Portal:Language

Topics Culture Geography Health History Mathematics Nature People Philosophy Religion Society Technology A language is a system of symbols, generally known as words, and the grammatical and other rules by which they are manipulated. The word language is also used to refer to the whole phenomenon of language, and in this sense language is one of several forms of human communication. The scientific study of language and languages, including their historical development, characteristics, and use in society, is the field of linguistics. Human language is a natural phenomenon, and language learning is instinctive in childhood. In using language, people use patterns of sound or gesture to convey the words and rules of language, or they represent these patterns in codes such as writing. There are thousands of languages, historically related to each other in many language families, and they share a number of common properties. Besides using naturally acquired language, people have consciously crafted languages such as Esperanto and Klingon. More about language... Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southern and eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. What survives through writing represents primarily the literary register of Anglo-Saxon. It was a West Germanic language closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. In most respects, including its grammar, it was much closer to modern German and Icelandic than to modern English. It was fully inflected with five grammatical cases, three grammatical numbers and three grammatical genders. Adjectives, pronouns and (sometimes) participles agreed with their antecedent nouns in case, number and gender. Finite verbs agreed with their subject in person and number. From the 9th century, Old English experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages. File:MarydaPatral1.jpg Maryada PatralLetter of Conduct written by Acharya Bhiksu (1st Head of Jain Swetamber Terapanth Sect) written in Rajasthani language File:Splitverb.png A split infinitive is an English-language grammatical construction in which a word or phrase, usually an adverb or adverbial phrase, comes between the marker to and the bare infinitive (uninflected) form of a verb. For example, a split infinitive occurs in the opening sequence of the Star Trek television series: to boldly go where no man has gone before. Here, the adverb "boldly" splits the full infinitive "to go". More rarely, the term compound split infinitive is used to describe situations in which the infinitive is split by more than one word: The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years. As the split infinitive became more common in the 19th century, some grammatical authorities sought to introduce a prescriptive rule against it. The construction is still the subject of disagreement among native English speakers as to whether it is grammatically correct or good style. However, most modern English usage guides have dropped the objection to the split infinitive. ...that the Permanent North American Gaeltacht (pictured) is an officially designated Irish speaking area in English/French speaking Ontario, Canada, the first of its kind outside of Ireland? ...that Englog is English mixed with Tagalog words, while Taglish is Tagalog mixed with English words, both being macaronic languages? ...that some 19th-century newspapers in South Australia published articles in the Cornish dialect of English to meet the needs of miners who had migrated there? ...that the Halegannada, literally "old Kannada", is an ancient form of the Kannada language? Languages of the world Languages of Africa: Arabic, Komering, Chadic, Cushitic, Kanuri, Maasai, Setswana, Swahili, Turkana, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu, more... Languages of the Americas: Aleut, Carib, Cherokee, Inuktitut, Iroquois, Kootenai, Mayan, Nahuatl, Navajo, Quechuan, Salish, American Sign Language, more... Languages of Asia: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Hindustani, Kannada, Marathi, Korean, Kurdish, Malayalam, Mongolian, Persian,Rajasthani, Sindhi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Tanchangya, Telugu, Tibetan, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Khowar, more... Languages of Austronesia: Austric, Fijian, Hawaiian, Javanese, Malagasy, Malay, Maori, Marshallese, Samoan, Tahitian, Tagalog, Tongan, Auslan, more... Languages of Europe: Basque, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (book), French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Leonese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, more... Constructed languages: Esperanto, Ido, Volapük, more... Language types 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) Linguistics (Outline, Portal, Book) Applied linguistics, Cognitive linguistics, Accent (dialect), 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 Writing systems Alphabets: Arabic alphabet, Cyrillic alphabet, Hebrew alphabet, Latin alphabet, more... Other writing systems: Abjad, Abugida, Braille, Hieroglyphics, Logogram, Syllabary, SignWriting, more.. See also: History of the alphabet, Script Template:/box-footer Template:/box-header Linguistics: Computational linguistics • Grammar • Historical linguistics • Morphology • Phonetics • Phonology • Pragmatics • Reading • Semantics • Sociolinguistics • Syntax • Writing Languages: Language families • Pidgins and creoles • Sign languages Linguists: By nationality • Grammarians • Historical linguists • Morphologists • Phoneticians • Phonologists • Sociolinguists • Syntacticians • Translators Wikipedia books: English Stubs: Constructed languages • Languages • Linguists • Pidgins and creoles • Typography • Vocabulary and usage • Writing systems Template:/box-footer Find a language Enter an ISO 639 code to find the corresponding language article   What are portals? List of portals Featured portals Purge server cache