Meanings
- uncountableThe quality of being a language.
The most recent research suggests that many animal species do have a kind of "languageness" that is not exactly like human language, but which is not necessarily simpler or less successful as a communicative code.
2018, Peter Kuras, transl., The Secret Language of Cats: How to Understand Your Cat for a Better, Happier Relationship, HQ, →ISBN, page 452 more examples
The issue of the languageness of the languages of art clears, moreover, if we turn from the aboutness of language to the special entityness of verbal-linguistic things, which, like art things, are entities just by virtue of being inferred as such from aspects of concreta filtered through a syntax and a semantics.
1970 August 20, Benjamin Boretz, “Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art from a Musical Point of View”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume LXVII, number 16, New York, N.Y.: The Journal of Philosophy, Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 552Much has been written about Synthetic Scots (e.g., McClure 1990; Purves 1997; Hart 2010), which was in effect an attempt at standardizing the vernacular in order to confer attributes of languageness upon it and make it appropriate for literary usage.
2018, James Costa, “On the Pros and Cons of Standardizing Scots: Notes From the North of a Small Island”, in Pia Lane, James Costa, Haley De Korne, editors, Standardizing Minority Languages: Competing Ideologies of Authority and Authenticity in the Global Periphery, Routledge, →ISBN, page 53
Origin
Cite this entry
languageness. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/languageness
“languageness.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/languageness. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “languageness,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/languageness.
Source: languageness on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.