All articles starting with L
25,375 articles
Language death
Language death is the complete cessation of a language's use, usually after language shift and interrupted intergenerational transmission. Also called language extinction; related terms include language endangerment and dormant or sleeping languages. Distinguished from language change, which is normal evolution, not death.
Language demographics of Quebec
Language demographics of Quebec: French is the official language, mother tongue of 74.8% in 2021; English FOLS 13.0%, bilingualism 46.4%, immigrants now majority French FOLS.
Language deprivation experiments
Language deprivation experiments test what happens when children lack language input during early life, from legendary royal isolation trials and cases like Genie and Victor of Aveyron to deaf-education and Romanian orphanage natural experiments, plus modern online and neural-network studies of the critical period hypothesis.
Language development
Language development: how humans acquire language, from infant speech-sound recognition through grammar to adult use. Covers behaviorist (Skinner), nativist (Chomsky), interactionist, and emergentist theories, milestones, critical periods, and bilingual development.
Language documentation
Language documentation (documentary linguistics) is the recording, transcription, annotation, and archiving of primary language data, a linguistics subfield founded around Himmelmann's 1998 paper in response to endangered language loss; about 500 languages are reasonably documented while 35–42% remain undocumented.
Language education
Language education: the organized teaching and learning of second, foreign, and heritage languages. Covers methods from grammar-translation to CLT and TBLT, bilingual education policy, CEFR, assessment, and critical-period research.
Language families of the world
Language families of the world: genealogical groupings of roughly 7,000 languages, established by the comparative method. Glottolog counts 246 families plus 183 isolates; Ethnologue 143; Atlantic-Congo and Austronesian are largest.
Language family
Language family: a group of languages shown by the comparative method to descend from one common ancestor; Glottolog recognizes 246 families and 183 isolates, with a comparative-method time depth near 10,000 years.
Language game (philosophy)
Language game (Sprachspiel): Wittgenstein's later-philosophy concept, first used in his February 1933 Cambridge lectures, of meaning as use within rule-governed activities or forms of life, later extended to signaling-game models and NLP.
Language interpretation
Language interpretation is real-time rendition of spoken or signed messages between languages, distinct from written translation. Covers simultaneous, consecutive, and sight translation modes, fields, history from the 1919 Paris Conference and Nuremberg, and machine interpreting research.
Language isolate
Language isolate: a natural language with no demonstrated genetic relatives, forming a one-member family; distinct from unclassified languages. Examples: Basque, the only living European isolate; roughly 136 to 200 isolates exist worldwide.
Language localisation
Language localisation, also spelled localization, is the process of adapting software, games, or websites to a target audience's language and cultural conventions, covering more than translation.
Language model
A language model, or language modeling, is a probability distribution over token sequences trained to predict the next token, the basis of systems like GPT-4.
Language model benchmark
A language model benchmark is a standardized collection of tasks, test data, and scoring rules used to measure language model performance, spanning tests like MMLU and SWE-bench.
Language nest
Language nest (Te Kōhanga Reo, Pūnana Leo): early-childhood immersion preschools for endangered languages, created by the Māori in New Zealand in 1982 and adapted in Hawaiʻi from 1983, now used by Indigenous communities worldwide.
Language of flowers
Language of flowers (floriography), a coded system assigning meanings to flowers, begun in French books from 1819 and fashionable in Victorian Britain and America 1820s to 1880s.
Language of Jesus
Language of Jesus: the question of which languages Jesus of Nazareth spoke. Scholarly consensus holds Palestinian Aramaic was his primary tongue, with Hebrew in worship and debated Greek use, in a multilingual first-century Judea.
Language of thought hypothesis
The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), or Mentalese, holds that thinking occurs in an internal mental language with combinatorial syntax and compositional semantics, introduced by Jerry Fodor in 1975 and distinct from natural language.
Language planning
Language planning (语言规划) is deliberate intervention by governments or communities in a language's status, form (corpus), acquisition, and prestige. Coined by Haugen in 1959; Kloss's corpus/status split and Cooper's acquisition planning define the field; UNESCO reports 40% of learners lack education in a fluent language.
Language poetry
Language poetry, also called Language writing, is an avant-garde movement in American poetry that emerged in the 1970s, holding that readers create a poem's meaning rather than the poet's voice.
Language policy
Language policy and planning (LPP): deliberate government or institutional efforts to influence language acquisition, structure, and use; three types (status, corpus, acquisition); field founded by Haugen in 1959, with phases of optimism, 1980s critique, and 1990s revival.
Language processing in the brain
Language processing in the brain: neurolinguistics, the study of neural comprehension and production of language, spanning Broca and Wernicke localization, the left frontal-temporal language network, and computational model-brain alignment.
Language proficiency
Language proficiency is the ability to use a language to communicate effectively, described by frameworks such as the CEFR (A1–C2), ACTFL, and ILR, and measured by tests like IELTS; CEFR, published in 2001, is the dominant reference scale.
Language question in Algerian literature
The language question in Algerian literature (الإشكالية اللغوية في الأدب الجزائري) is the ongoing debate over whether Algerian writers should write in Arabic, French, darija, or Tamazight.
Language revitalization
Language revitalization is the effort to reverse decline in endangered languages through intergenerational transmission, language nests, immersion schooling, and policy. Key cases include Hebrew, Māori (kōhanga reo), and Welsh; UNESCO leads the 2022–2032 International Decade of Indigenous Languages.
Language Server Protocol
The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open protocol announced by Microsoft in 2016 that standardizes communication between editors and language servers, reducing language-editor integration work.
Language Therapy
Language therapy is rehabilitation for language disorders and training for children's language development disorders, distinct from speech therapy. Evidence covers DLD gains (SMD 0.46 expressive), caregiver-mediated programs, and aphasia treatment.
Language-specific adapters
Language-specific adapters, also called language adapters, are small neural modules trained on one language atop a frozen multilingual Transformer, best known through the 2020 MAD-X framework for cross-lingual transfer.
Languages in Star Wars
Languages in Star Wars: Galactic Basic, Huttese, Ewokese, Shyriiwook, Mando'a, droid Binary, and the Aurebesh script. Mostly sonic pastiche from real languages and animal sounds, not full conlangs like Klingon.
Languages of Afghanistan
Languages of Afghanistan: a country of 40–59 languages where Dari (Afghan Persian, 77%) and Pashto (48%) are official; Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi, Pashai, and five unwritten Nuristani languages complete the multilingual landscape.