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# Language

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Languages are, roughly speaking, ways of representing things. In mathematics and computing formal languages called programming languages are used, but most often the term refers to the languages we humans use in conversation and literature. Human language, actually, has one feature that cannot be found in programming languages: discreteness?.

The study of languages makes up linguistics and philology. Other important concepts:

- Philosophy of Language
- Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
- Orthography

Some of the major languages of the world (not at all intended to be a complete list, of course):

- Arabic language
- Chinese language
- English language
- French language
- German language
- Greek language
- Hebrew language
- Hindi language
- Italian language
- Japanese language
- Kiswahili?
- Korean language
- Polish language
- [Portuguese language]?
- Russian language
- Spanish language
- Turkish language

Grouped by families:

- Indo-European (Germanic, Italic, Slavic, Celtic, Greek, etc.)
- Uralic languages ((Finno-Ugric, Samoyedic?)
- Altaic languages (Turkic, Mongolic?, Tunguzic?)
- [Caucasian languages]? (Abkhazo-Adyghian?, Nakho-Dagestanian?, Kartvelian?)
- Sino-Tibetan languages (Chinese, Tibeto-Burman?)
- Afro-Asiatic languages (Semitic, etc.)
- [Niger-Congo languages]? (Bantu?, etc.)
- Austroasiatic languages
- Dravidian languages (Tamil, etc.)
- Tai languages
- Unique languages
  - Basque language
  - Etruscan language
  - [Ainu language]?
  - [Sumerian language]?
  - [Rhaetian language]?
  - [Mitanni language]?
- Incertae sedis
  - Japanese language
  - Korean language
- Artificial languages (Esperanto, Lojban, ASL?, etc)
- Useless languages (Pig Latin, Gibberish, etc)

A useful listing of 4000 languages and dialects (grouped by relatedness), with the numbers one thru 10 in each language can be found at http://www.zompist.com/

Grouped by geographical area:

- Southeast Asian languages

In mathematics, a language is a set of strings of symbols. Languages are defined on alphabets (sets of symbols); a language is a subset of the Kleene star of its alphabet. Languages differ in what types of machines can recognize them, and thus form the Chomsky hierarchy. The mathematical study of languages has important applications in computer science and linguistics.

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Last edited August 7, 2001 2:13 pm (diff)
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