language

Code-switching is the practice of alternating between two or more languages within a single conversation.

Romaji is the romanization of Japanese, with several systems including Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki.

Phonology is the branch of linguistics dealing with systems of speech sounds in particular languages.

Braille is a tactile writing system used by blind and visually impaired people, developed by Louis Braille in 1824.

The Latin alphabet is the most widely used writing system in the world.

The Welsh language, native to Wales, is one of the oldest languages still in use in Europe.

Mandarin is a tonal language with four main lexical tones plus a neutral tone in standard speech.

The IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet, is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to represent speech sounds.

Pinyin is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in mainland China.

Semantics is the linguistic study of meaning in language.

Syntax is the set of rules governing the structure of sentences in a language.

The Devanagari script is used to write Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali, and several other languages.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were used for both religious and administrative writing in ancient Egypt for over 3,000 years.

Cuneiform, developed in ancient Sumer around 3200 BCE, is one of the earliest known writing systems.

The Greek alphabet, developed around the 9th century BCE, was the first writing system to use distinct letters for vowels and consonants.

Sanskrit is an ancient Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism.

ISO 639 is a standard for codes representing languages, used by libraries and software for identification.

Swahili, also known as Kiswahili, is a Bantu language widely spoken across East Africa.

Old Norse was the language of the Vikings and is the ancestor of modern Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Faroese.

English has its origins in the Anglo-Saxon dialects brought to Britain in the 5th century.

Bilingualism is the regular use of two or more languages by an individual or community.

The world's most-spoken languages by native speakers include Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Arabic.

The Arabic script is written from right to left and is used for Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and other languages.

Korean is written in Hangul, a featural alphabet introduced by King Sejong the Great in the 15th century.

English is a West Germanic language with extensive borrowings from Latin, French, and other languages.

Sign languages are full natural languages with their own grammar and syntax, distinct from spoken languages of the same region.

Mandarin Chinese has the largest number of native speakers of any language in the world.

There are approximately 7,000 living languages spoken worldwide.

Latin is the historical language of ancient Rome and remains the official language of the Vatican City.

The Cyrillic script is used for several Slavic languages including Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Serbian.

Japanese writing combines three scripts: kanji (Chinese-derived characters), hiragana, and katakana.

English is the most widely taught second language in the world.

The Indo-European language family includes most languages of Europe, the Iranian Plateau, and the Indian subcontinent.

Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language created by L. L. Zamenhof and first published in 1887.

Chomsky's transformational generative grammar revolutionized linguistic theory beginning with his 1957 book Syntactic Structures.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition.

Phonemes are the distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language.

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language and may be free, like 'cat,' or bound, like the plural suffix '-s.'

Pidgin languages are simplified contact languages that develop between groups with no common language; creoles develop when a pidgin becomes a community's native language.

Hebrew is one of the world's oldest continuously used languages and is the official language of Israel.

Spanish, also called Castilian, is the world's second-most-spoken native language and the official language of more than 20 countries.

Portuguese is the official language of Portugal, Brazil, and several African countries.

French is an official language of France, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, and many African and Caribbean countries.

German is the most widely spoken native language in the European Union.

Italian is the official language of Italy, San Marino, and parts of Switzerland.

Russian is the most geographically widespread Slavic language and the official language of Russia.