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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
vernacular
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And there may be preferred slinging techniques, attendant rituals and even a subcultural vernacular associated with the activity.
▪ In many cases this is quite unlike the vernacular of the parents' country or countries.
▪ It is bad when the inevitable exclusiveness of vernacular becomes the reason for using it.
▪ Thus, the potential for this kind of reversal is always likely to be present in vernaculars.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Vernacular

Vernacular \Ver*nac"u*lar\, a. [L. vernaculus born in one's house, native, fr. verna a slave born in his master's house, a native, probably akin to Skr. vas to dwell, E. was.] Belonging to the country of one's birth; one's own by birth or nature; native; indigenous; -- now used chiefly of language; as, English is our vernacular language. ``A vernacular disease.''
--Harvey.

His skill the vernacular dialect of the Celtic tongue.
--Fuller.

Which in our vernacular idiom may be thus interpreted.
--Pope.

Vernacular

Vernacular \Ver*nac"u*lar\, n. The vernacular language; one's mother tongue; often, the common forms of expression in a particular locality.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
vernacular

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.\n\nFor 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]

Wiktionary
vernacular

a. 1 Of or pertaining to everyday language. 2 Belonging to the country of one's birth; one's own by birth or nature; native; indigenous. 3 (context architecture English) of or related to local building materials and styles; not imported 4 (context art English) is connected to a collective memory; not imported n. 1 The language of a people or a national language. 2 everyday speech or dialect, including colloquialisms, as opposed to literary, liturgical, or scientific language. 3 Language unique to a particular group of people; jargon, argot. 4 (context Roman Catholicism English) The indigenous language of a people, into which the words of the Mass are translated.

WordNet
vernacular
  1. n. a characteristic language of a particular group (as among thieves); "they don't speak our lingo" [syn: cant, jargon, slang, lingo, argot, patois]

  2. the everyday speech of the people (as distinguished from literary language)

vernacular

adj. being or characteristic of or appropriate to everyday language; "common parlance"; "a vernacular term"; "vernacular speakers"; "the vulgar tongue of the masses"; "the technical and vulgar names for an animal species" [syn: common, vulgar]

Wikipedia
Vernacular

A vernacular or vernacular language is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, especially as distinguished from a literary, national or standard variety of the language, or a lingua franca (vehicular language) used in the region or state inhabited by that population. Some linguists use "vernacular" and " nonstandard dialect" as synonyms.

Vernacular (disambiguation)

Vernacular language is the native language or dialect of a population, as opposed to a literary, national, or standard language.

Vernacular may also refer to:

  • Vernacular architecture, a category of architecture based on local needs and construction materials, andraditional architecture of the world.
  • Vernacular art is made by countryside, often indigenous, people
  • Vernacular culture, cultural forms made and organised by ordinary, often indigenous people
  • Vernacular dance, dance styles that evolved outside of dance studios
  • Vernacular geography, the sense of place that is revealed in ordinary people's language
  • Vernacular literature, literature written in the vernacular — the speech of the "common people"

Usage examples of "vernacular".

For those who are not up on the vernacular of a prior generation, I should explain that a blivet is a five-pound container with ten pounds of excrement.

Benedict Anderson discusses the force of print in replacing Latin with the vernacular, in building the image of an ancient national culture, and in fostering homogeneity of dialect and hence communication among linguistically different speakers.

Plume reappeared alone, went straight to his home, and slammed the door behind him, a solecism rarely known at Sandy, and presently on the hot and pulseless air there arose the sound of shrill protestation in strange vernacular.

Existence had seemed simpler then: It was life or deathnone of these perplexing customs and slangish vernacular.

Sondra used their own vernacular rather than the street term of a speedball to denote the combination of cocaine and heroin.

The following year, the year of the great consecration ceremony and the closing of the dome, Alberti offered an Italian version dedicated to Filippo Brunelleschi, who always wrote and spoke in the vernacular himself.

Although Glagolitic is a formal script reserved chiefly for religious writing and unsuitable for widespread use, these monuments are nevertheless the beginning of vernacular literacy and literature among the Croats.

India he laboured indefatigably at the vernaculars, and his reward was an astonishingly rapid proficiency in Gujarati, Marathi, Hindustani, as well as Persian and Arabic.

Even should they survive three jumps on a mass displacement ship, or crazy ship in the common vernacular, they will still arrive at the colony with no assets and little prospects of earning an independent living, or so it is said.

In addition to his exhaustive acquaintance with Sanskrit, and the southern India vernaculars, he had some knowledge of Tibetan, Arabic, Kawi, Javanese and Coptic.

A vernacular term for neo-fins whose genes include grafts from natural Stenos bredanensis dolphins.

He had written poetry, too, galloping iambics in the fashionable mode, and excursions in the vernacular after the manner of Burns.

The tourniquet unwound and, when the blood recommenced to spurt, he panicked, addressing Milo in the ancient vernacular.

Making straight for the steep cliff, where the churchyard hangs over the laneway to the East Pier so steeply that some of the flat tombstones, thruffsteans or through-stones, as they call them in Whitby vernacular, actually project over where the sustaining cliff has fallen away, it disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.

The Church (formerly the largest publisher of bibles and other religious and "earthly" texts and the upholder and protector of reading in the Dark Ages) castigated and censored the printing of "heretical" books (especially the vernacular bibles of the Reformation) and restored the Inquisition for the specific purpose of controlling book publishing.