vernacular
pronunciation
How to pronounce vernacular in British English:
UK [vəˈnækjələ(r)]
How to pronounce vernacular in American English:
US [vərˈnækjələ(r)]
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- Noun:
- a characteristic language of a particular group (as among thieves)
- the everyday speech of the people (as distinguished from literary language)
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- Adjective:
- being or characteristic of or appropriate to everyday language
Word Origin
- vernacular (adj.)
- c. 1600, "native to a country," from Latin vernaculus "domestic, native, indigenous; pertaining to home-born slaves," from verna "home-born slave, native," a word of Etruscan origin. Used in English in the sense of Latin vernacula vocabula, in reference to language. As a noun, "native speech or language of a place," from 1706. For human speech is after all a democratic product, the creation, not of scholars and grammarians, but of unschooled and unlettered people. Scholars and men of education may cultivate and enrich it, and make it flower into the beauty of a literary language; but its rarest blooms are grafted on a wild stock, and its roots are deep-buried in the common soil. [Logan Pearsall Smith, "Words and Idioms," 1925]
Example
- 1. " The sound of sense . " It represents common and vernacular elements of speech .
- 2. Writers rejected traditional literary conventions and embraced writing in ' baihua , ' or vernacular chinese .
- 3. Mad 's beijing hutong bubble project proposes adding similar bubbles to many of the city 's hutongs to improve living conditions while preserving the vernacular urban fabric .
- 4. " Strained relation , " this tension between speech and pattern , suggests the tension between all sorts of contending forces in frost : the vernacular and the literary , the concrete and the abstract ; flux , fixity ; the individual will and material fact .
- 5. Heavy-handed efforts in vernacular services also risk crowding out promising locals , by pinching good journalists .