languagenoun [ C or U ]
uk/ˈlæŋ.ɡwɪdʒ/us/ˈlæŋ.ɡwɪdʒ/A1 a system of communication consisting of sounds, words, and grammar, or the system of communication used by people in a particular country or type of work:
She does research into how children acquire language.
Do you speak any foreign languages?"
I'm hopeless at learning languages.
the English language
legal/technical language
the language of business
Java and Perl are both important computer programming languages (= systems of writing instructions for computers).
More examples
- She's studying modern Japanese language and culture.
- Unable to speak a word of the language, he communicated with his hands.
- We were encouraged to learn foreign languages at school.
- Her novels have been translated into 19 languages.
- One of the main reasons I came to England was to study the language.
Thesaurus: synonyms and related words
Linguistic terms & linguistic style
- affricate
- allophone
- anaphor
- anaphora
- anaphoric
- double entendre
- ellipsis
- idiomatic
- irregular
- lexicology
- linguistic
- litotes
- neurolinguistics
- parallelism
- philology
- portmanteau word
- semantic
- semiotics
- stylistics
- tone language
See more results »
Idiom(s)
speak/talk the same language