.e., a secondary recipient of an action. For example, him in I gave him a book is translated in Latin by a dative case. The Latin dative also has other uses; and the cases called dative in other languages correspond in their grammatical function only in part to that of the...

• declension see inflection.

• demotic see hieroglyphic.

• derivation in grammar: see inflection.

• dialect variety of a language used by a group of speakers within a particular speech community. Every individual speaks a variety of his language, termed an idiolect. Dialects are groups of idiolects with a common core of...

• Dravidian languages family of about 23 languages that appears to be unrelated to any other known language family. The Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 200 million people, living chiefly in S and central...

• Dutch language member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages ). Also called Netherlandish, it is spoken by about 15 million inhabitants of the Netherlands, where it is the national language, and by about 300,000 people in the Western Hemisphere. The written...

• E fifth letter of the alphabet. It is a usual symbol for a mid-front vowel, such as ĕ in the English step. A mid-front vowel was represented by Greek epsilon [Gr.,= e without the aspirate],...

• Egyptian language extinct language of ancient Egypt, a member of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages ). The development of ancient Egyptian is usually divided into four periods: (1) Old Egyptian, spoken and written in Egypt during the IV to VI dynasties of the Old Kingdom (3d millennium BC); (2)...

• Elamite extinct language of uncertain relationship that was once spoken in the ancient kingdom of Elam , located in SW Asia. It appears to be unrelated to any other languages, although some scholars see a kinship between Elamite and Brahui, one of the modern Dravidian languages. Elamite is an agglutinative language in that different linguistic elements, each of which exists separately and has a fixed meaning, are often joined to form one word. A number of stone...

• English language member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages ). Spoken by about 470 million people throughout the world, English is the official language of about 45 nations. It is the mother tongue of about 60 million persons in the British Isles, from where...

• epigraphy see inscription.

• Erse synonym for Irish and sometimes also for Scottish Gaelic. See Celtic languages.

• Eskimo-Aleut family of Native American languages consisting of Aleut (spoken on the Aleutian Islands and the Kodiak Peninsula) and Eskimo or Inuktitut (spoken in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia). Aleut...

• Esperanto an artificial language introduced in 1887 and intended by its inventor, Dr. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof (1859-1917), a Polish oculist and linguist, to ease communication between speakers of different...

• Ethiopic extinct language of Ethiopia belonging to the North Ethiopic group of the South Semitic (or Ethiopic) languages, which, in turn, belong to the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of...

• etymology branch of linguistics that investigates the history, development, and origin of words. It was this study that chiefly revealed the regular relations of sounds in the Indo-European languages (as...

• exclamation point see punctuation.

• F sixth letter of the alphabet. The Greek letter corresponding to it, digamma, which probably represented a sound like w, disappeared before the classical period. In Western alphabets f has usually...

• Faliscan extinct language belonging to the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Italic languages.

• Finnish language also called Suomi, member of the Finnic group of the Finno-Ugric languages. These languages form a subdivision of the Uralic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages ). Finnish is spoken by about 5 million people in Finland. Additional speakers totaling close to 1 million live in neighboring areas of Sweden and Russia and also in the United States. There are...

• Finno-Ugric languages also called Finno-Ugrian languages, group of languages forming a subdivision of the Uralic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages ). The Finno-Ugric group of languages can be divided into two subgroups, Finnic and Ugric. These languages have about 24 million speakers distributed in enclaves scattered in a territory that...

• Flemish language member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages ). Generally regarded as the Belgian variant of Dutch (see Dutch language ) rather than as a separate tongue, Flemish is spoken by approximately 5.5 million people in Belgium, where it is one of the official languages, and by a few thousand persons in France. So closely...

• French language member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages ). It is spoken as a first language by more than 70 million people, chiefly in France (55 million speakers), Belgium (3 million), Switzerland (1.5 million), former French and Belgian colonies in...

