natural languages
Evolved human communication
Natural languages are the languages that develop organically among human communities—English, Mandarin, Swahili, Arabic—as opposed to constructed languages like Esperanto or programming languages like Python.
The term appears mainly in linguistics and computer science, where the distinction matters: Natural language processing allows computers to interpret human speech.
Natural languages are messy, idiomatic, and constantly evolving, which is precisely what makes them difficult for machines to parse.
- wordLinguistic meaning unit
- speechOral communication ability
- voiceSound from throat
- spoken wordPoetry delivered aloud
- semanticsStudy of linguistic meaning
phonology · morphology · communication · grammar · sentence · word order · syntax · lost in translation · accent · native speaker · vocabulary · phrase · pragmatics · lingua franca · dialect · conversation · mouth · pidgins
natural languagesconstructed languages
Artificially devised communication systems
artificial languages · conlangs · Esperanto · Klingon · Elvish
natural languagesprogramming languages
Formal computer instruction systems
computer languages · machine languages · code · machine code · Python
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