Language

Language is a systematic means of communication by the use of sounds, signals, conventional symbols, body movements and patterns that have an agreed upon meaning so that a message can be interpreted accurately. Language is the cognitive process involved in producing and understanding linguistic communication. Language is a system of words used to name things in a particular discipline. Language is the mental faculty or power of vocal communication. Language is the communication by word of mouth.



Language is the software of the mind and the brain is the hardware. Language is the machine code of the human brain and a software program that controls your thoughts and allows you to think. Language is the human operating system that shapes your reality and gives your life meaning. How computers use voltages as a language.

Learning a New Language - Linguistics - Translations - Interpretations - Vocal Learning - Speech - Child Development - History of Language

Language is the single greatest human invention of all time. Without proper language, humans would have died off or gone extinct thousands of years ago. Though language is still in early development, we know more about the power of language than any other time in human history. Language not only helps us to communicate information, language also gives us the ability to process information and the ability to interpret information, and reinterpret information. Language gave humans the ability to communicate by assigning meaning to symbols and then agreeing on the definitions of each symbol as a society. Creating language was an amazing advancement. We have accomplished so many things using language. But language has weaknesses and vulnerabilities. When we don't agree on the meaning of symbols, we can not communicate effectively or efficiently. Language has many simplistic elements, such as letters and words. But the meaning of words can have deeper meanings and communicate an enormous amount of information. And understanding these deeper meanings depends on the background knowledge of the person and the level of intelligence that the person has in order to understand the deeper meaning of a particular word, or understand just a symbol of a word. We can not pretend that things are simple when they are not. Being simple minded is not bad, it's only bad when we ignore the fact that things can be more complex and not that simple. Reading levels of students and citizens needs to be taken seriously. If we can not comprehend what we read, then how are we going to comprehend the thoughts we have. This is why knowledge is so extremely important. If you don't have the knowledge to understand, then the ability to understand becomes ineffective and inefficient. This breakdown in communication causes a lot of damage. We can not ignore the value of knowledge. We are facing critical junctures that will require our full understanding. The problems we face we be challenging, but our problems will be even more challenging if we can't fully understand the dangers. We need to stop the language that is used as a weapon of control. When schools and the media controls the narrative, language can be used a method to control the mind, instead of language being used as a tool to free the mind. When language is not being taught effectively, or used effectively, this creates language disorders, which makes this is a type of child abuse that can have devastating consequences. We can not pretend that things are simple when they are not. Being simple minded is not bad, it's only bad when we ignore the fact that things can be more complex and not that simple.

When you master language, you master your thoughts, and then you master your world

Mastering language goes way beyond fluency and comprehension. Mastering language is the understanding that certain words have power and that knowledge has power. In order to make use of the power of knowledge and master the vibrational energy of words, you need to master the language that knowledge uses. Language controls your thoughts, especially when you can't control the language that you use to think. When you lack experience, skills, knowledge and the information that you need to effectively and efficiently use language to control your thoughts and actions, you will be vulnerable to uncontrollable thoughts and uncontrollable actions. These lack of skills may also make you vulnerable to distortions in your reality, and you may not even be aware of it. If you can't control your mind, then someone else will. The words you use, and the meaning that you give to those words, makes a big difference. You are what you think and you are what you know, or what you pretend to know. Language and words can shape your thoughts, and your body can influence your thoughts. When you can master your language, you can master your world.

Linguistic Relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the speakers world view or cognition.

Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis or Whorfianism is a principle that is often defined to include two versions. The strong version says that language determines thought, and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage can influence thought and decisions. 

Philosophy of Language seeks to understand the way language represents reality. Major topics in philosophy of language include: the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, learning, and thought.

Linguistic Determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception.

How Language Shapes Thought: Lera Boroditsky (video) - Dreaming in Different Tongues: Languages and the Way We Think (youtube)

The Power of Words - Positive Thinking - Thoughts Effect Water - Mind Over Matter - Mindfulness - Hypnosis - Inner Monologue - Language and Thought Connections - The Word - Word Games - Child Development - Printing Press - Historical Linguistics - Human Voice - Mantras - Inspirational Words - Placebos

"You are what you think", but what if you are not aware of what you're thinking, or, what if you don't fully understand what your thoughts mean? Who are you then?

"We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language." ~ George Carlin (wiki)

"If thought corrupts language, language can corrupt thoughts." ~ George Orwell 1946.

"The tongue has the power of life and death." ~  Proverbs 18:21

"Without words, you would have no thoughts."

Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that a certain narrative can affect our perception. When you control the inner monologue, you control your perception of the world.

Having real conversations is the only accurate way to use language effectively without having misinterpretations.

Propaganda and a dumbed down education proves that language can be used to manipulate your thoughts and distort reality. The difference between an intelligent person and an ignorant person is related to the ability of that person to use language effectively by having a large vocabulary and enough experience and knowledge to use words effectively. Reading comprehension is just as important as thought comprehension.

The Use of Language Influences our Learning Processes, affecting our ability to collect different kinds of data, make connections between them, and infer a desirable mode of behavior from them. Lack of Language Dangers.

Almost 99 percent of people on the planet have only conversational language skills at an intermediate level, which is just above a beginner. Very few people are using language effectively to its full potential. English.

Language can bring us together, but language can also tear us apart.

Be aware of your thoughts, and be aware of how your body effects your thoughts. Remember that one thought leads to another.

Zipf's Law (the words most used in communication)

Language is more than just knowing the meaning of words, language is knowing the words that give life meaning. Language is more than an ordinary communication tool, language helps us to communicate internally and externally, which helps to connect us to everything in the universe. Language gives your soul a name. Language gives God a name. Language gives us so much. But language can also take from us when language is inadequate or manipulated. Language skills should be mandatory. So we must make language skills available to everyone. An unequal world comes from unequal language skills. This inequality of language skills is a vulnerability to human survival. A knowledge gap is a wound on human existence. We can't effectively protect ourselves if too many people are injured. Luckily this cognitive injury can be healed using a high quality education.

Language Barrier is a barrier to communication between people who are unable to speak a common language, or unable to understand certain words in their own language. Inadequate vocabulary can be a major hindrance in communication when we find ourselves searching for the exact word or phrase that would be appropriate for what we are trying to express. Poor vocabulary hinders the communicator to convey written or verbal messages in right sense. The communicator should know the clear and precise meaning of the used words and their appropriate replacement, if needed. If the appropriate and inadequate words are used ,they will not make clear the idea to be communicated. A language barrier impedes the formation of interpersonal relationships and can cause misunderstandings that lead to conflict, frustration, offense, violence, hurt feelings, and wasting time, effort, money, and human life. Inadequate information falls short to convey the message and overload information information distracts the reader’s attention and dilutes the theme of message. Psychological Barriers arise from motives ,emotions, social values, different perception etc. These can create psychological distance, and cause misunderstanding among people at work and hinder the communication process. People speaking the same language can have difficulty understanding each other if they are from different regions of the same country. Dialectical and accents differences, the use of slang and regional colloquialisms can create numerous problems that may lead to misunderstanding and gaps in communication. Semantic Barriers are obstacles in communication that distort the meaning of a message being sent. Miscommunications can arise due to different situations that form the semantic barrier between the sender and the receiver. These situations, to name a few, may be language, education, or cultural differences, misinterpreted jokes or phrases that have a figurative meaning, jargon or slang, psychological barriers such as selective perceptions, premature evaluation, poor listening and emotions.

Communicating in a foreign language takes emotion out of decision-making and affects the way we think.

Translation and cross-cultural communication may be challenging. Researchers have found was strong evidence for relativism in meaning, demonstrating how the particular language a person speaks influences the way they assemble ideas and think about reality. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldviews and cognition. This would mean that language guides thinking.

Cognitive abilities help each other during development: In other words, better reasoning skills allow individuals to improve their vocabulary more quickly, and better vocabularies are associated with faster improvement in reasoning ability. Mutualism.

Language skills are not necessary for learning abstract relations. Analogical ability — the ability to see common relations between objects, events or ideas — is a key skill that underlies human intelligence and differentiates humans from other apes.

Three-month-old infants can learn abstract relations before language comprehension. Findings suggest humans' talent for relational learning doesn't depend on language. Pattern recognition is a built in instinct.

Bantu language shows that processing of focused information may be universal. Languages have different ways of highlighting relevant information. This study shows that despite these differences, the consequences are the same: to trigger a brain response to process information more deeply. In many languages across the world, speakers use intonation to focus on relevant information: ‘Father cooked the sauce’. Speakers may also use a specific sentence structure to mark focus: ‘It was father who cooked the sauce’. Listeners and readers process focused information in a deeper way than non-focused information. For instance, EEG studies show an increased N400 response when words are focused. The N400 is a negative brain response that typically occurs 400 ms after encountering an unexpected word, in sentences such as ‘I eat bottles’.

Words are needed to think about numbers. The results suggest that in order to think about exact numbers, people need to have a word for that number. The ability to reason about numbers is bound by the highest number a person can count to.

Language Proficiency is the ability of an individual to use language with a level of accuracy that transfers meaning in production and comprehension. Native-level fluency is estimated to require a lexicon between 20,000 and 40,000 words, but basic conversational fluency might require as few as 3,000 words. Developing proficiency in any language begins with word learning. By the time they are 12 months old, children learn their first words and by the time they are 36 months old, they may know well over 900 words with their utterances intelligible to the people who interact with them the most. Developing language proficiency improves an individual’s capacity to communicate. Over time through interaction and through exposure to new forms of language in use, an individual should learn new words, sentence structures, and meanings, thereby increasing their command of using accurate forms of the target language.

Fluent is speaking readily, clearly, and effectively. Articulate - Speech.

Fluency means the smoothness or flow with which sounds, syllables, words and phrases are joined together when speaking quickly.

The size of your vocabulary can only be effective when you use words effectively in meaningful ways. You can't use what you don't have, and you don't have what you don't use effectively.

Every None (youtube) - Moments by Everynone (youtube)

Abuses of Language - Inadequate Language Harms

Language ideology studies the connections between the beliefs speakers have about language and the larger social and cultural systems they are a part of, illustrating how these beliefs are informed by and rooted in such systems. By doing so, language ideologies link the implicit as well as explicit assumptions people have about a language or language in general to their social experience and political as well as economic interests. The concept is used primarily within the fields of anthropology, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cross-cultural studies to characterize any set of beliefs or feelings about languages as used in their social worlds.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (hypnosis) - NLP

Meta-Linguistics is the branch of linguistics that studies language and its relationship to other cultural behaviors. It is the study of dialogue relationships between units of speech communication as manifestations and enactments of co-existence. Psycholinguistics.

The Theory of Communicative Action is a two-volume 1981 book by Jürgen Habermas, about the social sciences in a theory of language. The theory of communicative action is a critical project which reconstructs a concept of reason which is not grounded in instrumental or objectivistic terms, but rather in an emancipatory communicative act. This reconstruction proposes "human action and understanding can be fruitfully analysed as having a linguistic structure", and each utterance relies upon the anticipation of freedom from unnecessary domination. These linguistic structures of communication can be used to establish a normative understanding of society. This conception of society is used "to make possible a conceptualization of the social-life context that is tailored to the paradoxes of modernity. Max Weber (wiki).

Language Game is a philosophical concept that refers to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. A word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the "rule" of the "game" being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance "Water!" could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication.

Private Language argument argues that a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent.

Functional Theories of Grammar are those approaches to the study of language that see functionality of language and its elements to be the key to understanding linguistic processes and structures. Functional theories of language propose that since language is fundamentally a tool, it is reasonable to assume that its structures are best analyzed and understood with reference to the functions they carry out. Functional theories of grammar differ from structural linguistics or formalist language theories, in that the latter approaches seek to define the different elements of language and describe the way they relate to each other only as systems of formal rules or operations, whereas the former additionally takes into account the context where linguistic elements are used and studies the way they are instrumentally useful or functional in the given environment. This means that functional theories of grammar tend to pay attention to the way language is actually used in communicative context. The formal relations between linguistic elements are assumed to be functionally-motivated.

Languages have an intriguing paradox. Languages with lots of speakers, such as English and Mandarin, have large vocabularies with relatively simple grammar. Yet the opposite is also true: Languages with fewer speakers have fewer words but complex grammars. Paradox.

Language is Learned in Brain Circuits that Predate Humans.

