The English and Germanlanguages are both members of the West Germaniclanguage family.
Deaf and mute people communicate using signlanguage.
1867,Report on the Systems of Deaf-Mute Instruction pursued in Europe, quoted in 1983 inHistory of the College for the Deaf, 1857-1907→ISBN, page 240:
Hence the naturallanguage of the mute is, in schools of this class, suppressed as soon and as far as possible, and its existence as alanguage, capable of being made the reliable and precise vehicle for the widest range of thought, is ignored.
2000, Geary Hobson,The Last of the Ofos,→ISBN, page113:
Mr. Darko, generally acknowledged to be the last surviving member of the Ofo Tribe, was also the last remaining speaker of the tribe'slanguage.
(uncountable) The ability to communicate using words.
the gift oflanguage
1805 December, Julius Griffiths, “A Journey across the Desert”, inThe Monthly Mirror, page362:
It is wholly out of the power oflanguage to convey any idea of the blissful enjoyment of obtaining water, after an almost total want of it, during eight and forty hours, in the scorching regions of an Arabian desert, in the month of July.
1981,William Irwin Thompson,The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page15:
Language is the articulation of the limited to express the unlimited; it is the ultimate mystery which is the image of God, for in breaking up infinity to create finite beings, God has found a way to let the limited being yet be a reflection of His unlimited Being.
Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyerlanguage, he expressed the important words by an initial, a medial, or a final consonant, and made scratches for all the words between; his clerks, however, understood him very well.
And ‘blubbing’ . . .Blubbing went out with ‘decent’ and ‘ripping’. Mind you, not a bad newlanguage to start up. 1920s schoolboy slang could be due for a revival.
legallanguage; thelanguage of chemistry
(countable,uncountable,figurative) The expression of thought (the communication of meaning) in a specified way; that which communicates something, as language does.
bodylanguage; thelanguage of the eyes
2001, Eugene C. Kennedy, Sara C. Charles,On Becoming a Counselor,→ISBN:
A tale about themselves [is] told by people with help from the universallanguages of their eyes, their hands, and even their shirting feet.
2005,Sean Dooley,The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page231:
Birding had become like that for me. It is alanguage that, once learnt, I have been unable to unlearn.
(countable,uncountable) A body of sounds, signs and/or signals by which animals communicate, and by which plants are sometimes also thought to communicate.
1983,The Listener, volume110, page14:
A more likely hypothesis was that the attacked leaves were transmitting some airborne chemical signal to sound the alarm, rather like insects sending out warnings[…] But this is the first time that a plant-to-plantlanguage has been detected.
2009,Animals in Translation, page274:
Prairie dogs use theirlanguage to refer to real dangers in the real world, so it definitely has meaning.
1896, William Horatio Clarke,The Organist's Retrospect, page79:
A flue-pipe is one in which the air passes through the throat, or flue, which is the narrow, longitudinal aperture between the lower lip and the tongue, orlanguage.[…] Thelanguage is adjusted by slightly elevating or depressing it,[…]