• Frisian language member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages ). It has a number of dialects and is spoken by more than 300,000 people, most of whom speak West Frisian and live in Friesland, a province of the Netherlands. North Frisian is spoken along the...

• Friulian see Rhaeto-Romanic.

• G 7th letter of the alphabet. It is a usual symbol for a voiced velar stop, as in the English go. It was originally a differentiated form of Greek gamma, which has C as its formal Roman correspondent....

• Gaelic or Goidelic, group of languages belonging to the Celtic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Celtic languages ; Irish language.

• gender [Lat. genus =kind], in grammar, subclassification of nouns or nounlike words in which the members of the subclass have characteristic features of agreement with other words. The term gender is not usually considered to include the classification of number. In French, for example, there are two genders, feminine and masculine, marked by the form of the articles la and le [both: the]. Most French nouns referring to males are masculine ( le garcon [the boy]), and most referring to females are feminine ( la fille [the girl]), thus conforming to natural gender. Other words are placed in either gender, e.g., le jardin [the garden] and la table [the table], being instances of grammatical gender. In German, Russian, and Latin there are three genders, called masculine, feminine, and neuter. Scandinavian and Dutch languages have in addition...

• genitive [Lat.,=genetic], in Latin grammar, the case typically used to refer to a possessor. The term is used in the grammar of other languages, but the phenomenon referred to may not closely resemble a Latin genitive; thus a Latin genitive will be...

• German language member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages ). It is the official language of Germany and Austria and is one of the official languages of Switzerland. Altogether nearly 100 million people speak German as their first language, among them about...

• Germanic languages subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by about 470 million people in many parts of the world, but chiefly in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. All the modern Germanic...

• gloss [Gr.,=tongue], explanatory note on a word or words of a text, usually written between the lines or in a margin of a manuscript. In copying a manuscript, a copyist sometimes incorporated a gloss in...

• Goidelic or Gaelic, group of languages belonging to the Celtic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Celtic languages ; Irish language.

• Gothic language dead language belonging to the now extinct East Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages ). Gothic has special value for the linguist because it was recorded several hundred years before the oldest surviving texts of all the other Germanic languages (except for a handful of earlier...

• gradation see ablaut.

• grammar description of the structure of a language, consisting of the sounds (see phonology ); the meaningful combinations of these sounds into words or parts of words, called morphemes; and the arrangement of the morphemes into phrases and sentences, called syntax. School grammars for the...

• Greek language member of the Indo-European family of languages (see Indo-European ). It is the language of one of the major civilizations of the world and of one of the greatest literatures of all time. Many modern scientific and technical words in English and other Western...

• Grimm's law principle of relationships in Indo-European languages, first formulated by Jakob Grimm in 1822 and a continuing subject of interest and investigation to 20th-century linguists. It shows that a...

• Gujarati language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages.

• Gullah a creole language formerly spoken by the Gullah, an African-American community of the Sea Islands and the Middle Atlantic coast of the United States. The word is probably a corruption of the African Gola or Gora, names of African tribes living in Liberia, but it may also be derived from Angola, whence many of the Gullahs' ancestors came. The Gullah dialect, spoken now by only a few hundred people, is a...

• Gypsy language see Romany.

• H 8th letter of the alphabet. It is a usual symbol for a glottal spirant, murmured (as in the English house ) or voiceless (as in the English herb ). In some Greek alphabets eta, the long e, had...

• Hamitic languages subfamily of the Hamito-Semitic family of languages, a now-abandoned system of classification for languages of N Africa and SW Asia. The Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, and (sometimes) Chadic languages...

• Hamito-Semitic languages see Afroasiatic languages.

• Hausa language member of the Chadic group of languages belonging to the Afroasiatic family of languages. See Afroasiatic languages.

• Hawaiian member of the Polynesian group of the Austronesian family of languages. Of the fewer than 10,000 people who speak Hawaiian, only a few hundred are native speakers, but the language is taught in...