How the brain processes language. Humans accomplish a phenomenal amount of tasks by combining pieces of information. We perceive objects by combining edges, categorize scenes by combining objects, interpret events by combining actions, and understand sentences by combining words. But researchers don't yet have a clear understanding of how the brain forms and maintains the meaning of the whole -- such as a sentence -- from its parts. Researchers have now shed new light on the brain processes that support the emergent meaning of combined words.

New insights into how the human brain organizes language. In addition to the classical language regions in the left hemisphere of the brain, the authors of the study found that structures in the brain regions below the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum play a key role in language processes. Language is the most important tool for human communication and essential for life in our society. Stroke.

Language Processing Areas of the Brain.

Our brains 'time-stamp' sounds to process the words we hear. New research shows why we hear 'lemon' and not 'melon'. Our brains 'time-stamp' the order of incoming sounds, allowing us to correctly process the words that we hear, shows a new study by a team of psychology and linguistics researchers. Its findings offer new insights into the intricacies of neurological function. To understand speech, your brain needs to accurately interpret both the speech sounds' identity and the order that they were uttered to correctly recognize the words being said. Different sounds are responded to with different neural populations. And, each sound is time-stamped with how much time has gone by since it entered the ear. This allows the listener to know both the order and the identity of the sounds that someone is saying to correctly figure out what words the person is saying.

Researchers use a computer model to explain how children integrate information during word learning. Children learn a huge number of words in the early preschool years. A two-year-old might be able to say just a handful of words, while a five-year-old is quite likely to know many thousands. In the real world, children learn words in complex social settings in which more than just one type of information is available. They have to use their knowledge of words while interacting with a speaker. Word learning always requires integrating multiple, different information sources.

Sounds and words are processed separately and simultaneously in the brain. After years of research, neuroscientists have discovered a new pathway in the human brain that processes the sounds of language. The findings suggest that auditory and speech processing occur in parallel, contradicting a long-held theory that the brain processed acoustic information then transformed it into linguistic information. Sounds of language, upon reaching the ears, are converted into electrical signals by the cochlea and sent to a brain region called the auditory cortex on the temporal lobe. For decades, scientists have thought that speech processing in the auditory cortex followed a serial pathway, similar to an assembly line in a factory. It was thought that first, the primary auditory cortex processes the simple acoustic information, such as frequencies of sounds. Then, an adjacent region, called the superior temporal gyrus (STG), extracts features more important to speech, like consonants and vowels, transforming sounds into meaningful words.

The tool of language gave us the ability to transfer information and knowledge to ourselves and to others. It was the first form of wireless communication. But it took thousands of years for humans to master language and to improve language in order to make communication more effectively and more efficiently. And now with the invention of computers and the internet, and the digitizing of language, more people are using language to transfer information and knowledge then any other time in human history.  But even though we use language to communicate and transfer information and knowledge every single day, 98% of people don't understand what knowledge and information is. And this lack of understanding is the single greatest source for most of our problems. If people fully understood what they were transmitting to themselves and to others, they would be a lot more careful, and more aware of what they think, and also be careful about what they say. People would then have more control, more power, more intelligence, more freedom, more potential, and more possibilities. Our full understanding of knowledge and information is the next big human transformation.

Without language, there would most likely be no human race, or life as we know it. A large vocabulary is like having a huge toolbox for life. But language is like a black box, because most people have no idea how language works. Language will help move you forward, and the lack of language will hold you back. Learn how to tell your own story, instead of letting others tell your story for you.

Without a language to describe our experience, we can't communicate what we know. You can learn from your senses and experiences, but only so much, 80% of knowledge and intelligence is delivered using language.

Reading, Writing, Communicating and Languages are very important skills to have. If you do not become proficient in these skills you will find it very difficult to Communicate with other people, as well as, find it very difficult to communicate with yourself. For one of the most important things you will learn about language is that it is also used to communicate inward as well as outward. So learning to read, write and communicate at a high level of proficiency is extremely important. These Skills open the doors of opportunity in all directions, doors that will normally not be visible unless you are a very good reader, writer and communicator.

Add Language to the Math, reading mix. Measuring the impact of one skill on another, in addition to measuring growth in the same skill, provides more of a "whole child" perspective.

The power of language influences thought and action. The words we use to describe things—to ourselves and others—affects how we and they think and act. It’s good to remind ourselves that this powerful influence happens in all kinds of situations, and most certainly with language related to teaching and learning.

If you didn't have the words to describe something, then how would you understand it?

Language gives you the ability to process information, and not just send and receive information. Processing information is the most important aspect, if the receiver cannot process incoming information effectively, then sending information becomes problematic or incoherent.

If people would learn how to understand knowledge and information in the correct way, and if people would learn to understand how language is used to transmit information, receive information and process information, then we would solve every problem in the world and every person would live beautiful and productive lives. When people learn, people have more power. And that is a fact of life. Understanding more about yourself and the world around you should always be exciting and exhilarating, if you are not experiencing this amazement when learning, then you're not learning things in the right way or learning the right things at the right time. If your school is boring, then there is something wrong with your school. If learning feels like it's a chore, then there is something wrong about what you are learning and how you are learning it. Learning should always be exhilarating and learning should always be its own reward. Make it happen.

Languages - Language History

Only about 2,400 of the world's roughly 7,200 Languages and Dialects have writing systems. in 2021, there are now roughly 6,500 languages that are spoken in the world today. Over 800 languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, a country of about six million people.

Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages promotes the documentation, maintenance, preservation, and revitalization of endangered languages worldwide through linguist-aided, community-driven multi-media language documentation projects. Endangered Languages - The Alliance for Linguistic Diversity.

Constructed Language is a language whose phonology, grammar and vocabulary have been consciously devised for human-like communication, instead of having developed naturally or by random. It is also referred to as an artificial or invented language. There are many possible reasons to create a constructed language, such as: to ease human communication, to give fiction, or an associated constructed setting and an added layer of realism, for experimentation in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning, for artistic creation, and for language games.

Symbols - English Language

Origin of Language has several theories. Continuity theories build on the idea that language exhibits so much complexity that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form; therefore it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among humans' primate ancestors. Discontinuity theories take the opposite approach—that language, as a unique trait which cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans, must have appeared fairly suddenly during the course of human evolution. Some theories consider language mostly as an innate faculty—largely genetically encoded. Other theories regard language as a mainly cultural system—learned through social interaction. Noam Chomsky, a proponent of discontinuity theory, argues that a single change occurred in humans before we left Africa, coincident with the Great Leap approximately 100,000 years ago, in which a common language faculty developed in a group of humans and their descendants. Chomsky bases his argument on the observation that any human baby of any culture can be raised in a different culture and will completely assimilate the language and behavior of the new culture that they were raised in. This implies that no major change to the human language faculty have occurred since we left Africa. Bio-linguistics can be defined as the study of biology and the evolution of language.

Origins of human language pathway in the brain at least 25 million years old. The human language pathway in the brain has been identified by scientists as being at least 25 million years old -- 20 million years older than previously thought.

Internal Reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question.

How did our ancestors develop the very first language? - Indo-European Language Family Tree - Language Origins (image)

Proto-Language is a postulated and unattested once-spoken ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or in some cases only partially attested and established as genuine. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method. In the tree model of historical linguistics, a protolanguage is a hypothetical or reconstructed, and unattested, from which a number of attested, or documented, known languages are believed to have descended by evolution, or slow modification of the proto-language into languages that form a language family. In the strict sense, a proto-language is the latest common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the start of the family's divergence into the attested daughter languages. It is therefore equivalent with the ancestral language or parental language of a language family. Origin of language (wiki)

Proto-writing - First Language - Inventions

Comparative Method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor.

List of Languages by total number of Speakers (wiki) - List of Languages by number of Native Speakers (wiki) - Languages Used on the Internet (wiki) - Languages Atlas

Unknown Language Jedek discovered in Southeast Asia.

Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. Philologist is someone who studies the history of languages, especially by looking closely at literature. Linguistics is the study of language, and a philologist is a type of linguist.

Etymology is the study of the history of the form of words and, by extension, the origin and evolution of their semantic meaning across time. It is a subfield of historical linguistics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, semiotics, and phonetics.

Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, and ultimately from the Phoenician alphabet. Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, initially in Italy and subsequently throughout the Roman Empire. Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin and French have contributed many words to the English Language. Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. Latin is estimated to have around 202,158 words in its vocabulary. Latin Wikipedia (wiki).

History of the Latin Script is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the standard script of the English language and is often referred to simply as "the alphabet" in English. It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters. Due to classicism, modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts. There are few regional variants.

Dialect refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. A language that is socially subordinated to a regional or national standard language, often historically cognate or genetically related to the standard language, but not actually derived from the standard language.

Pronunciations - Tone - Language Proficiency - Fluency

Specific Language Impairment is diagnosed when a child's language does not develop normally and the difficulties cannot be accounted for by generally slow development, physical abnormality of the speech apparatus, autism spectrum disorder, acquired brain injury or hearing loss. Twin studies have shown that it is strongly genetic. Usually, language impairment is resulted from mutation in genes.

Aphasia is an inability to comprehend and formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. This damage is typically caused by a cerebral vascular accident (stroke), or head trauma, however these are not the only possible causes. To be diagnosed with aphasia, a person's speech or language must be significantly impaired in one (or several) of the four communication modalities following acquired brain injury or have significant decline over a short time period (progressive aphasia). The four communication modalities are auditory comprehension, verbal expression, reading and writing, and functional communication.

Communication Disorders - Memory Training

Language Module refers to a hypothesized structure in the human brain (anatomical module) or cognitive system (functional module) that some psycholinguists such as Steven Pinker claim contains innate capacities for language.

Speech Language Pathology is a field of expertise practiced by a clinician known as a speech-language pathologist, also called speech and language therapist, or speech therapist, who specializes in the evaluation and treatment of communication disorders, cognition, voice disorders, and swallowing disorders.

Lena Foundation is advanced technology to accelerate language development of children 0-5. 

UCLA Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture.

Universal Language may refer to a hypothetical or historical language spoken and understood by all or most of the world's population. In some contexts, it refers to a means of communication said to be understood by all living things, beings, and objects alike. It may be the idea of an international auxiliary language for communication between groups speaking different primary languages. In other conceptions, it may be the primary language of all speakers, or the only existing language. Some religious and mythological traditions state that there was once a single universal language among all people, or shared by humans and supernatural beings.

Rosetta Project - Natural Language - Grammar - Learning to Speak - Translations - Language Interpretation

Phrase Structure Rules are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax, and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, being first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957.

Digital Infinity is the idea that all human languages follow a simple logical principle, according to which a limited set of digits—irreducible atomic sound elements—are combined to produce an infinite range of potentially meaningful expressions.

MIT Language Universal ties all Languages together.

Why is the Chinese Language so simple? Why is Latin so difficult? Why Latin? (youtube)

Isolating Language is a type of language with a very low morpheme per word ratio and no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Currently the most widely used isolating language is Mandarin Chinese.

Phoneme is one of the units of sound, or gesture in the case of sign languages, that distinguishes one word from another in a particular language. Two words that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form, is called a minimal pair, which are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones constitute two separate phonemes in the language.

Why is learning the English Language better for Brain development?

Monolingualism is the condition of being able to speak only a single language, as opposed to multilingualism. In a different context, "unilingualism" may refer to a language policy which enforces an official or national language over others.

Language Arts is the name given to the study and improvement of the arts of language.

Musical Language

Interagency Language Roundtable Scale is a set of descriptions of abilities to communicate in a language.

Interagency Language Roundtable is an unfunded organization comprising various agencies of the United States Federal Government with the purpose of coordinating and sharing information on foreign language activities at the federal level.

Mixed Language

Mixed Language is a language that arises through the fusion of usually two source languages, normally in situations of thorough bilingualism (Meakins, 2013), so that it is not possible to classify the resulting language as belonging to either of the language families that were its sources.

Fusional Language are a type of synthetic languages, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single morpheme in combination with affixes to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic changes.

Spanglish is a blend of Spanish and English lexical items and grammar. Spanglish can be considered a variety of Spanish with heavy use of English or vice versa. It can be more related either to Spanish or to English, depending on the circumstances. Since Spanglish arises independently in each region, it reflects the locally spoken varieties of English and Spanish. In general different varieties of Spanglish are not necessarily mutually intelligible. In Mexican and Chicano Spanish the common term for "Spanglish" is "Pocho". Spanglish is a name sometimes given to various contact dialects, pidgins, or creole languages that result from interaction between Spanish and English used by people who speak both languages or parts of both languages, mainly spoken in the United States.

