Encyclopedia > Natural language

  Article Content

Natural language

1. A natural language is one that evolved along with a culture of human native speakers who use the language for general-purpose communication. Languages like English, American Sign Language and Japanese are natural languages, while languages like Esperanto are called constructed languages, having been deliberately created for a specific purpose.

Constructed languages can still have "native" speakers, if children learn it at a young age from parents who have learned the language; there are estimated to be 200-2000 native speakers of Esperanto, for example.

2. Sometimes any language used by human beings (be it naturally evolved like English, or constructed like Esperanto) is considered a "natural" language, while programming languages and data representation languages for computers are classed as artificial. This usage can be seen in the term natural language processing.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Father Damien

... to travel to Molokai to help the lepers who had virtually nothing to keep them warm or fed. After twelve years of ministering to the patients at the leper colony ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 21.2 ms