Auxiliary Language

The term auxiliary language is a language which is not the primary or native language of a community. It may refer to:

  • an international auxiliary language, a planned, artificial language constructed for international communication, such as Esperanto
  • a local minority language which has official recognition
  • a liturgical language, such as Latin, Sanskrit, or Old Church Slavonic, used in religious services
  • a professional, trade, or otherwise secret language such as Kallawaya among Andean herbalists
  • an initiation language such as Damin in Australia
  • a language of ethnic identity such as Eskayan in the Philippines

Famous quotes containing the word language:

    “English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
    —Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)