Trope is language used in a figurative or nonliteral sense.

Multilingualism is the use of two or more languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population.

Code-Switching occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation. Multilinguals, speakers of more than one language, sometimes use elements of multiple languages when conversing with each other. Thus, code-switching is the use of more than one linguistic variety in a manner consistent with the syntax and phonology of each variety. Code-switching is distinct from other language contact phenomena, such as borrowing, pidgins and creoles, loan translation (calques), and language transfer (language interference). Borrowing affects the lexicon, the words that make up a language, while code-switching takes place in individual utterances. Speakers form and establish a pidgin language when two or more speakers who do not speak a common language form an intermediate, third language. On the other hand, speakers practice code-switching when they are each fluent in both languages. Code mixing is a thematically related term, but the usage of the terms code-switching and code-mixing varies. Some scholars use either term to denote the same practice, while others apply code-mixing to denote the formal linguistic properties of language-contact phenomena and code-switching to denote the actual, spoken usages by multilingual persons. The term also describes literary styles that include elements from more than one language, sometimes used to refer to relatively stable informal mixtures of two languages, or switching among dialects, styles or registers, which is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or in a particular social setting.

Bilingualism comes naturally to our brains. Processing multiple languages taps same mechanisms as listening to only one. The brain uses a shared mechanism for combining words from a single language and for combining words from two different languages, a team of neuroscientists has discovered. Its findings indicate that language switching is natural for those who are bilingual because the brain has a mechanism that does not detect that the language has switched, allowing for a seamless transition in comprehending more than one language at once.

Lexical Entrainment is the phenomenon in conversational linguistics of the process of the subject adopting the reference terms of their interlocutor. In practice, it acts as a mechanism of the cooperative principle in which both parties to the conversation employ lexical entrainment as a progressive system to develop "conceptual pacts" (a working temporary conversational terminology) to ensure maximum clarity of reference in the communication between the parties; this process is necessary to overcome the ambiguity inherent in the multitude of synonyms that exist in language. Lexical entrainment arises by two cooperative mechanisms: Embedded corrections – a reference to the object implied by the context of the sentence, but with no explicit reference to the change in terminology. Exposed corrections – an explicit reference to the change in terminology, possibly including a request to assign the referent a common term (e.g., "by 'girl', do you mean 'Jane'?").

Everyday Language

Natural Language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages can take different forms, such as speech, signing, or writing. They are distinguished from constructed and formal languages such as those used to program computers or to study logic.

NLP - Computer Languages - Sign Language - Body Language - Jargon - Lingo

Formal Language is a set of strings of symbols together with a set of rules that are specific to it. The alphabet of a formal language is the set of symbols, letters, or tokens from which the strings of the language may be formed; frequently it is required to be finite. The strings formed from this alphabet are called words, and the words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called well-formed words or well-formed formulas. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar such as a regular grammar or context-free grammar, also called its formation rule.

Standard Language may be defined either as a language variety used by a population for public purposes or as a variety that has undergone standardization.

Vernacular is appropriate everyday language or the everyday speech of a native language or native dialect of a specific population, especially as distinguished from a literary, national or standard variety of the language, or a lingua franca used in the region or state inhabited by that population. Some linguists use "nonstandard dialect" or "colloquial" or "informal" as synonyms.

Colloquialism is the linguistic style used for casual communication or informal communication or everyday language. It is the most common functional style of speech. Colloquialism is characterized by wide usage of interjections and other expressive devices; it makes use of non-specialist terminology, and has a rapidly changing lexicon. It can also be distinguished by its usage of formulations with incomplete logical and syntactic ordering.

First Language is a language that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term native language or mother tongue refers to the language of one's ethnic group rather than one's first language. Children brought up speaking more than one language can have more than one native language, and be bilingual or multilingual. By contrast, a second language is any language that one speaks other than one's first language.

Mother Tongue is the language which a person has grown up speaking from early childhood.

Idiom is a manner of speaking that is natural to native speakers of a language. The usage or vocabulary that is characteristic of a specific group of people. The style of a particular artist, school or movement. An expression whose meanings cannot be inferred from the meanings of the words that make it up.

Animacy is a grammatical and semantic principle expressed in language based on how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age.

Oracy is the ability to express oneself fluently and grammatically in speech.

Semitic Languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. Semitic languages are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of Western Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa, as well as in often large expatriate communities in North America and Europe, with smaller communities in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language. It includes norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

Anglosphere is a set of English-speaking nations with a similar cultural roots, based upon populations originating from the nations of the British Isles (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Ireland), which today maintain close political and military cooperation.

Algonquin is either a distinct Algonquian language closely related to the Ojibwe language or a particularly divergent Ojibwe dialect. It is spoken, alongside French and to some extent English, by the Algonquin First Nations of Quebec and Ontario. As of 2006, there were 2,680 Algonquin speakers, less than 10% of whom were monolingual. Algonquin is the language for which the entire Algonquian language subgroup is named. The similarity among the names often causes considerable confusion. Like many Native American languages, it is strongly verb-based, with most meaning being incorporated into verbs instead of using separate words for prepositions, tense, etc.

Synthetic Language - Artificial Language

Synthetic Language is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an analytic language. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications (such as fusional, agglutinative, etc.), although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to exhibit synthetic properties.

Polysynthetic Language are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words".

Artificial Language are languages of a typically very limited size which emerge either in computer simulations between artificial agents, robot interactions or controlled psychological experiments with humans. They are different from both constructed languages and formal languages in that they have not been consciously devised by an individual or group but are the result of (distributed) conventionalisation processes, much like natural languages. Opposed to the idea of a central designer, the field of artificial language evolution in which artificial languages are studied can be regarded as a sub-part of the more general cultural evolution studies.

Idioglossia is an idiosyncratic language invented and spoken by only one person or very few people. Most often, idioglossia refers to the "private languages" of young children, especially twins, the latter being more specifically known as cryptophasia, and commonly referred to as twin talk or twin speech. Children who are exposed to multiple languages from birth are also inclined to create idioglossias, but these languages usually disappear at a relatively early age, giving way to use of one or more of the languages introduced. Fantasy.

Indo-European Languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch. The most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Persian and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the human population speaks an Indo-European language natively, by far the highest of any language family.

Anishinaabemowin is the Language of the Three Fires Confederacy.

Global Language System is the "ingenious pattern of connections between language groups", surprisingly strong and efficient network that ties together - directly or indirectly - the six billion inhabitants of the earth." The global language system draws upon the world system theory to account for the relationships between the world's languages and divides them into a hierarchy consisting of four levels, namely the peripheral, central, supercentral and hypercentral languages.

Pidgin s a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common: typically, a mixture of simplified languages or a simplified primary language with other languages' elements included. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the country in which they reside (but where there is no common language between the groups). Fundamentally, a pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication, as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language. A pidgin may be built from words, sounds, or body language from multiple other languages and cultures. They allow people who have no common language to communicate with each other. Pidgins usually have low prestige with respect to other languages. Not all simplified or "broken" forms of a language are pidgins. Each pidgin has its own norms of usage which must be learned for proficiency in the pidgin. A pidgin differs from a creole, which is the first language of a speech community of native speakers, and thus has a fully developed vocabulary and grammar. Most linguists believe that a creole develops through a process of nativization of a pidgin when children of acquired pidgin-speakers learn it and use it as their native language. List of English-Based Pidgins (wiki).

International Auxiliary Language is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primarily a second language.

Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language. It is the most widely spoken constructed language in the world.

List of Constructed Languages (wiki)

Abkhaz Phonology is a language of the Northwest Caucasian family which, like the other Northwest Caucasian languages, is very rich in consonants. Abkhaz has a large consonantal inventory that contrasts 58 consonants in the literary Abzhywa dialect, coupled with just two phonemic vowels (Chirikba 2003:18–20).Abkhaz has three major dialects, Abzhywa, Bzyp and Sadz, which differ mainly in phonology.

Toki Pona is a human language invented in 2001. It was an attempt to understand the meaning of life in 120 words. Toki Pona is a constructed language, first published as draft on the web in 2001 and then as a complete book and e-book Toki Pona: The Language of Good in 2014. It was designed by translator and linguist Sonja Lang (formerly Sonja Elen Kisa) of Toronto.

Code-Talker Paradox - Computer Language - Body Language - Speech

Morphological Typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional languages. Agglutinative languages rely primarily on discrete particles (prefixes, suffixes, and infixes) for inflection, while fusional languages "fuse" inflectional categories together, often allowing one word ending to contain several categories, such that the original root can be difficult to extract. A further subcategory of agglutinative languages are polysynthetic languages, which take agglutination to a higher level by constructing entire sentences, including nouns, as one word.

Morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.

Morpheme is the smallest grammatical unit in a language. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word, by definition, is freestanding. The linguistics field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. When a morpheme stands by itself, it is considered as a root because it has a meaning of its own (e.g. the morpheme cat) and when it depends on another morpheme to express an idea, it is an affix because it has a grammatical function (e.g. the –s in cats to indicate that it is plural). Every word comprises one or more morphemes.

Lexicology is the part of linguistics which studies words. This may include their nature and function as symbols, their meaning, the relationship of their meaning to epistemology in general, and the rules of their composition from smaller elements (morphemes such as the English -ed marker for past or un- for negation; and phonemes as basic sound units). Lexicology also involves relations between words, which may involve semantics (for example, love vs. affection), derivation (for example, fathom vs. unfathomably), use and sociolinguistic distinctions (for example, flesh vs. meat), and any other issues involved in analyzing the whole lexicon of a language.

Lexicon is the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word "lexicon" derives from the Greek λεξικόν (lexicon), neuter of λεξικός (lexikos) meaning "of or for words".

Hapax Legomenon is a word that occurs only once within a context, either in the written record of an entire language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. Hapax legomena in ancient texts are usually difficult to decipher, since it is easier to infer meaning from multiple contexts than from just one.

English Language - History

English Language gives precision and flexibility. New words bring new ideas. It's like the English language was made for the human brain. There is around one million words in the English language, including thousands of obsolete words. English is by far the most powerful language. It is the dominant language of three G7 nations (USA, UK and Canada), and British legacy has given it a global footprint. It is the world's lingua franca. Mandarin, which ranks second, is only half as potent. English speakers don’t know that the way their language works is just one of endless ways it could have come out. It’s easy to think that what one’s native language puts words to, and how, reflects the fundamentals of reality.

As the English language evolved over the last 600 years, it absorbed words and used words from several different languages like Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Dutch, Spanish, Norman, and more. And now other languages in the world are using English words more often, so most languages now share each others words. Over 60 percent of all English words have Greek or Latin roots. In the vocabulary of the sciences and technology, the figure rises to over 90 percent. English Learning.

Latin words: "Semper paratus" (always ready) - "Semper fidelis" (always faithful) - "Qui transtulit sustinet" ("He who transplanted still sustains"). Printing Press History - Letters.

The Rapidly Changing Language of American English (youtube) - Interview with William Labov, Professor of Linguistics at University of Pennsylvania and author of Dialect. David discusses the various and changing dialects and accents spoken in American English, and the political and economic factors in those 15 dialects

The English Language did not give rise to intelligence because humans had the ability to be intelligent way before the English language was even developed. Our ancestors used other languages to become intelligent. What the English language did for humanity was to give The Power of Language to more people. The English language is so versatile that you can communicate on so many different levels. English also makes it easy to transmit thoughts and emotions. The English language also helped people advance and learn faster because the language advanced and evolved as people learned more about how to use language effectively and efficiently. But the power of language is almost useless if people never learn how to use the power of language effectively and efficiently. Language is Key to Human Intelligence.

English Language Facts: English is the third largest language by number of native speakers, after Mandarin and Spanish. Approximately 330 to 360 million people around the world speak English as their first language. Estimates that include second language speakers vary greatly, from 470 million to more than 1 billion, and there are more than 50 English speaking countries. Because English is so widely spoken, it has often been referred to as a "world language". While it is not an official language in most countries, it is currently the language most often taught as a foreign language. The United States has the most native speakers at 258 million.

