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A natural language or ordinary language is any spoken language or sign language used organically in a human community, first emerging without conscious premeditation and subject to: replication across generations of people in the community, regional expansion or contraction, and gradual Language change.MacKay, Ian R. A. "Sounds of North American English." Phonetics and Speech Science. Cambridge University Press, 2023. p 8.: " Natural human language refers to language that has evolved naturally and is spoken by a group of people we call a speech community. This language is the native language of at least a good portion of the speech community. One characteristic of such a language is change through time; despite the efforts of some grammarians, natural language is always in flux, not stable and unchanging". The vast majority of languages in the world are natural languages. As a category, natural language includes both (ones with high social prestige) as well as Vernacular. Even an official language with a regulating academy such as Standard French, overseen by the italic=no, is still classified as a natural language (e.g. in the field of natural language processing), as its prescriptive aspects do not make it regulated enough to be considered a constructed or controlled natural language. Linguists broadly consider writing to be a static visual representation of a particular natural language, though, in many cases in highly literate modern societies, written language is also now subject to the natural processes of widely spoken natural languages.
Excluded from the definition of natural language are: artificial and constructed languages, such as those developed for fiction; languages of formal language, such as those in computer programming; and non-human communication systems in nature, such as whale vocalizations or ' waggle dance. The academic consensus is that particular key features prevent animal communication systems from being classified as languages at all. Certain systems of human communication with no native speakers, as sometimes used in cross-cultural contexts, are also not natural languages.
Some natural languages have become organically "standardized" through the synthesis of two or more pre-existing natural languages over a relatively short period of time through the development of a pidgin, which is not considered a language, into a stable creole language. A creole such as Haitian Creole has its own grammar, vocabulary and literature. It is spoken by over 10 million people worldwide and is one of the two official languages of the Republic of Haiti.
As of 1996, there were 350 attested families with one or more native speakers of Esperanto. Latino sine flexione, another international auxiliary language, is no longer widely spoken.
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