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Natural Language ○꠹｜Definition｜1st｜20260107013520-00-⌔
Natural language
A natural language or ordinary language is any spoken language or signed language used organically in a human community, first emerging without conscious premeditation and subject to: replication across generations of people in the community, regional expansion or contraction, and gradual internal and structural changes.1 The vast majority of languages in the world are natural languages. As a category, natural language includes both standard dialects (ones with high social prestige) as well as nonstandard or vernacular dialects. Even an official language with a regulating academy such as Standard French, overseen by the Académie Française, is still classified as a natural language (e.g. in the field of natural language processing), as its prescriptive aspects do not make it regulated enough to be considered a constructed or controlled natural language. Linguists broadly consider writing to be a static visual representation of a particular natural language, though, in many cases in highly literate modern societies, writing itself is also now subject to the natural processes of widely spoken natural languages.
Excluded from the definition of natural language are: artificial and constructed languages, such as those developed for works of fiction; languages of formal logic, such as those in computer programming;2 and non-human communication systems in nature, such as whale vocalizations or honey bees ’ waggle dance.3 The academic consensus is that particular key features prevent animal communication systems from being classified as languages at all. Certain systems of human communication with no native speakers, as sometimes used in cross-cultural contexts, are also not natural languages.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
MacKay, Ian R. A. “Sounds of North American English.” Phonetics and Speech Science. Cambridge University Press, 2023. p 8.: ” Natural human language refers to language that has evolved naturally and is spoken by a group of people we call a speech community. Th[is] language is the native language of at least a good portion of the speech community. One characteristic of such a language is change through time; despite the efforts of some grammarians, natural language is always in flux, not stable and unchanging”. ↩
Lyons, John (1991). Natural Language and Universal Grammar. Cambridge University Press. pp. 68–70. ISBN 978-0521246965. ↩
Norris, Paul F. (25 August 2011). “The Honeybee Waggle Dance – Is it a Language?”. AnimalWise. Archived from the original on 20 August 2016. Retrieved 10 April 2019. ↩
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