List of Countries by English-Speaking Population (wiki) - List of Territorial entities where English is an Official Language (wiki)

51.6% of people On the Internet speak English, 6.6% speak Russian and 2.0% speak Chinese. The number of internet users in 2015 was 3.2 billion people, which means that 1.5 billion people speak the English Language?

There are six large countries with a majority of native English speakers that are sometimes grouped under the term Anglosphere. There are 62 million native English speakers in the United Kingdom, 32 million in Canada, 20 million in Australia, and 3.8 million in New Zealand. Other countries also use English as their primary and official languages. Besides the major varieties of English, such as American English, British English, Indian English, Canadian English, Australian English, Irish English, New Zealand English and their sub-varieties, countries such as South Africa, the Philippines, Jamaica and Nigeria also have millions of native speakers of dialect continua ranging from English-based creole languages to Standard English.

The Adventure Of English - 2003 BBC Documentary - Episode 1 - BBC Documentary (youtube) - Presented by Melvyn Bragg (8 episodes about 50 minutes each).

Alfred the Great King of Wessex from 871 to 899.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of annals in Old English chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons. The original manuscript of the Chronicle was created late in the 9th century, probably in Wessex, during the reign of Alfred the Great. Multiple copies were made of that one original and then distributed to monasteries across England, where they were independently updated. In one case, the Chronicle was still being actively updated in 1154.

Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the pronunciation of the English language that took place in England between 1350 and 1600. Through the Great Vowel Shift, all Middle English long vowels changed their pronunciation. English spelling was becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of the peculiarities of English spelling.

1362 English Language starts to be used in Law and in Courtrooms where Latin was the norm for years.
1380 John Wycliffe wrote the English translation of the Bible from Latin.
1435 Printing Press was invented.
1479 Common written language spelling standards were introduced.
1524 William Tyndale wrote the English translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek. Translation created new English words.
1540 Bible for All. Great Bible (wiki).
1589 Shakespeare.
1611 Kings Bible. Books of Kings (wiki).
1755 Shakespeare had thousands of quotes in the First English Dictionary, which had only 21,000 Words.
1993 Webster's Third New International Dictionary and The Oxford English Dictionary included some 470,000 entries.
2018 there is currently around one million words in the English language, including thousands of obsolete words. But the true power of the English language is not the size of it's vocabulary, but it's the quality of the words in the English that can express more meaning and communicate more definitively than any other known language. But sadly, the power of the English language is still underutilized. So we have the power, we are just not using it effectively.

The oldest known dictionaries were Akkadian Empire cuneiform tablets with bilingual Sumerian–Akkadian wordlists, discovered in Ebla (modern Syria) and dated roughly 2300 BCE. A Chinese dictionary, the c. 3rd century BCE Erya, was the earliest surviving monolingual dictionary; Arabic dictionaries were compiled between the 8th and 14th centuries CE.

Plymouth Rock in 1620 marked the beginning of America. 2020 will mark the beginning of Intelligence.

America helped define and expand the English Language.

Noah Webster (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook pioneer, English-language spelling reformer, political writer, editor, and prolific author. He has been called the "Father of American Scholarship and Education". In  783 his blue-backed speller books taught five generations of American children how to spell and read, secularizing their education. According to Ellis (1979), he gave Americans "a secular catechism to the nation-state." Webster's name has become synonymous with "dictionary" in the United States, especially the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language. Webster was born in the Western Division of Hartford (which became West Hartford, Connecticut).

Americans expanded the English Language making it even better as people migrated westward. Adding new descriptive words from native American Indians and from Spanish people from the south.

I love the English Language (wordpress) - English as a Second Language

English Alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an uppercase and a lowercase form, and the same letters constitute the ISO basic Latin alphabet. The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface (and font), and the shape of handwritten letters can differ significantly from the standard printed form (and between individuals), especially when written in cursive style. English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis is used by some publishers in words such as "coöperation" or "naïve"). Written English does, however, have a number of digraphs. The alphabet was derived from an original series of sixteen characters, that emerged as a way to record spoken words. The English language itself was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, in use from the 5th century. This alphabet was brought to what is now England, along with the proto-form of the language itself, by Anglo-Saxon settlers. Very few examples of this form of written Old English have survived, mostly as short inscriptions or fragments.

African-American English any of various nonstandard forms of English spoken by black people, especially as an urban dialect in the US.

I believe that learning to speak English gives a person greater potential to be smarter or more intelligent because the English language has many more words than other languages, and also, the English language makes it easier to think, listen, speak and explain complex concepts. The English language seems to be perfect for the way that the brain is designed to use language effectively and efficiently. Though the English language is the only language I know, this can only be an opinion.

Visual Language

Visual Language is a system of communication using visual elements. Speech as a means of communication cannot strictly be separated from the whole of human communicative activity which includes the visual and the term 'language' in relation to vision is an extension of its use to describe the perception, comprehension and production of visible signs.

Sign Language - Body Language - Visual Communication - Hearing Impaired Tools - Spatial Intelligence - Symbols - Vocabulary - Grammar - Word's

Visual Literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read” and that meaning can be through a process of reading.

Linguistic Intelligence - Language Smart

Linguistics is the scientific study of language that involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguistics involves the sensitivity to spoken and written language, and the ability to learn languages, and the capacity to use language to accomplish certain goals. A linguist is a person who speaks several languages and is a specialist in linguistics.

Linguistic Analysis is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used or how it was used in the past by a group of people in a speech community.

Computational Linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, math, logic, philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience, among others.

Behavioural Linguistics is the science-based use of language to persuade. It's rooted in nudge theory combined with psychology, sociolinguistics, and principles of marketing. language is a powerful way to change behavior.

Linguistic Categories include, Lexical category, a part of speech such as noun, preposition, etc. Syntactic category, a similar concept which can also include phrasal categories, and Grammatical category, a grammatical feature such as tense, gender, etc. Every word of a natural language can be categorically described via a matrix of values that represent the implementation of features that, in their turn, are categorial properties. Since there exist many nonclearcut cases, that is, items that may paradigmatically belong to more than one category, it is necessary to use both a functional and a formal approach in order to get a categorial definition of the items. The traditional parts of speech still seem to be the best categorization, in spite of the fact that typology has become acquainted with languages that show very different morphosyntactic structures.

Psycholinguistics is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language. Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a listener. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, due mainly to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain processes language, and less so the known processes of social sciences, human development, communication theories, and infant development, among others. There are several subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain. For example: neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right; and developmental psycholinguistics, as a branch of psycholinguistics, concerns itself with a child's ability to learn language.

Neurolinguistics is the study of the neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, communication disorders and neuropsychology. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language. Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling.

Cognitive Linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind. There has been scientific and terminological controversy around the label 'cognitive linguistics'; there is no consensus on what specifically is meant with the term.

Morphology - Language Controls Thoughts

Computational Lexicology is a branch of computational linguistics, which is concerned with the use of computers in the study of lexicon. It has been more narrowly described by some scholars (Amsler, 1980) as the use of computers in the study of machine-readable dictionaries. It is distinguished from computational lexicography, which more properly would be the use of computers in the construction of dictionaries, though some researchers have used computational lexicography as synonymous.

Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics. Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. In older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics.

Database for studying individual differences in language skills. Why do people differ in their ability to use language? As part of a larger study into this question, researchers tested 122 adult native speakers of Dutch on various language and cognitive measures, including tests of vocabulary size, grammar, understanding and producing sentences, working memory and processing speed. Other researchers are encouraged to use this database to further investigate individual differences in language skills. Although most people learn to speak their mother tongue fluently, native speakers differ in their ability to use language. Adult language users not only differ in the number of words they know, they also differ in how quickly they produce and understand words and sentences. How do individuals differ across language tasks? Are individual differences in language ability related to general cognitive abilities?

Historical Linguistics is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical linguistics involves several key areas of study, including the reconstruction of ancestral languages, the classification of languages into families,(comparative linguistics) and the analysis of the cultural and social influences on language development.

Linguistic Rights are the human and civil rights concerning the individual and collective right to choose the language or languages for communication in a private or public atmosphere. Other parameters for analyzing linguistic rights include the degree of territoriality, amount of positivity, orientation in terms of assimilation or maintenance, and overtness. Linguistic rights include, among others, the right to one's own language in legal, administrative and judicial acts, language education, and media in a language understood and freely chosen by those concerned. Linguistic rights in international law are usually dealt in the broader framework of cultural and educational rights.

Scholars link diet, dentition, and linguistics. Anthropologists used a novel data analysis of thousands of languages, in addition to studying a unique subset of celebrities, to reveal how a soft food diet -- contrasted with the diet of hunter-gatherers -- is restructuring dentition and changing how people speak.

Endonym, exonym or autonym is an established, non-native name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used only outside that particular place, group, or linguistic community. Exonyms exist not only for historico-geographical reasons, but also in consideration of difficulties when pronouncing foreign words. For instance, Deutschland is the endonym for the country that is also known by the exonym Germany in English, Alemania in Spanish and Allemagne in French.

Phonological Awareness refers to an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and has, therefore, been the focus of much research.

Tone - Use of Pitch

Tone in language is when different tones will change the meaning of the words, even if the pronunciation of the word is the same otherwise. A word's meaning could be different depending on which syllable is stressed. Music Tones.

Tone in linguistics is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels.

I don't like the tone of your voice. It's not just what you say, but how you say it, or the way you say it. Metaphors.

Undertone is a quiet or hushed tone of voice or a low or subdued utterance or accompanying sound. A muted tone of sound or color. A quality (as of emotion) underlying the surface of an utterance or action. An underlying quality or feeling.

Tone Deaf - Hearing Errors

Stress in linguistics or accent is relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word, or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. This emphasis is typically caused by such properties as increased loudness and vowel length, full articulation of the vowel, and changes in pitch. Pronunciation.

High Rising Terminal is a feature of some variants of English where declarative sentence clauses end with a rising-pitch intonation, until the end of the sentence where a falling-pitch is applied. Empirically, one report proposes that HRT in American English and Australian English is marked by a high tone (high pitch or high fundamental frequency) beginning on the final accented syllable near the end of the statement (the terminal), and continuing to increase in frequency (up to 40%) to the end of the intonational phrase. New research suggests that the actual rise can occur one or more syllables after the last accented syllable of the phrase, and its range is much more variable than previously thought. (also known as upspeak, uptalk, rising inflection, moronic interrogative, or high rising intonation or HRI).

Intonation in linguistics is variation of spoken pitch that is not used to distinguish words; instead it is used for a range of functions such as indicating the attitudes and emotions of the speaker, signaling the difference between statements and questions, and between different types of questions, focusing attention on important elements of the spoken message and also helping to regulate conversational interaction. Humor (sarcasm) - Gestures.

Vocal Inflection contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation does distinguish words. So when your voice rises at the end of a question, that is technically called intonation. Inflection has two meanings: it can sometimes mean intonation, modulation of the voice; change in pitch or tone of voice. Listening Skills.

Inflection is a change in the form of a word (usually by adding a suffix) to indicate a change in its grammatical function. The patterns of stress and intonation in a language. A manner of speaking in which the loudness or pitch or tone of the voice is modified. Deviation from a straight or normal course.

Inflection is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and mood. The inflection of verbs is also called conjugation, and one can refer to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, participles, prepositions, postpositions, numerals, articles etc., as declension. An inflection expresses one or more grammatical categories with a prefix, suffix or infix, or another internal modification such as a vowel change. For example, the Latin verb ducam, meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix -am, expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). The use of this suffix is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb. The inflected form of a word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot stand alone as a word). For example, the English word cars is a noun that is inflected for number, specifically to express the plural; the content morpheme car is unbound because it could stand alone as a word, while the suffix -s is bound because it cannot stand alone as a word. These two morphemes together form the inflected word cars. Words that are never subject to inflection are said to be invariant; for example, the English verb must is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category. Its categories can be determined only from its context. Requiring the forms or inflections of more than one word in a sentence to be compatible with each other according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement. For example, in "the choir sings", "choir" is a singular noun, so "sing" is constrained in the present tense to use the third person singular suffix "s". Languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages. These can be highly inflected (such as Latin, Greek, Spanish, Biblical Hebrew, and Sanskrit), or weakly inflected (such as English). Languages that are so inflected that a sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many American Indian languages) are called polysynthetic languages. Languages in which each inflection conveys only a single grammatical category, such as Finnish, are known as agglutinative languages, while languages in which a single inflection can convey multiple grammatical roles (such as both nominative case and plural, as in Latin and German) are called fusional. Languages such as Mandarin Chinese that never use inflections are called analytic or isolating.

