vernacular - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From Latin vernāculus (“domestic, indigenous, of or pertaining to home-born slaves”), from verna (“a native, a home-born slave (one born in his master's house)”).

vernacular (plural vernaculars)

  1. The language of a people or a national language.
    Synonyms: vulgate, vulgar
    Coordinate terms: lingua franca, link language, vehicular language
    The vernacular of the United States is English.
  2. Everyday speech or dialect, including colloquialisms, as opposed to standard, literary, liturgical, or scientific idiom.
    Near-synonym: basilect
    Street vernacular can be quite different from what is heard elsewhere.
  3. Language unique to a particular group of people.
    Near-synonyms: jargon, argot, dialect, slang
    For those of a certain age, hiphop vernacular might just as well be a foreign language.
  4. A language lacking standardization or a written form.
  5. Indigenous spoken language, as distinct from a literary or liturgical language such as Ecclesiastical Latin.
    Synonyms: vulgate, vulgar
    Vatican II, a church council in the 1960s, allowed the celebration of the mass in the vernacular.
  6. (architecture) A style of architecture involving local building materials and styles; not imported.

national language

everyday speech

language unique to a particular group of people

spoken language as opposed to literary or liturgical

vernacular (comparative more vernacular, superlative most vernacular)

  1. Of or pertaining to everyday language, as opposed to standard, literary, liturgical, or scientific idiom.
    Near-synonyms: common, everyday, indigenous, ordinary, vulgar, colloquial, basilectal
    • 1983, Richard Ellis, The Book of Sharks, Knopf, →ISBN, page 111:
      There are blacktips, silvertips, bronze whalers, black whalers, spinner sharks, and bignose sharks. These of course are vernacular names, but this is one case where the scientific nomenclature does not clarify the species, since it is now being revised.
  2. Belonging to the country of one's birth; one's own by birth or by nature.
    Near-synonyms: native, indigenous; endemic
    a vernacular disease
  3. (architecture) Of or related to local building materials and styles; not imported.
    Synonym: folk
    Coordinate terms: primitive, naive
  4. (art) Connected to a collective memory; not imported.
  5. (taxonomy) Not attempting to use the rules of a taxonomic code, especially, not using scientific Latin.
    Synonym: common
    Hypernym: nonsystematic
    An English vernacular name for Rosa multiflora is multiflora rose.

pertaining to everyday language

vernacular m or f (plural vernaculares)

  1. vernacular (pertaining to everyday language)
    Synonym: vernáculo

Borrowed from French vernaculaire.

vernacular m or n (feminine singular vernaculară, masculine plural vernaculari, feminine and neuter plural vernaculare)

  1. vernacular