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León, region and former kingdom, Spain

(Encyclopedia)León lā-ōnˈ [key], historic region and former kingdom, NW Spain, E of Portugal and Galicia, now part of Castile–León. It includes the provinces of León, Salamanca, and Zamora, named after thei...

computer program

(Encyclopedia)computer program, a series of instructions that a computer can interpret and execute; programs are also called software to distinguish them from hardware, the physical equipment used in data processin...

Eskimo-Aleut

(Encyclopedia)Eskimo-Aleut, family of Native American languages consisting of Aleut (spoken on the Aleutian Islands and the Kodiak Peninsula) and Eskimo or Inuktitut (spoken in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberi...

Hawaiian

(Encyclopedia)Hawaiian, member of the Polynesian group of the Austronesian family of languages. Of the fewer than 10,000 people who speak Hawaiian, only a few hundred are native speakers, but the language is taught...

lingua franca

(Encyclopedia)lingua franca lĭngˈgwə frăngˈkə [key], an auxiliary language, generally of a hybrid and partially developed nature, that is employed over an extensive area by people speaking different and mutua...

Bloomfield, Leonard

(Encyclopedia)Bloomfield, Leonard, 1887–1949, American linguist, b. Chicago. Bloomfield was professor at Ohio State Univ. (1921–27), at the Univ. of Chicago (1927–40), and at Yale (from 1940). His specialty f...

Esperanto

(Encyclopedia)Esperanto ĕspəränˈtō [key], an artificial language introduced in 1887 and intended by its inventor, Dr. Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof (1859–1917), a Polish oculist and linguist, to ease communication ...

Saussure, Ferdinand de

(Encyclopedia)Saussure, Ferdinand de fĕrdēnäNˈ də sōsürˈ [key], 1857–1913, Swiss linguist. One of the founders of modern linguistics, he established the structural study of language, emphasizing the arbit...

Middlebury College

(Encyclopedia)Middlebury College, at Middlebury, Vt.; coeducational; chartered and opened 1800. It is a small liberal arts college noted for its summer language schools, which pioneered in the development of specia...

speech

(Encyclopedia)speech: see language.