Language (French langage < Latin lingua, the tongue) signified originally expression of thought by spoken words, but now in its widest sense it signifies expression of thought by any means; as, the language of the eyes, the language of flowers. As regards the use of words, language in its broadest sense denotes all the uttered sounds and their combinations into words and sentences that human beings employ for the communication of thought, and, in a more limited sense, the words or combinations forming a means of communication among the members of a single nation, people, or race. Speech involves always the power of articulate utterance; we can speak of the language of animals, but not of their speech. A tongue is the speech or language of some one people, country, or race. A dialect is a special mode of speaking a language peculiar to some locality or class, not recognized as in accordance with the best usage; a barbarism is a perversion of a language by ignorant foreigners, or some usage akin to that. Idiom refers to the construction of phrases and sentences, and the way of forming or using words; it is the peculiar mold in which each language casts its thought. The great difficulty of translation is to give the thought expressed in one language in the idiom of another. A dialect may be used by the highest as well as the lowest within its range; a patois is distinctly illiterate, belonging to the lower classes; those who speak a patois understand the cultured form of their own language, but speak only the degraded form, as in the case of the Italian lazzaroni or the former negro slaves in the United States. Vernacular, from the Latin, has the same general sense as the Saxon mother tongue, of one's native language, or that of a people; as, the Scriptures were translated into the vernacular. Compare DICTION.