Conjugate is to give the different forms of a verb in an inflected language as they vary according to voice, mood, tense, number, and person.

Grammatical Conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, case, and other grammatical categories such as possession, definiteness, politeness, causativity, clusivity, interrogativity, transitivity, valency, polarity, telicity, volition, mirativity, evidentiality, animacy, associativity, pluractionality, reciprocity, agreement, polypersonal agreement, incorporation, noun class, noun classifiers, and verb classifiers in some languages. Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages tend to have the most complex conjugations albeit some fusional languages such as Archi can also have extremely complex conjugation. Typically the principal parts are the root and/or several modifications of it (stems). All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme, and the canonical form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent that lexeme (as seen in dictionary entries) is called a lemma. The term conjugation is applied only to the inflection of verbs, and not of other parts of speech (inflection of nouns and adjectives is known as declension). Also it is often restricted to denoting the formation of finite forms of a verb – these may be referred to as conjugated forms, as opposed to non-finite forms, such as the infinitive or gerund, which tend not to be marked for most of the grammatical categories. Correlative Conjunction come in pairs some are: both...and either...or ex: She'd rather play the drums than sing. Conjugation is also the traditional name for a group of verbs that share a similar conjugation pattern in a particular language (a verb class). For example, Latin is said to have four conjugations of verbs. This means that any regular Latin verb can be conjugated in any person, number, tense, mood, and voice by knowing which of the four conjugation groups it belongs to, and its principal parts. A verb that does not follow all of the standard conjugation patterns of the language is said to be an irregular verb. The system of all conjugated variants of a particular verb or class of verbs is called a verb paradigm; this may be presented in the form of a conjugation table.

Deflexion is a linguistic process related to inflectional languages. All members of the Indo-European language family belong to this kind of language and are subject to some degree of deflexional change. The process is typified by the degeneration of the inflectional structure of a language. This phenomenon has been especially strong in Western European languages, such as English, French, and others.

Variation in linguistics is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary pronunciation (accent), word choice (lexicon), or morphology and syntax (sometimes called "grammar"). But while the diversity of variation is great, there seem to be boundaries on variation – speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in sentence word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Language variation does not equate with language ungrammaticality, but speakers are still (often unconsciously) sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native tongue. Language variation is a core concept in sociolinguistics. Sociolinguists investigate whether this linguistic variation can be attributed to differences in the social characteristics of the speakers using the language, but also investigate whether elements of the surrounding linguistic context promote or inhibit the usage of certain structures.

Languages differ in the degree to which they overtly and obligatorily mark semantic distinctions; this difference is termed as one of over specification. Second, a particular aspect of one grammar may differ from that aspect in another's in terms of the number of rules (in phonology and syntax) or foundational elements (in terms of phonemic inventory) required to generate surface forms. Third, grammars differ in the degree to which they are festooned with irregularity and suppletion. Inflection and complexity, and whether one grammar can be more complex than another are discussed.

Even a visual style of writing of text, letters and words can influence the meaning. Like font style, letter sizes, colors and punctuation marks.

Linguistic Intelligence is an individuals' ability to understand both spoken and written language, as well as their ability to speak and write themselves. In a practical sense, linguistic intelligence is the extent to which an individual can use language, both written and verbal, to achieve goals. In addition to this, high linguistic intelligence has been linked to improved problem solving, as well as to increased abstract reasoning. In many cases, only the verbal aspects are taken into consideration. This is usually referred to as verbal intelligence or verbal fluency, and is commonly a reflection of an individual's overall linguistic intelligence. Part of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theory.

Linguistic Anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages, and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use. Linguistic anthropology explores how language shapes communication, forms social identity and group membership, organizes large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and develops a common cultural representation of natural and social worlds.

Orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language. It includes norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

Socio- Linguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and the effects of language use on society. Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language in that the focus of sociology of language is the effect of language on the society, while sociolinguistics focuses on the society's effect on language. Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree with pragmatics. It is historically closely related to linguistic anthropology and the distinction between the two fields has even been questioned.

Style in sociolinguistics is a set of linguistic variants with specific social meanings. In this context, social meanings can include group membership, personal attributes, or beliefs. Linguistic variation is at the heart of the concept of linguistic style—without variation there is no basis for distinguishing social meanings. Variation can occur syntactically, lexically, and phonologically. Many approaches to interpreting and defining style incorporate the concepts of indexicality, indexical order, stance-taking, and linguistic ideology. Note that a style is not a fixed attribute of a speaker. Rather, a speaker may use different styles depending on context. Additionally, speakers often incorporate elements of multiple styles into their speech, either consciously or subconsciously, thereby creating a new style.

Cognitive Linguistics refers to the school of thought within linguistics that interprets language in terms of the concepts, sometimes universal, sometimes specific to a particular tongue, which underlie its forms.

Computational Linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective.

Linguistic Prescription is the practice of elevating one variety or manner of language use over another. It may imply that some forms are incorrect, improper, or illogical, or lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value.

Phonological (sounds that words make)

Interlinguistics is the study of various aspects of linguistic communication between people who cannot make themselves understood by means of their different first languages. It is concerned with investigating how ethnic and auxiliary languages (lingua franca) work in such situations and with the possibilities of optimizing interlinguistic communication, for instance by use of international auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto or Interlingua. These are languages that are created by an intentional intellectual effort, usually with the aim of facilitating interlinguistic communication, but there are also interlanguages that have arisen spontaneously. These are called pidgin languages.

UCLA Department of Linguistics

Structural Linguistics is an approach to linguistics originating from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism.

Realization Linguistics is the process by which some kind of surface representation is derived from its underlying representation; that is, the way in which some abstract object of linguistic analysis comes to be produced in actual language. Phonemes are often said to be realized by speech sounds. The different sounds that can realize a particular phoneme are called its allophones.

Coherence Linguistics is what makes a text semantically meaningful. It is especially dealt with in text linguistics. Coherence is achieved through syntactical features such as the use of deictic, anaphoric and cataphoric elements or a logical tense structure, as well as presuppositions and implications connected to general world knowledge. The purely linguistic elements that make a text coherent are subsumed under the term cohesion.

Codification is the process of standardizing and developing a norm for a language.

Information Theory

Palaeography is the study of ancient and historical handwriting (that is to say, of the forms and processes of writing, not the textual content of documents). Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria. The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts. However, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision.

Mora in linguistics is a unit in phonology that determines syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing.

Computer Language (voltages, on or off, zero or one)

Math as a Language (numbers, symbols) - Music

Communication (wireless, mediums) - Words - Gestures

Language Complexity can be characterized as the number and variety of elements, and the elaborateness of their interrelational structure. This general characterisation can be broken down into sub-areas: Syntagmatic complexity: number of parts, such as word length in terms of phonemes, syllables etc.. Paradigmatic complexity: variety of parts, such as phoneme inventory size, number of distinctions in a grammatical category, e.g. aspect. Organizational complexity: e.g. ways of arranging components, phonotactic restrictions, variety of word orders. Hierarchic complexity: e.g. recursion, lexical–semantic hierarchies.

 

Language Learning

5 techniques to speak any Language: Sid Efromovich at TEDxUpperEastSide (video)

One way to effectively learn a language is using the language in interaction with others. Use language for a purpose and learn to use the language in context. Speech.

How to Teach a Language (PDF)

Language Immersion is a method of teaching a second language in which the learners’ second language (L2) is the medium of classroom instruction. Through this method, learners study school subjects, such as math, science, and social studies, in their L2. The main purpose of this method is to foster bilingualism, in other words, to develop learners' communicative competence or language proficiency in their L2 in addition to their first or Native Language (L1). Additional goals are the cognitive advantages to bilingualism.

Content-Based Instruction the use of subject matter as a vehicle for second or foreign language teaching/learning. Learners are exposed to a considerable amount of language through stimulating content. Learners explore interesting content and are engaged in appropriate language-dependent activities. Languages are not learned through direct instruction, but rather acquired "naturally" or automatically. CBI supports contextualized learning; learners are taught useful language that is embedded within relevant discourse contexts rather than as isolated language fragments. Hence students make greater connections with the language and what they already know. Complex information is delivered through real life context for the students to grasp well and leads to intrinsic motivation. In CBI information is reiterated by strategically delivering information at right time and situation compelling the greater flexibility and adaptability in the curriculum can be deployed as per the student's interest.

Language Acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition is one of the quintessential human traits, because non-humans do not communicate by using language. Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their Native Language. This is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages. The capacity to successfully use language requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary. Language can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign. Human language capacity is represented in the brain. Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called recursion. Evidence suggests that every individual has three recursive mechanisms that allow sentences to go indeterminately. These three mechanisms are: relativization, complementation and coordination. Furthermore, there are actually two main guiding principles in first-language acquisition, that is, speech perception always precedes speech production and the gradually evolving system by which a child learns a language is built up one step at a time, beginning with the distinction between individual phonemes.

Language Learning Strategies are the processes and actions that are consciously deployed by language learners to help them learn or use a language more effectively. Metacognitive strategies, which involved thinking about (or knowledge of) the learning process, planning for learning, monitoring learning while it is taking place, or self-evaluation of learning after the task had been completed. Cognitive strategies, which involved mental manipulation or transformation of materials or tasks, intended to enhance comprehension, acquisition, or retention. Social/affective strategies, which consisted of using social interactions to assist in the comprehension, learning or retention of information. As well as the mental control over personal affect that interfered with learning. Cognitive—making associations between new and already known information. This would include strategies that include the learner using reasoning or analysis of the grammar to find understanding. Mnemonic—making associations between new and already known information through use of formula, phrase, verse or the like;
Metacognitive—controlling own cognition through the co-ordination of the planning, organization and evaluation of the learning process; Compensatory—using context to make up for missing information in reading and writing; Affective—regulation of emotions, motivation and attitude toward learning; Social—the interaction with other learners to improve language learning and cultural understanding. The purpose of this strategy is to help the students understand and cooperate with those that speak the language they are learning.

Embodied Bilingual Language is the idea that people mentally simulate their actions, perceptions, and emotions when speaking and understanding a second language (L2) as with their first language (L1). It is closely related to embodied cognition and embodied language processing, both of which only refer to native language thinking and speaking. An example of embodied bilingual language would be situation in which a L1 English speaker learning Spanish as a second language hears the word rápido ("fast") in Spanish while taking notes and then proceeds to take notes more quickly.

Tim Ferriss about how he Learns Languages (youtube) - Techniques on Learning other Languages Fast and Easy.

Tone - Infection - Conjugate - Associations

Medium of Instruction is a language used in teaching. It may or may not be the official language of the country or territory. If the first language of students is different from the official language, it may be used as the medium of instruction for part or all of schooling. Bilingual or multilingual education may involve the use of more than one language of instruction. UNESCO considers that "providing education in a child's mother tongue is indeed a critical issue".

Language Transfer refers to speakers or writers applying knowledge from one language to another language.

Multi-Competence refers to the knowledge of more than one language in one person's mind.

Contrastive Analysis is the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities.

Spanish Speakers Take Longer To Learn English.

Kindergarten English Learners and Time to Proficiency (PDF-June 2017)

Study examines role of working memory, cognitive functions in English learners learning to write. The study conducted a battery of cognitive tests, gauged the writing skills of the students and then tested the functions again. Working memory, or how we store thoughts we want to convey, was shown to be the most significant predictor of writing ability. Other cognitive functions like phonological awareness and oral language development increased as the students aged, but were not associated with improved writing. The results not only help us understand how English learners, a growing population, learn to write, but can help educators design better interventions to help the students, researchers argue.

Communicate with a Non Native English Speaker (wikihow)

Modern Language Aptitude Test is designed to predict a student’s likelihood of success and ease in learning a foreign language.

Defense Language Aptitude Battery is a test used by the United States Department of Defense to test an individual's potential for learning a foreign language and thus determining who may pursue training as a military linguist. It consists of 126 multiple-choice questions and the test is scored out of a possible 164 points. The test is composed of five audio sections and one visual section. As of 2009, the test is completely web-based. The test does not attempt to gauge a person's fluency in a given language, but rather to determine their ability to learn a language. The test will give the service member examples of what a selection of words or what a portion of a word means, then asks the test taker to create a specific word from the samples given.

