NATURAL LANGUAGE

Pronunciation (US):

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does natural language mean? 

• NATURAL LANGUAGE (noun)
  The noun NATURAL LANGUAGE has 1 sense:

1. a human written or spoken language used by a community; opposed to e.g. a computer language

  Familiarity information: NATURAL LANGUAGE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• NATURAL LANGUAGE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A human written or spoken language used by a community; opposed to e.g. a computer language

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

natural language; tongue

Hypernyms ("natural language" is a kind of...):

language; linguistic communication (a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds or conventional symbols)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "natural language"):

Khoisan; Khoisan language (a family of languages spoken in southern Africa)

Nilo-Saharan; Nilo-Saharan language (a family of East African languages spoken by Nilotic peoples from the Sahara south to Kenya and Tanzania)

Niger-Kordofanian; Niger-Kordofanian language (the family of languages that includes most of the languages spoken in Africa south of the Sahara; the majority of them are tonal languages but there are important exceptions (e.g., Swahili or Fula))

Afrasian; Afrasian language; Afro-Asiatic; Afroasiatic; Afroasiatic language; Hamito-Semitic (a large family of related languages spoken both in Asia and Africa)

Dravidian; Dravidian language; Dravidic (a large family of languages spoken in south and central India and Sri Lanka)

Caucasian; Caucasian language (a number of languages spoken in the Caucasus that are unrelated to languages spoken elsewhere)

Cassite; Kassite (an ancient language spoken by the Kassites)

Elamite; Elamitic; Susian (an extinct ancient language of unknown affinities; spoken by the Elamites)

Basque (the language of the Basque people; of no known relation to any other language)

Ural-Altaic (a (postulated) group of languages including many of the indigenous languages of Russia (but not Russian))

Indo-European; Indo-European language; Indo-Hittite (the family of languages that by 1000 BC were spoken throughout Europe and in parts of southwestern and southern Asia)

first language; maternal language; mother tongue (one's native language; the language learned by children and passed from one generation to the next)

Papuan; Papuan language (any of the indigenous languages spoken in Papua New Guinea or New Britain or the Solomon Islands that are not Malayo-Polynesian languages)

Austronesian; Austronesian language (the family of languages spoken in Australia and Formosa and Malaysia and Polynesia)

Hmong; Hmong language; Miao (a language of uncertain affiliation spoken by the Hmong)

Austro-Asiatic; Austro-Asiatic language; Munda-Mon-Khmer (a family of languages spoken in southern and southeastern Asia)

Sino-Tibetan; Sino-Tibetan language (the family of tonal languages spoken in eastern Asia)

Chukchi; Chukchi language (an indigenous and isolated language of unknown origin spoken by the Chukchi that is pronounced differently by men and women)

Eskimo-Aleut; Eskimo-Aleut language (the family of languages that includes Eskimo and Aleut)

American-Indian language; American Indian; Amerind; Amerindian language; Indian (any of the languages spoken by Amerindians)

creole (a mother tongue that originates from contact between two languages)

tonal language; tone language (a language in which different tones distinguish different meanings)

Antonym:

artificial language (a language that is deliberately created for a specific purpose)

 Context examples 

An extension to UML that provides constraint and object query expressions on an object-oriented model that cannot otherwise be expressed by diagrammatic notation, providing expressions that have neither the ambiguities of natural language nor the inherent difficulty of using complex mathematics.

(Object Constraint Language, NCI Thesaurus)