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A spoken language is a form of communication produced through articulate sounds or, in some cases, through manual gestures, as opposed to written language. Oral or vocal languages are those produced using the vocal tract, whereas sign languages are produced with the body and hands.
An example of such mixed languages is Tok Pisin, the official language of Papua New Guinea, which originally arose as a Pidgin based on English and Austronesian languages; others are Kreyòl ayisyen, the French-based creole language spoken in Haiti, and Michif, a mixed language of Canada, based on the Native American language Cree and French.
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 ...
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. [1] [2] [3] The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language, and analogous systems of sign languages), and pragmatics ...
One example is the Ket language spoken in central Siberia, which belongs to the wider Yeniseian language family; had it been discovered in recent times independently from its now extinct relatives, such as Yugh and Kott, it would have been classified as an isolate. Another explanation for language isolates is that they arose independently in ...
Spoken language, on the other hand, is a continuous (as opposed to discrete) phenomenon, made up of a potentially unlimited number of components. There is no predetermined system for distinguishing and classifying these components and, consequently, no preset way of mapping these components onto written symbols.
Mordovia (state language; with Moksha and Russian) [81] Even: Sakha (local official language; in localities with Even population) [79] Evenki: Sakha (local official language; in localities with Evenki population) [79] Faroese: Faroe Islands (with Danish) Finnish: Karelia (authorized language; with Karelian and Veps) [82] French: parts of Canada
This is a list of languages by number of native speakers. Current distribution of human language families All such rankings of human languages ranked by their number of native speakers should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum . [ 1 ]