Translations

A new study reveals children's language development is a learnt skill and is intricately linked to their ability to recognize patterns in their environment. - Brain mechanism involved in language learning.

Exposure to accents helps children learn words. University of Freiburg study on vocabulary acquisition uses novel game-based design • Study results: Children of primary school age can benefit from long-term experience with multiple accents when learning words in unfamiliar accents from other children • Bilingualism, on the other hand, did not lead to corresponding effects in vocabulary learning.

Learning to Speak

Text Segmentation is the process of dividing written text into meaningful units, such as words, sentences, or topics. The term applies both to mental processes used by humans when reading text, and to artificial processes implemented in computers, which are the subject of natural language processing. The problem is non-trivial, because while some written languages have explicit word boundary markers, such as the word spaces of written English and the distinctive initial, medial and final letter shapes of Arabic, such signals are sometimes ambiguous and not present in all written languages.

Linguistics, rhythm or Isochrony is one of the three aspects of prosody, along with stress and intonation. Languages can be categorized according to whether they are syllable-timed, mora-timed, or stress-timed.

Language Rhythm (PDF)

Statistical Learning in Language Acquisition is the ability for humans and other animals to extract statistical regularities from the world around them to learn about the environment. Although statistical learning is now thought to be a generalized learning mechanism, the phenomenon was first identified in human infant language acquisition.

Learning a New Language - Software for Self Teaching 
Language Learning Library
Live Mocha 
Duolingo
Verbling Language Tutoring
Tinyworld: Connecting the world via Language Sharing
Native Monks tutors of over 130 different languages.
Tutoring - Private Language Lessons
Mango Languages
Rosetta Stone (Website)
Pimsleur Approach  (amazon)
Paul Pimsleur
U Talk Over 130 languages to start speaking.
Talking Dictionary
Live Fluent learn, understand, and enjoy your foreign language.

Babbling is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering articulate sounds, but does not yet produce any recognizable words. Babbling begins shortly after birth and progresses through several stages as the infant's repertoire of sounds expands and vocalizations become more speech-like. Infants typically begin to produce recognizable words when they are around 12 months of age, though babbling may continue for some time afterward. Babbling can be seen as a precursor to language development or simply as vocal experimentation. The physical structures involved in babbling are still being developed in the first year of a child's life. This continued physical development is responsible for some of the changes in abilities and variations of sound babies can produce. Abnormal developments such as certain medical conditions, developmental delays, and hearing impairments may interfere with a child's ability to babble normally. Though there is still disagreement about the uniqueness of language to humans, babbling is not unique to the human species.

Speak for Yourself AAC iPad app using Babble (youtube) - The "Babble" feature allows users to explore vocabulary by opening every word in the application by touching one button. Just as a baby, practicing to speak, "babbles" by exploring his mouth's motor movements and hearing the sounds produced, the user can explore the words available in Speak for Yourself with alternative motor movements (e.g. using his hand). The user can be returned to their customized setting by touching the same button to turn "babble" off.

Children learn quantifiers in the same order no matter what their language is, The existence of universal patterns in the language acquisition process that do not always coincide with the linguistic universals, according to which the world's languages are classified.

Children and Language

Natural Language Procedures is a set of procedures used by behavior analysts. These procedures are used to mirror the natural areas of language use for children. Behavior analysts language training procedures run along a continuum from highly restrictive such as discrete trial training to very nonrestrictive conversationally-based strategies. Natural language falls in the middle of these procedures.

Phonetics (word sounds)
Interpretation
Speech
Sign Language
Translation Tools

Language Learning Principle

Learning Methods - Memory Training

Language Arts is the study and improvement of the arts of language. The primary divisions in language arts are literature and language, where language in this case refers to both linguistics, and specific languages. The five strands of the language arts are reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing (visual literacy). Language Styles

Noticing Hypothesis is a concept in second-language acquisition where learners cannot learn the grammatical features of a language unless they notice them. Noticing alone does not mean that learners automatically acquire language; rather, the hypothesis states that noticing is the essential starting point for acquisition. There is debate over whether learners must consciously notice something, or whether the noticing can be subconscious to some degree.

Natural Language Processing is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages and, in particular, concerned with programming computers to fruitfully process large natural language corpora. Challenges in Natural Language Processing frequently involve natural language understanding, natural language generation (frequently from formal, machine-readable logical forms), connecting language and machine perception, managing human-computer dialog systems, or some combination thereof.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Natural Language Toolkit is a suite of libraries and programs for symbolic and statistical natural language processing (NLP) for English written in the Python programming language.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Language learning system that pays attention more efficiently than ever before. A hardware and software system called SpAtten streamlines state-of-the-art natural language processing. The advance could reduce the computing power, energy, and time required for text analysis and generation.

English Learning
Chinese Made Easy
Babbel
Speak for Yourself
LinguaStep 
Middlebury Interactive
Enduring Voices
Conversation Exchange

Russian Language Info-Graph (image)

See Touch Learn is a free Language Development App and Visual Instruction Tool.

Can knowing the corresponding letters and symbols of another language help you learn a new language? Omniglot - ie languages. (vocabulary, accent, grammar, pronunciation, slang).

Bilingual - Speaking Two Languages

Bilingual is a person who can speak two languages fluently.

Multilingualism is the use of two or more languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one other language in addition to their mother tongue.

Polyglot is the ability to master, or the state of having mastered, multiple languages. Polyglot Gathering Events.

Polylinguist is a person who is fluent in numerous languages. Code Switching.

Hyperpolyglot is someone who is both a gifted and massive language accumulator. They possess a particular neurology that's well-suited for learning languages very quickly and being able to use them.

Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti was an Italian cardinal and famed hyperpolyglot. Individuals who consider themselves polyglots generally speak, read, or otherwise use five or more languages. In some cases, the number can be as high as several dozen.

Benefits of Being Bilingual

Study Reveals How Language Develops in Bilingual Children. When bilingual children learn any two languages from birth each language proceeds on its own independent course, at a rate that reflects the quality of the children’s exposure to each language. Spanish skills become vulnerable as children’s English skills develop, but English is not vulnerable to being taken over by Spanish. In their longitudinal data, the researchers found evidence that as the children developed stronger skills in English, their rates of Spanish growth declined. Spanish skills did not cause English growth to slow, so it’s not a matter of necessary trade-offs between two languages. One well established fact about monolingual development is that the size of children’s vocabularies and the grammatical complexity of their speech are strongly related.

Does speaking several languages lower your vocabulary?

Going beyond English is critical for conservation. Research in languages other than English is critically important for biodiversity conservation and is shockingly under-utilized internationally, according to an international research team.

Multi-Competence refers to the knowledge of more than one language in one person's mind. From the multicompetence perspective, the different languages a person speaks are seen as one connected system, rather than each language being a separate system. People who speak a second language are seen as unique multilingual individuals, rather than people who have merely attached another language to their repertoire. People learning a second language rarely reach the same level of competence as native speakers. When people learn a second language, the way they speak their first language changes in subtle ways. L2 users think more flexibly than monolinguals, are more aware of language in general, and have better attitudes towards other cultures. For example, English children who had Italian lessons for one hour a week had higher word awareness in English than children who had no language lessons.

Is your ability to communicate effectively hindered when not speaking your native language?

Bilingual Families

Metalinguistic Awareness refers to the ability to objectify language as a process as well as an artifact. The concept of metalinguistic awareness is helpful to explaining the execution and transfer of linguistic knowledge across languages (e.g. code switching as well as translation among bilinguals). Metalinguistics can be classified as the ability to consciously reflect on the nature of language, by using the following skills: An awareness that language has a potential greater than that of simple symbols (it goes beyond the meaning). An awareness that words are separable from their referents (meaning resides in the mind, not in the name, i.e. Sonia is Sonia, and I will be the same person even if somebody calls me another name). An awareness that language has a structure that can be manipulated (realizing that language is malleable: you can change and write things in many different ways (for example, if something is written in a grammatically incorrect way, you can change it)).

Code-Switching (mixing)

Children and Language

Second Language

Second Language Acquisition is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics, but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education.

Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL Score)
Secondary Level English Proficiency Test (SLEP Score)
English Language History

English as a Second or Foreign Language is the use of English by speakers with different native languages. Instruction for English-language learners may be known as English as a second language (ESL), English as a foreign language (EFL), English as an additional language (EAL), or English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). English Language Learners (ELL), English Learners (EL). English as a foreign language (EFL) is used for non-native English speakers learning English in a country where English is not commonly spoken. The term ESL has been seen by some to indicate that English would be of secondary importance, but only if their first language or native language is used effectively and efficiently. Learning the English language in order to use the English Language to preserve other languages and other cultures is seen as an incentive to learn the English language.

Second Languages that are popular in each Country (Info-Graph Image)

Computer Programming Language as a Second Language

There are over a billion people who are currently learning a second language. Official Languages 

Skill-Based Theories of Second Language Acquisition are theories of second-language acquisition based on models of skill acquisition in cognitive psychology. These theories conceive of second-language acquisition as being learned in the same way as any other skill, such as learning to drive a car or play the piano. That is, they see practice as the key ingredient of language acquisition. The most well-known of these theories is based on John Anderson's adaptive control of thought model.

Threshold Hypothesis is a hypothesis concerning second language acquisition that stated that a minimum threshold in language proficiency must be passed before a second-language speaker can reap any benefits from language. It also states that, in order to gain proficiency in a second language, the learner must also have passed a certain and age appropriate level of competence in his or her first language. Set forth in a study by Cummins (1976).

Language Attrition is the process of losing a native, or first, language. This process is generally caused by both isolation from speakers of the first language ("L1") and the acquisition and use of a second language ("L2"), which interferes with the correct production and comprehension of the first. Such interference from a second language is likely experienced to some extent by all bilinguals, but is most evident among speakers for whom a language other than their first has started to play an important, if not dominant, role in everyday life; these speakers are more likely to experience language attrition. It is common among immigrants that travel to countries where languages foreign to them are used.

"People with a significant amount of music experience can also have the ability to learn aspects of language more easily."

Right Side of Brain - Left Side of Brain

Educational Testing Service

Australian man wakes from coma speaking fluent Mandarin but had completely forgotten English (youtube)

Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare medical condition in which patients develop speech patterns that are perceived as a foreign accent that is different from their native accent, without having acquired it in the perceived accent's place of origin.

It's nice to be able to communicate in more then one language, but what's more important is that you are an effective communicator. So just don't learn a new language for conversation, learn a new language to increase your effectiveness to communicate. Just don't teach a new language, teach effective ways to communicate.

Medium of Instruction is a language used in teaching. It may or may not be the official language of the country or territory. If the first language of students is different from the official language, it may be used as the medium of instruction for part or all of schooling. Bilingual or multilingual education may involve the use of more than one language of instruction. UNESCO considers that "providing education in a child's mother tongue is indeed a critical issue".

Words to a Human are like Code to a Computer. The more you have, the more you can do.

The Power of Words - Writing - Dictionaries - Library Finder

Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. It has traditionally focused largely on the study of the systems of phonemes in particular languages (and therefore used to be also called phonemics, or phonematics), but it may also cover any linguistic analysis either at a level beneath the word (including syllable, onset and rime, articulatory gestures, articulatory features, mora, etc.) or at all levels of language where sound is considered to be structured for conveying linguistic meaning. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages.

Translate - Interpret

Translation is to read and understand a word or phrase in a particular language and then repeat and say that word or phrase again in a different language so that someone else can understand what the word or phrase means. Translate is to restate words from the first language into a second language with words that are equivalent in effect so that the communication can be understood and be deciphered accurately. A written communication in a second language having the same meaning as the written communication in a first language. To convert or change something from one form or medium into another. Translation is not always from one language to another, it could be the same language communicated by rewording a message in less technical terminology or in simpler terms that most people could understand.

Interpret is an oral translation of speech or sign from one language into another. To restate words from one language into another language to make sense of a language for someone who does not understand a particular language.

Interpretation is the designation of meanings to various concepts, symbols, or objects under consideration. An assignment of meaning to the symbols of a formal language.

