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:

    “This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)