national languages
Country's designated speech
National languages are those officially recognized or widely used within a nation-state, often for government, education, and public life.
A country may have one national language or several: Switzerland has four national languages.
The term sometimes distinguishes languages with symbolic or cultural status from official languages used in law and administration, though the categories often overlap.
- bilingualismProficiency in two languages
- standardizationImplementing uniform technical specifications
- dialectRegional language variety
- heritageInherited cultural legacy
- cultural heritageInherited collective traditions
official status · vernacular · constitution · code-switching · diglossia · mother tongue · mother country · lingua franca · orthography · lexicography · creole · literary canon · spoken word · Swahili · folklore · oral tradition · pidgin · citizenship
- sociolinguisticssociolinguistics, diglossia, bilingualism, dialects, code-switching
- language rightsmother tongue, multilingualism, bilingualism, immersion programs, native dialects
- geography termsmap, atlas, globe, compass, coordinates
national languagesregional dialects
Geographically distinct speech varieties
local dialects · regional languages · minority languages · tribal languages · world languages
national languagesconstructed languages
Artificially devised communication systems
artificial languages · foreign languages · conlangs · pidgins · creoles
national, languages, nation, language, nations, nationally, nationalism, nationalist, nationalistic