Senses - Touch - Tone - Context - Body to Mind Signals - Perception - Paraphrasing

Language Interpretation is oral translation of speech or sign from a language into another. The facilitation of dialogue between parties using different languages.

Literal Translation is the rendering of text from one language to another one word at a time.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis is an approach to psychological qualitative research with an idiographic focus, which means that it aims to offer insights into how a given person, in a given context, makes sense of a given phenomenon. Usually, these phenomena relate to experiences of some personal significance, such as a major life event, or the development of an important relationship. IPA is one of several approaches to qualitative, phenomenological psychology. It is distinct from other approaches, in part, because of its combination of psychological, interpretative, and idiographic components.

Interpretivism holds that reality is subjective, socially constructed, and a composite of multiple perspectives. Through this lens, research is inherently shaped by the researcher, who brings their own subjective view of observed phenomena based on their personal experience.

Interpretable-by-Design. Models are interpretable when humans can readily understand the reasoning behind predictions and decisions made by the model. The more interpretable the models are, the easier it is for someone to comprehend and trust the model. Interpretation (model theory) (wiki)

Interpretability is a relation between formal theories that expresses the possibility of interpreting or translating one into the other. Interpretability Logic (wiki)

Language Pair is an identifier that describes a combination of two languages as used in the translation process. It defines the specific variants of both the source language and the target language.

Interpretation in logic is an assignment of meaning to the symbols of a formal language.

Interpretation Errors

Lost in Translation is when some languages don't have the words that describe what the other language is trying to communicate, so the message is not understood correctly. Or when someone lacks the vocabulary in their own language, they can't explain something so that can be understood accurately. Or when the person receiving the message does not interpret the message accurately, they don't understand, or sometimes pretends to understand.

Open to Interpretation is a message that has an intended meaning that is not clear and that people may have different opinions about it or have a hard time accurately understanding it, or understand it in the wrong way.

Personal Interpretation is when someone changes the meaning of something, or changes the definition of a word, phrase or behavior. This may cause a person to have a narrow point of view, or cause assumptions, or cause a person to not understand something accurately or empathetically. A personal interpretation could be an opinion that borderlines delusional and fantasy. You can express your own personal meaning, but try not to use words that already have definitions and intended meanings that are commonly understood.

Language Barriers - Subjective - Opinion - Antidotal - Bias - Beliefs - Assumptions - False Accusations - Lying - Education Level - Comprehension - Errors - Processing Speed - Code Interpretation - Interpretation of the Law - Flawed Reasoning - Perspective - Paraphrasing

When you have words with more than one definition, and definitions with more than one word, it's hard sometimes to be understood in the way that you intended. Even people who speak the same language, sometimes need a translation. So this is not just a foreign language problem, this is also a communication problem. Every single day a person needs to interpret many different things, not just with our senses, but with the knowledge we have in our minds. Reality is how it's interpreted in the mind.

Leave Nothing to the Imagination is to deliberately show or describe all of the parts or details of something so that someone does not have to guess or imagine what the message is.

Everything depends on how you interpret it because things are relative.

Personal Interpretation is a particular way that a person understands an event or perceives an occurrence or remembers something. People sometimes see things differently, hear things differently and read things differently. This is because everyone has individual experiences and different levels of knowledge and understanding. Each person learns different things at different times, and each person does not have the same access to the same knowledge and information, so things could easily get lost in translation. Beliefs are a type of interpretation where certain things can have different meanings.

Misinterpretation is the action of interpreting something wrongly or incorrectly, usually causing confusion or misunderstanding. Misinterpret is to interpret falsely.

Misconstrued is to interpret something in the wrong way. Misconstrue is to interpret something in the wrong way or incorrectly, especially a person's words or actions.

Construe is to interpret a word or action in a particular way. To make sense of something or to assign a meaning to something.

Context - You're not saying it right. Ambiguity - Multiple Meanings.

You can be misinterpreted even when you say too much or when you say too little. The key is not to expect to be interpreted correctly, and to keep the conversation going, so that eventually, an understanding can be achieved.

Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a lacuna, or lexical gap. The term arises when describing the difficulty of achieving the so-called perfect translation.

Accidental Gap is a potential word, word sense, morpheme, or other form that does not exist in some language despite that it would be permissible by the grammatical rules of that language. For example, a word pronounced /peɪ̯k/ is theoretically possible in English, as it would obey English word-formation rules, but does not currently exist. Its absence is therefore an accidental gap, in the ontologic sense of the word accidental (that is, circumstantial rather than essential). Accidental gaps differ from systematic gaps, those words or other forms which do not exist in a language due to the boundaries set by phonological, morphological, and other rules of that specific language. In English, a word pronounced /pfnk/ does not and cannot exist because it has no vowels and therefore does not obey the word-formation rules of English. This is a systematic, rather than accidental, gap. Various types of accidental gaps exist. Phonological gaps are either words allowed by the phonological system of a language which do not actually exist, or sound contrasts missing from one paradigm of the phonological system itself. Morphological gaps are nonexistent words or word senses potentially allowed by the morphological system. A semantic gap refers to the nonexistence of a word or word sense to describe a difference in meaning seen in other sets of words within the language. Accidental gap is also known as a gap, paradigm gap, accidental lexical gap, lexical gap, lacuna, or hole in the pattern.

Procedures for Effective Translation

Translation Procedure: Translation sometimes needs more than just one single translation. Sometimes you have to speak the word and then speak or write the intended definition of that word so that the message is understood accurately. Context must be included in the message as well as body language or other symbols and forms of communication. Some translations can be complex, so a simple answer translation may not be effective. First I say something, then it's translated. Then the person receiving the translation needs to confirm that what is being translated is understood correctly. Then it may need to be translated back again in the words that this particular language uses to explain what is being said. Then you might have to use different words to be translated. And this process continues until a full understanding is accomplished. Diplomacy.

Double Translation is when you translate a piece of Latin into English. Then, without the Latin, you would translate their English translation back into Latin. The final translation of Latin was supposed to match the original Latin as closely as possible. Google Translate can't deal with double translation.

Reinterpret is to interpret something in a new or different way.

Closed-Loop Communication is a communication technique used to avoid misunderstandings. When the sender gives a message, the receiver repeats this back. The sender then confirms the message; thereby common is using the word “yes”. When the receiver incorrectly repeats the message back, the sender will say “negative” (or something similar) and then repeat the correct message. If the sender, the person giving the message, does not get a reply back, he must repeat it until the receiver starts closing the loop. To get the attention of the receiver, the sender can use the receiver's name or functional position, touch his or her shoulder, etc.

Interpreter is a person who converts a thought or expression in a source language into an expression with a comparable meaning in a target language either simultaneously in "real time" or consecutively when the speaker pauses after completing one or two sentences. The Interpreter's objective is to convey every semantic element as well as tone and register and every intention and feeling of the message that the source-language speaker is directing to target-language recipients (except in summary interpretation, used sometimes in conferences).

Simultaneous Interpretation is when the interpreter has to translate what was said within the time allowed by the speaker's pace without changing the natural flow of the speech. In simultaneous interpreting, the interpreter has to interpret what the speaker says at the same time as the speaker is giving the speech.

Simultaneous Interpretation happens when an interpreter translates the message from the source language to the target language in real-time. Unlike in consecutive interpreting, this way the natural flow of the speaker is not disturbed and allows for a fairly smooth output for the listeners. Translation and interpretation refers to two different activities. Translators render the meaning of written text into a different language, in written form. Whereas interpreters work with the spoken language. Because there are no long pauses for the interpreter to stop and think through the speech during simultaneous interpretation, this type of interpretation allows for a smooth experience for the listeners as they don’t need to wait to understand the message. Therefore, simultaneous interpretation is best-suited for large-scale events and conferences where the delay in the delivery of the speech could ruin the experience of the event. On the downside, simultaneous interpretation can be stressful for the interpreters because they have to do their best in a very limited time and they usually don’t know the text until they hear it (just the topic). Also, simultaneous interpreters have to do their best to keep the tone and the choice of words of the speaker, which adds even more stress. Simultaneous Interpretation Technology with electronic/electric equipment, the information is transferred into the target language the moment interpreters understand a “unit” of meaning. The speakers and the interpreters talk into microphones, and the interpreters and the listeners use earphones. Whispered interpreting or chuchotage This is simultaneous interpreting without equipment. It works just like simultaneous interpretation with equipment but in this case, no microphones or headphones are used. Simultaneous interpreters sit next to the people who do not understand the source language and whisper the translation in their ears. Traditional conference interpreting equipment (hardware) helps to make sure that all listeners can understand interpretation well. How does simultaneous interpretation with traditional hardware look: The speaker talks into a microphone. His or her speech is broadcast to the interpreter who sits in a sound-proof interpreter booth and listens through headphones. As the interpreter listens to the speech, he or she translates it in real-time into a microphone. The interpretation is transmitted wirelessly to the headphones of the event attendees.

Source Text is a text, sometimes oral, from which information or ideas are derived. In translation, a source text is the original text that is to be translated into another language. Sentences that are simple and direct increase understanding. Clear, concise, well-constructed sentences improve translation quality. Use Standard English word order whenever possible. This generally means a subject, verb, and object with associated modifiers. Ensure correct grammatical structure and proper punctuation. Readers must infer the relationship between the words. Synonyms get in the way of clarity. Avoid humor. Use relative pronouns like “that” and “which.” Use the active voice rather than the passive. English text is often shorter than other languages, which means sufficient space is needed for expansion up to 35%. Make sure you are familiar with the file format. Context.

Translation Memory is a database that stores "segments", which can be sentences, paragraphs or sentence-like units (headings, titles or elements in a list) that have previously been translated, in order to aid human translators. The translation memory stores the source text and its corresponding translation in language pairs called “translation units”. Individual words are handled by terminology bases and are not within the domain of TM. Software programs that use translation memories are sometimes known as translation memory managers (TMM) or translation memory systems (TM systems, not to be confused with a Translation management system (TMS), which is another type of software focused on managing process of translation). Translation memories are typically used in conjunction with a dedicated computer assisted translation (CAT) tool, word processing program, terminology management systems, multilingual dictionary, or even raw machine translation output. Research indicates that many companies producing multilingual documentation are using translation memory systems. In a survey of language professionals in 2006, 82.5% out of 874 replies confirmed the use of a TM. Usage of TM correlated with text type characterized by technical terms and simple sentence structure (technical, to a lesser degree marketing and financial), computing skills, and repetitiveness of content. Machine Translation is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of software to translate text or speech from one language to another.

Variation in language states that there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Different Meanings.

Parallel Text is a text placed alongside its translation or translations. Parallel text alignment is the identification of the corresponding sentences in both halves of the parallel text. The Loeb Classical Library and the Clay Sanskrit Library are two examples of dual-language series of texts. Reference Bibles may contain the original languages and a translation, or several translations by themselves, for ease of comparison and study; Origen's Hexapla (Greek for "sixfold") placed six versions of the Old Testament side by side. A famous example is the Rosetta Stone, whose discovery allowed the Ancient Egyptian language to begin being deciphered. Large collections of parallel texts are called parallel corpora (see text corpus). Alignments of parallel corpora at sentence level are prerequisite for many areas of linguistic research. During translation, sentences can be split, merged, deleted, inserted or reordered by the translator. This makes alignment a non-trivial task.

Bridge Language is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers' native languages. Bridge language is also known as lingua franca, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language. Math Language.

Lincos Language is a constructed language designed to be understandable by any possible intelligent extraterrestrial life form, for use in interstellar radio transmissions. Freudenthal considered that such a language should be easily understood by beings not acquainted with any Earthling syntax or language. Lincos was designed to be capable of encapsulating "the whole bulk of our knowledge".

Constructed Language is a language whose phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, instead of having developed naturally, are consciously devised for some purpose. A constructed language may also be referred to as an artificial, planned or invented language.

