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NATURAL LANGUAGE
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I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A human written or spoken language used by a community; opposed to e.g. a computer language
Synonyms:
natural language; tongue
Classified under:
Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents
Hypernyms ("natural language" is a kind of...):
language; linguistic communication (a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols)
Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "natural language"):
Nilo-Saharan; Nilo-Saharan language (a family of East African languages spoken by Nilotic peoples from the Sahara south to Kenya and Tanzania)
Niger-Kordofanian; Niger-Kordofanian language (the family of languages that includes most of the languages spoken in Africa south of the Sahara; the majority of them are tonal languages but there are important exceptions (e.g., Swahili or Fula))
Afrasian; Afrasian language; Afro-Asiatic; Afroasiatic; Afroasiatic language; Hamito-Semitic (a large family of related languages spoken both in Asia and Africa)
Dravidian; Dravidian language; Dravidic (a large family of languages spoken in south and central India and Sri Lanka)
Caucasian; Caucasian language (a number of languages spoken in the Caucasus that are unrelated to languages spoken elsewhere)
Cassite; Kassite (an ancient language spoken by the Kassites)
Elamite; Elamitic; Susian (an extinct ancient language of unknown affinities; spoken by the Elamites)
Basque (the language of the Basque people; of no known relation to any other language)
Ural-Altaic (a (postulated) group of languages including many of the indigenous languages of Russia (but not Russian))
Indo-European; Indo-European language; Indo-Hittite (the family of languages that by 1000 BC were spoken throughout Europe and in parts of southwestern and southern Asia)
Khoisan; Khoisan language (a family of languages spoken in southern Africa)
Papuan; Papuan language (any of the indigenous languages spoken in Papua New Guinea or New Britain or the Solomon Islands that are not Malayo-Polynesian languages)
Austronesian; Austronesian language (the family of languages spoken in Australia and Formosa and Malaysia and Polynesia)
Hmong; Hmong language; Miao (a language of uncertain affiliation spoken by the Hmong)
Austro-Asiatic; Austro-Asiatic language; Munda-Mon-Khmer (a family of languages spoken in southern and southeastern Asia)
Sino-Tibetan; Sino-Tibetan language (the family of tonal languages spoken in eastern Asia)
Chukchi; Chukchi language (an indigenous and isolated language of unknown origin spoken by the Chukchi that is pronounced differently by men and women)
Eskimo-Aleut; Eskimo-Aleut language (the family of languages that includes Eskimo and Aleut)
American-Indian language; American Indian; Amerind; Amerindian language; Indian (any of the languages spoken by Amerindians)
creole (a mother tongue that originates from contact between two languages)
tonal language; tone language (a language in which different tones distinguish different meanings)
first language; maternal language; mother tongue (one's native language; the language learned by children and passed from one generation to the next)
Antonym:
artificial language (a language that is deliberately created for a specific purpose)
