Standard language

A standard language (also standard variety, standard dialect, and standard) is a language variety that has undergone substantial codification of grammar and usage and is employed by a population for public communication. The term standard language occasionally refers to the entirety of a language that includes a standardized form as one of its varieties. Typically, the language varieties that undergo substantive standardization are the dialects spoken and written in centers

Spanish language

Spanish (español (help·info) or castellano (help·info), lit. ’Castilian’) is a Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in Spain and the Americas. It is the world’s second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese, and the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi. Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages of the Indo-European language family, which evolved

Seth Govind Das

Seth Govind Das (16 October 1896 – 18 June 1974) was an Indian independence activist and a distinguished parliamentarian. He belonged to the Maheshwari merchant family of Raja Gokuldas of Jabalpur. The family began as the banking firm of Sevaram Khushalchand, one of the “great firms” as termed by T.A. Timberg. Das was also a famous Hindi author. He was well known for

Schwa deletion in Indo-Aryan languages

Schwa deletion, or schwa syncope, is a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in Assamese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Gujarati, and several other Indo-Aryan languages with schwas that are implicit in their written scripts. Languages like Marathi and Maithili with increased influence from other languages through coming into contact with them—also show a similar phenomenon. Some schwas are obligatorily deleted in pronunciation even if the script suggests otherwise. Schwa deletion is important

List of languages by number of native speakers

This article ranks human languages by their number of native speakers. However, all such rankings should be used with caution, because it is not possible to devise a coherent set of linguistic criteria for distinguishing languages in a dialect continuum. For example, a language is often defined as a set of varieties that are mutually intelligible, but independent national standard languages

Romanization

Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of writing from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, for representing the spoken word, and combinations of both. Transcription methods can be subdivided into phonemic transcription, which records the phonemes or units of semantic meaning in speech, and more strict phonetic transcription,

Register (sociolinguistics)

In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or in a particular communicative situation. For example, when speaking officially or in a public setting, an English speaker may be more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage than in a casual setting, for example, by pronouncing words ending in -ing with a velar nasal instead of an alveolar nasal (e.g., “walking” rather than “walkin’”), choosing words that

Raskhan

Syed Ibrahim Khan (1548-1628) was a poet of Pashtun origins, who became a devotee of Lord Krishna. He is known to have lived in Amroha near Delhi, India. Raskhan was his takhallus in Hindi. In his early years, he became a follower of Lord Krishna and learned the bhakti marga from Goswami Vitthalnath and began living in Brindavan and spent his whole life there. He accepted Lord Krishna as the Supreme God

Prestige (sociolinguistics)

In sociolinguistics, prestige is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally considered by a society to be the most “correct” or otherwise superior. In many cases, they are the standard form of the language, though there are exceptions, particularly in situations of covert prestige (where

Phono-semantic matching

Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is the incorporation of a word into one language from another, often creating a neologism, where the word’s non-native quality is hidden by replacing it with phonetically and semantically similar words or roots from the adopting language. Thus, the approximate sound and meaning of the original expression in the source language are preserved, though the new expression (the PSM) in the target language may sound native.