Language Planning is a deliberate effort to influence the function, structure or acquisition of languages or language varieties within a speech community, or the activity of preparing a normative orthography, grammar, and dictionary for the guidance of writers and speakers in a non-homogeneous speech community. Eleven language planning goals have been recognized (Nahir 2003): Language purification – prescription of usage norms in order to preserve the "linguistic purity" of language, protect language from foreign influences, and guard against perceived language deviation from within. Language revival – the attempt to restore to common use a language which has few or no surviving native speakers. Language reform – deliberate change in specific aspects of language or extralinguistic elements, such as grammar and orthography, in order to facilitate use. Language standardization – the attempt to garner prestige for a regional language or dialect, developing it as the chosen standard language of a region. Language spread – the attempt to increase the number of speakers of a language. Lexical modernization – word coining or adaptation. Terminology unification – development of unified terminologies, mainly in technical domains. Stylistic simplification – simplification of language usage in lexicon, grammar, and style. That includes changing the use of language in social and formal contexts. Interlingual communication – facilitation of linguistic communication between members of distinct speech communities. Language maintenance – preservation of a group's native language as a first or second language where pressures threaten or cause a decline in the status of the language. Auxiliary-code standardization – standardization of marginal, auxiliary aspects of language, such as signs for the deaf, place names, or rules of transliteration and transcription. Their respective frameworks differ slightly, but they emphasize four common attributes: Language origin – whether a given language is indigenous or imported to the speech community. Degree of standardization – the extent of development of a formal set of norms that define 'correct' usage. Juridical status. Sole official language (e.g. French in France and Turkish in Turkey). Joint official language (e.g. English and Afrikaans in South Africa; French, German, Italian and Romansh in Switzerland). Regional official language (e.g. Igbo in Nigeria; Marathi in Maharashtra, India). Promoted language – lacks official status on a national or regional level but is promoted and sometimes used by public authorities for specific functions (e.g. Spanish in New Mexico; West African Pidgin English in Cameroon). Tolerated language – neither promoted nor proscribed; acknowledged but ignored (e.g. Native American languages in the United States in the present day). Proscribed language – discouraged by official sanction or restriction (e.g. Galician, Basque and Catalan during Francisco Franco's regime in Spain; Macedonian in Greece; indigenous American languages during the boarding school era). Vitality – the ratio, or percent, of users of a language to another variable, such as the total population. Kloss and Stewart both distinguish six classes of statistical distribution. However, they draw the line between classes at different percentages. According to Kloss, the highest level of vitality is demarcated by 90% or more speakers, followed by 70%, 40%, 20%, 3%, and less than 3%. According to Stewart, the six classes are determined by the following percentages of speakers: 75%, 50%, 25%, 10%, 5%, and less than 5%. William Stewart outlines ten functional domains in language planning: Official – An official language "function[s] as a legally appropriate language for all politically and culturally representative purposes on a nationwide basis." The official function of a language is often specified in a constitution. Provincial – A provincial language functions as an official language for a geographic area smaller than a nation, typically a province or region (e.g. French in Quebec). Wider communication – A language of wider communication may be official or provincial, but more importantly, it functions as a medium of communication across language boundaries within a nation (e.g. Hindi in India; Swahili language in East Africa). International – An international language functions as a medium of communication across national boundaries (e.g. English, formerly French as a diplomatic and international language). Capital – A capital language functions as a prominent language in and around a national capital (e.g. Dutch and French in Brussels). Group – A group language functions as a conventional language among the members of a single cultural or ethnic group. Educational – An educational language functions as a medium of instruction in primary and secondary schools on a regional or national basis (Urdu in West Pakistan and Bengali in East Pakistan). School subject – A school subject language is taught as a subject in secondary school or higher education (e.g. Classical languages). Literary – A literary language functions as a language for literary or scholarly purposes (Academese). Religious – A religious language functions as a language for the ritual purposes of a particular religion (e.g. Liturgical Latin for the Latin Church within the Catholic Church; Arabic for the reading of the Qur'an). Robert Cooper outlines two additional functional domains (mass media and work) and distinguishes three sub-types of official functions: A statutory language is a "de jure" official language. A working language is used by a government for daily activities. A symbolic language is used as a state symbol.

Language Shift is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time. Often, languages that are perceived to be higher status stabilize or spread at the expense of other languages that are perceived by their own speakers to be lower-status. Language shift, also known as language transfer or language replacement or language assimilation.

Language Change is variation over time in a language's features. Types of changes are systematic change in the pronunciation of phonemes, or sound change. Or borrowing, in which features of a language or dialect are altered as a result of influence from another language or dialect. And analogical change, in which the shape or grammatical behavior of a word is altered to more closely resemble that of another word. All living languages are continually undergoing change.

Message Broker is an intermediary computer program module that translates a message from the formal messaging protocol of the sender to the formal messaging protocol of the receiver. Message brokers are elements in telecommunication or computer networks where software applications communicate by exchanging formally-defined messages. Message brokers are a building block of message-oriented middleware (MOM) but are typically not a replacement for traditional middleware like MOM and remote procedure call (RPC).

Translation Studies is the systematic study of the theory, description and application of interpretation and translation.

Culture Interpretation
Aesthetic Interpretation is an explanation of the meaning of a work of art.
Allegorical Interpretation is an approach that assumes a text should not be interpreted literally.
Dramatic Interpretation is an event in speech and forensics competitions in which participants perform excerpts from plays.
Heritage Interpretation is communication about the nature and purpose of historical, natural, or cultural phenomena.
Interpretation in music is the process of a performer deciding how to perform music that has been previously composed.
Literary theory are methods for interpreting literature, including historicism, feminism, structuralism, deconstruction.
Interpretation centre is an institution for dissemination of knowledge of natural or cultural heritage.
Biblical Interpretation is the study of the principles of interpretation concerning the books of the Bible.
Interpretation of tongues is a supernatural ability to understand unknown languages.
Oral Interpretation is a dramatic art.

Law Interpretation
Authentic Interpretation is the official interpretation of a statute issued by the statute's legislator.
Financial Accounting Standards Board Interpretations, is part of the United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US GAAP).
Interpretation Act is a stock short title used for legislation relating to interpretation of legislation.
Judicial Interpretation is an interpretation of law by a judiciary.
Statutory Interpretation is determining the meaning of legislation.

Philosophy Interpretation
Interpretation in philosophy is the assignment of meanings to various concepts, symbols, or objects under consideration.
Interpretation in logic is an assignment of meaning to the symbols of a formal language.
Exegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text.
Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation theory.
Semantics is the study of meaning in words, phrases, signs, and symbols.
Interpretant is a concept in semiotics.

Transcribe is to put thoughts, speech, or data into written or printed form. Transliterate foreign characters or write or type out shorthand, notes, or other abbreviated forms into ordinary characters or full sentences. To convert a representation of language, typically speech but also sign language, etc., to another representation. The term now usually implies the conversion of speech to text by a human transcriptionist with the assistance of a computer for word processing and sometimes also for speech recognition, the process of a computer interpreting speech and converting it to text.

Transcription in linguistics is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances (speech or sign language) or preexisting text in another writing system. Transcription should not be confused with translation, which means representing the meaning of a source language text in a target language (e.g. Los Angeles into City of Angels) or with transliteration which means representing the spelling of a text from one script to another (e.g. Jalapeño, which preserves the Ñ from Spanish despite the diacritic having no use in English).

Translation Movement was a widely supported movement under Islamic ruling that resulted in the translation of materials from various different languages to Arabic. It successfully formed an overlap of civilizations and established new cultural and political maps. Islamic rulers contributed to the movement in several ways, including the creation of translation classes to organize its flow of throughout the different periods of the Islamic Empire. The translation movement played a significant role in the development of Arab scientific knowledge, as many scientific theories had emerged from different origins. Later, Western culture was introduced to the preserved Arabic translated collections because majority of their original scripts were lost.

Universal Principles in the Repair of Communication Problems.

Multimedia Translation also sometimes referred to as Audiovisual translation, is a specialized branch of translation which deals with the transfer of multimodal and multimedial texts into another language and/or culture. and which implies the use of a multimedia electronic system in the translation or in the transmission process.

Translation Criticism is the systematic study, evaluation, and interpretation of different aspects of translated works. It is an interdisciplinary academic field closely related to literary criticism and translation theory.

Speech Recognition enables the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers and computerized devices such as those categorized as smart technologies and robotics. It is also known as automatic speech recognition or ASR, computer speech recognition, or just speech to text or STT.

Genetic Translation - Signal Conversion - Interpreter (computing code) - Meanings

"Every act of communication is an act of translation.” (Gregory Rabassa)

Hearing Accurately and understanding correctly doesn't always happens. So listening must be the responsibility of both people. Listen to your own words and as well as the words spoken by other people.

The brain area with which we interpret the world. Language, empathy, attention - as different as these abilities may be, one brain region is involved in all these processes: The inferior parietal lobe (IPL). Yet until now it was unclear exactly what role it plays in these profoundly human abilities. Scientists have now shown that the IPL comes into play when we need to interpret our environment. Usually, the different areas in the cerebrum take on a very specific function. For example, they process our movements or things we see or hear, i.e. direct physical information. However, some areas of the brain come into play when dealing with more advanced mental tasks. They process incoming information that has already been pre-processed and is thus already at an abstract level.

Interface Hypothesis in adult second language acquisition is an attempt to explain non-target-like linguistic behavior that persists even among highly advanced speakers. For adult second language learners, acquiring grammatical properties within a given linguistic area, such as phonology, syntax, or semantics, should not be problematic. Interfacing between those modules, such as communicating between the syntax and semantic systems, should likewise be feasible. However, grammatical operations where the speaker is required to interface between an internal component of the grammar, and an external component, such as pragmatics or discourse information, will prove to be very difficult, and will not be acquired completely by the second language learner, even at very advanced levels.

Easiest Languages to Learn. Spanish. Italian. French. German. Portuguese. English. Tutoring Websites.

Mandarin is a Chinese language which is considered as one of the hardest languages to translate. It is very different from any language of the world. Translating a text from Chinese to another language involves learning Chinese, which is a really tough task in itself. Chinese is a tonal language and the meanings of words change according to tone and pronunciation. There are more than 80,000 Mandarin characters, which makes translating a text or speech from Chinese language cumbersome. Japanese is difficult to translate. There are 1000s of Japanese characters to be learned before translating from Japanese to another language. The Japanese grammar and sentence structure are quite different from English or any romance language. This also causes difficulty while translation. Not as hard as Mandarin, but Japanese is one of the toughest languages to translate. Arabic is a hard language to translate because of its vocabulary. It has a huge vocabulary, and the reason behind is that, there are multiple synonyms of a word in Arabic. Moreover, it is written from right direction to left, adding more complexity to translation. Another factor that makes Arabic tough is the variation in Arabic dialect based on location. Arabic is spoken in multiple countries and each country follows different dialect, making it hard for someone to interpret what is being said. Hebrew is one of the most ancient languages of the World which is still spoken. It is considered as a tough language to translate. Just like Arabic, it is read and written from right to left direction. The grammar, new sounds, and the root system make Hebrew tough for translation for English speakers. However, the number of alphabets in Hebrew is less, which makes things a bit easier for the translator. Korean is an isolated language, and is very different from any other language of the World. The toughest part about translating a text or a speech from Korean to another language is pronunciation. Learning Korean pronunciations is really tough and takes a lot of practice. The grammar rules are also quite different, causing trouble for translators.

Translation Tools - Translation Apps

Voice Translation App
i Translate App
i Translate Voice
My Phrazer
701 Translator
Languages are available in Skype Translator

Travis - I speak 80 languages, so can you! The personal voice translator that lets you instantly communicate in over 80 languages.

Meet the Pilot: Smart Earpiece Language Translator. A world without language barriers: The Pilot is an earpiece which translates between languages.

CLIK- Wireless Earbuds with Voice Translation

Waverly Labs smart earpiece capable of translating between users speaking a different language.

Word Lens translates printed words from one language to another with your smartphone's video camera, in real time, no network connection needed! Translate instantly by pointing your camera. With the Translate app, you can translate text in images, either in a picture you've taken or imported, or just by pointing your camera. You can translate text you see around you just by pointing your camera lens at it.

Internet calling and chat and has a text-to-text translation service for its messaging App
More Apps

Language Translation Tools (google)
Google Android Translation App
Google (translate)

Speak and Translate
Live Translation Services
Translations

Write in a language that you’re learning and native speakers will correct your mistakes.

12-Language Talking Translator (amazon)

Universal Translator (wiki)

Artificial Intelligence - Question and Answer Platforms


Communication Related Subjects - Languages - Learning to Speak - Speech - Speaking Effectively - Talking - Communication - Nonverbal Communication - Body Language - Listening - Hearing Accurately when other People Speak - Hearing Difficulties - Is Thinking and Talking to Yourself the same thing?