LANGUAGE

[noun] - a system of communication consisting of a set of small parts and a set of rules which decide the ways in which these parts can be combined to produce messages that have meaningHuman language consists of words that are usually spoken or written. [U]"Do you speak any foreign languages?" "Well, I learnt three languages at school, but I don't speak any of them fluently." [C]How old is the English language? [C]I found her lecture quite difficult to follow because she used a lot of technical language. [U]COBOL, C and BASIC are three of the most important computer programming languages (= systems of writing instructions). [C]We come from similar backgrounds, so we speak/talk the same language (= we have the same ideas and ways of expressing them), and understand each other's problems.A language laboratory (informal language lab) is a room in a school, college or university in which students use sound recordings, television or computers to learn foreign languages.