A modern language is any human language that is currently in use. The term is used in language education to distinguish between languages which are used for day-to-day communication (such as French and German) and dead classical languages such as Latin, Attic Greek, Sanskrit, and Classical Chinese, which are studied for their cultural or linguistic value.
Read more about Modern Language: The Teaching of Modern Languages
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or language:
“It was announced that the trouble was not “malignant.”... It was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)
“All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)