• Hebrew language member of the Canaanite group of the West Semitic subdivision of the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic family of languages (see Afroasiatic languages ). Hebrew was the language of the Jewish people in biblical times, and most of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. The oldest extant example of Hebrew writing dates from the 11th or 10th cent...

• hieratic see hieroglyphic.

• hieroglyphic [Gr.,=priestly carving], type of writing used in ancient Egypt. Similar pictographic styles of Crete, Asia Minor, and Central America and Mexico are also called hieroglyphics (see Minoan civilization ; Anatolian languages ; Maya ; Aztec ). Interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics, begun by Jean-François Champollion , is virtually complete; the other hieroglyphics are only very imperfectly understood. The distinguishing feature of hieroglyphics is that they are conventionalized pictures used chiefly to...

• Himyaritic another name for Old South Arabian. See Arabic languages ; Afroasiatic languages.

• Hindi language belonging to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The official language of India, Hindi is the written or literary variant of Hindustani that is used by Hindus. It is written in the Devanagari alphabet employed for Sanskrit and has a vocabulary of Indic origin. There are two main dialectal groups of the Hindi language: Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi. The former has four principal dialects. The latter is the medium of...

• Hindustani subdivision of the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian languages, which themselves form a subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Some authorities define Hindustani as the spoken form of Hindi and Urdu. Others prefer to call Hindi and Urdu written varieties of Hindustani. The term Hindustani can also be used to include some vernacular dialects of northern India. Hindi is the variety of Hindustani used by Hindus; it is also the official language of India. Written in the Devanagari...

• Hittite see Anatolian languages.

• Hokan-Siouan linguistic stock, or family, whose member languages are spoken by Native Americans in North and Central America. See Native American languages.

• Hungarian language also called Magyar, member of the Ugric group of the Finno-Ugric languages. These languages form a subdivision of the Uralic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages ). Hungarian is spoken by approximately 10 million people in Hungary and by an additional 3 million throughout Eastern Europe, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere. There are a number of...

• hyphen see punctuation.

• I 9th letter of the alphabet. This vowel can be pronounced with a short vowel sound, as the Ĭ in sit, or with a long vowel sound, like the ī in ride. The Greek correspondent is iota. J...

• Icelandic language member of the North Germanic, or Scandinavian, group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Spoken chiefly in Iceland, where it is the official language, it stems from...

• Ido short name of Esperandido, an artificial language that is a simplified version of Esperanto. See international language.

• imperative see mood.

• imperfect see tense.

• Indic languages group of languages belonging to the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian.

• indicative see mood.

• Indo-Aryan variant name for Indic languages. Broader uses referring to racial stocks are now obsolete. See Indo-Iranian.

• Indo-European family of languages having more speakers than any other language family. It is estimated that approximately half the world's population speaks an Indo-European tongue as a first language. The...

• Indo-European Family of Languages, The The Indo-European Family of Languages Subfamily Group Subgroup Languages and Principal Dialects  Asterisk indicates a dead language. Anatolian     Hieroglypic Hittite , Hittite...

• Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken by more than a billion people, chiefly in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (see The Indo-European Family of Languages , table). The Indo-Iranian subfamily consists of three groups of languages: the Dardic (or Pisacha), the Indic (or Indo-Aryan), and the Iranian. Some scholars, however, include the Dardic tongues...

• Indonesian language see Malayo-Polynesian languages.

• infinitive see mood ; tense.

• inflection in grammar. In many languages, words or parts of words are arranged in formally similar sets consisting of a root, or base, and various affixes. Thus walking, walks, walker have in common the root walk and the affixes -ing, -s, and -er. An inflectional affix carries certain grammatical restrictions with it; for example, with the plural inflection -s, a change from singular to plural in the noun tree/trees requires a concommitant change in the verb form from singular to plural: "the tree is green," "the trees are green." Other examples of English inflectional suffixes are the verb tenses. Many languages have far more extensive inflection than English, e.g., Latin, Eskimo, Arabic. In Latin grammar the typical noun...

