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A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a sign language , which is produced with the body and hands.
This is a list of languages by total number of speakers. It is difficult to define what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect . For example, Chinese and Arabic are sometimes considered single languages, but each includes several mutually unintelligible varieties , and so they are sometimes considered language families instead.
In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal ...
A sound in spoken language characterized by an open configuration of the voice tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure above the vocal cords. The Roman vowels include the letters “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “u” and sometimes “y”. In all languages, vowels form the nucleus of a syllable. A vowel also completes a syllable.
Spoken language combines vowel and consonant sounds to form units of meaning like words, which belong to a language's lexicon. There are many different intentional speech acts , such as informing, declaring, asking , persuading , directing; acts may vary in various aspects like enunciation , intonation , loudness , and tempo to convey meaning.
The more commonly spoken languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, so the less commonly spoken languages eventually disappear from populations. Of the between 6,000 [5] and 7,000 languages spoken as of 2010, between 50 and 90% of those are expected to have become extinct by the year 2100. [6]
Then in turn, when a development in children's written language skills is seen, their spoken language skills have also improved. A child's written language in this phase mirrors their spoken language. [54] In the third phase, differentiation, children begin to learn that written language regularly differs in structure and style from spoken ...
Reading by using phonics is often referred to as decoding words, sounding-out words or using print-to-sound relationships.Since phonics focuses on the sounds and letters within words (i.e. sublexical), [13] it is often contrasted with whole language (a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading) and a compromise approach called balanced literacy (the attempt to combine whole language and ...