Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) Czech language chĕk [key], in the past sometimes also called Bohemian, member of the West Slavic group of the Slavic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Slavic languages). The off...

(Encyclopedia)  CEE Spanish language, member of the Romance group of the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Romance languages). The official language of Spain and 19 Latin American nati...

(Encyclopedia) creole language krēōlˈ [key], any language that began as a pidgin but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the original mother tongue or tongues. Examples are the Gullah o...

(Encyclopedia) Harper, William Rainey, 1856–1906, American educator and Hebrew scholar, b. New Concord, Ohio, grad. Muskingum College, 1870, Ph.D. Yale, 1875. The author of many texts on Hebrew language and litera...

(Encyclopedia) Greek language, member of the Indo-European family of languages (see Indo-European). It is the language of one of the major civilizations of the world and of one of the greatest literatures of all tim...

(Encyclopedia) Assyrian language, East Semitic dialect that evolved from Akkadian after 1950 b.c. The term Assyrian is sometimes incorrectly used for the Akkadian language as a whole because the first inscriptions i...

(Encyclopedia) German language, member of the West Germanic group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Germanic languages). It is the official language of Germany and Austria and i...

(Encyclopedia) Persian language, member of the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages (see Indo-Iranian languages). The official language of Iran, it has about 38 millio...

(Encyclopedia) Tibetan language, member of the Tibeto-Burman subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages (see Sino-Tibetan languages). It is spoken by 5 million people in the Tibet autonomous region and the Qi...

(Encyclopedia) Icelandic language, member of the North Germanic, or Scandinavian, group of the Germanic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Spoken chiefly in Iceland, where it is the official languag...