• inscription writing on durable material. The art is called epigraphy. Modern inscriptions are made for permanent, monumental record, as on gravestones, cornerstones, and building fronts; they are often decorative and...

• instrumental in the grammar of certain languages (e.g., Russian), the case referring to means or instrument. The Latin ablative may in some instances be termed instrumental.

• interjection English part of speech consisting of exclamatory words such as oh, alas, and ouch. They are marked by a feature of intonation that is usually shown in writing by an exclamation point (see punctuation...

• Interlingua name of an artificial language introduced in 1951; also the name of a simplified form of Latin (sometimes called Latino Sine Flexione, or "Latin without inflection" ) introduced in the early 20th...

• international language sometimes called universal language, a language intended to be used by people of different linguistic backgrounds to facilitate communication among them and to reduce the misunderstandings and...

• interrogation point see punctuation.

• Inuktitut see Eskimo-Aleut.

• Iranian languages group of languages belonging to the Indo-Iranian family of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages.

• Irish language also called Irish Gaelic and Erse, member of the Goidelic group of the Celtic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Celtic languages ). The history of Irish as a literary language falls into three periods: Old Irish (7th-9th cent. AD), Middle Irish (10th-16th cent.), and Modern Irish (since the 16th cent.). In the medieval period...

• Iroquoian branch of Native North American languages belonging to the Hokan-Siouan linguistic family, or stock, of North and Central America. See Native American languages.

• Italian language member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages ). The official language of Italy and San Marino, and one of the official languages of Switzerland, Italian is spoken by about 58 million people in Italy, 24,000 in San Marino, 840,000 in...

• Italic languages subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages that may be divided into two groups. The first group consists of the ancient Italic languages and dialects that were once spoken in Italy. The...

• J 10th letter of the alphabet , a Western European medieval development of I, with which it was formerly quite interchangeable in writing. It is pronounced as a consonant in English and often as a...

• Japanese language of uncertain origin that is spoken by more than 125 million people, most of whom live in Japan. There are also many speakers of Japanese in the Ryukyu Islands, Korea, Taiwan, parts of the...

• Javanese language see Malayo-Polynesian languages.

• K 11th letter of the alphabet. It is a usual symbol for a voiceless velar stop, as in the English cook. It corresponds to Greek kappa. In chemistry K is the symbol for the element potassium.

• Kanarese or Kannada , Dravidian language of India. See Dravidian languages.

• Kannada or Kanarese , Dravidian language of India. See Dravidian languages.

• Kashmiri language belonging to the Dardic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages.

• Kechua see Quechua ; Native American languages.

• Khalka language see Mongolian languages.

• Khoisan see African languages.

• Korean language of uncertain ancestry. It is thought by some scholars to be akin to Japanese, by others to be a member of the Altaic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages ), and by still others to be unrelated to any known language. The Korean tongue is spoken by about 68 million people in Korea (45 million in South Korea and 23 million in North Korea) and by nearly...

• Kurdish language belonging to the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. See Indo-Iranian languages.

• L 12th letter of the alphabet. It is a usual symbol for a lateral consonant, as in the English lateral. The Greek correspondent is lambda. L is the Roman numeral for 50.

• Ladin see Rhaeto-Romanic.

• Ladino see Sephardim.

• landsmaal see Norwegian language.

• language systematic communication by vocal symbols. It is a universal characteristic of the human species. Nothing is known of its origin, although scientists have identified a gene that clearly contributes...

• language acquisition the process of learning a native or a second language. The acquisition of native languages is studied primarily by developmental psychologists and psycholinguists. Although how children learn to...

• language of signs see sign language.

• langue d'oc and langue d'oïl names of the two principal groups of medieval French dialects. Langue d'oc (literally, "language of yes" ) was spoken south of a line running, roughly, from Bordeaux to Grenoble, whereas langue...

• Latin language member of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European fam