Natural language (original) (raw)

I. (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A human written or spoken language used by a community; opposed to e.g. a computer language

Synonyms:

natural language; tongue

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Hypernyms ("natural language" is a kind of...):

language; linguistic communication (a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "natural language"):

Nilo-Saharan; Nilo-Saharan language (a family of East African languages spoken by Nilotic peoples from the Sahara south to Kenya and Tanzania)

Niger-Kordofanian; Niger-Kordofanian language (the family of languages that includes most of the languages spoken in Africa south of the Sahara; the majority of them are tonal languages but there are important exceptions (e.g., Swahili or Fula))

Afrasian; Afrasian language; Afro-Asiatic; Afroasiatic; Afroasiatic language; Hamito-Semitic (a large family of related languages spoken both in Asia and Africa)

Dravidian; Dravidian language; Dravidic (a large family of languages spoken in south and central India and Sri Lanka)

Caucasian; Caucasian language (a number of languages spoken in the Caucasus that are unrelated to languages spoken elsewhere)

Cassite; Kassite (an ancient language spoken by the Kassites)

Elamite; Elamitic; Susian (an extinct ancient language of unknown affinities; spoken by the Elamites)

Basque (the language of the Basque people; of no known relation to any other language)

Ural-Altaic (a (postulated) group of languages including many of the indigenous languages of Russia (but not Russian))

Indo-European; Indo-European language; Indo-Hittite (the family of languages that by 1000 BC were spoken throughout Europe and in parts of southwestern and southern Asia)

Khoisan; Khoisan language (a family of languages spoken in southern Africa)

Papuan; Papuan language (any of the indigenous languages spoken in Papua New Guinea or New Britain or the Solomon Islands that are not Malayo-Polynesian languages)

Austronesian; Austronesian language (the family of languages spoken in Australia and Formosa and Malaysia and Polynesia)

Hmong; Hmong language; Miao (a language of uncertain affiliation spoken by the Hmong)

Austro-Asiatic; Austro-Asiatic language; Munda-Mon-Khmer (a family of languages spoken in southern and southeastern Asia)

Sino-Tibetan; Sino-Tibetan language (the family of tonal languages spoken in eastern Asia)

Chukchi; Chukchi language (an indigenous and isolated language of unknown origin spoken by the Chukchi that is pronounced differently by men and women)

Eskimo-Aleut; Eskimo-Aleut language (the family of languages that includes Eskimo and Aleut)

American-Indian language; American Indian; Amerind; Amerindian language; Indian (any of the languages spoken by Amerindians)

creole (a mother tongue that originates from contact between two languages)

tonal language; tone language (a language in which different tones distinguish different meanings)

first language; maternal language; mother tongue (one's native language; the language learned by children and passed from one generation to the next)

Antonym:

artificial language (a language that is deliberately created for a specific purpose)

Credits