Wiktionary
n. (context literature English) A register of a language that is used in literary writing.
Wikipedia
A literary language is a register or dialect of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary forms is more marked in some languages than in others. Where there is a strong divergence, the language is said to exhibit diglossia.
Classical Latin was the literary register of Latin, as opposed to the Vulgar Latin spoken across the Roman Empire. The Latin brought by Roman soldiers to Gaul, Iberia, or Dacia was not identical to the Latin of Cicero, and differed from it in vocabulary, syntax, and grammar. Some literary works with low-register language from the Classical Latin period give a glimpse into the world of early Vulgar Latin. The works of Plautus and Terence, being comedies with many characters who were slaves, preserve some early basilectal Latin features, as does the recorded speech of the freedmen in the Cena Trimalchionis by Petronius Arbiter. At the third Council of Tours in 813, priests were ordered to preach in the vernacular language — either in the rustica lingua romanica (Vulgar Latin), or in the Germanic vernaculars — since the common people could no longer understand formal Latin.
Usage examples of "literary language".
By a remarkable and subtle piece of scholarship, Tolkien showed that the language of two important manuscripts of the text (one in a Cambridge college, the other in the Bodleian Library at Oxford) was no mere unpolished dialect, but a literary language, with an unbroken literary tradition going back to before the Conquest.
Later, during the Tang dynasty, there were fine stories written on such themes in the classical literary language, stories like 'Curly Beard', 'Red Thread', and The Kunlun Slave'.
That our literary language isn't suited to his common herd of millions out there maybe they're inventing their own, been to the movies lately?
He couldn't make a simple statement, he had to dress it up in flowery literary language.