Languoid

A languoid is a set of lects or languages that are grouped together for some purpose. In the simplest case, languoids are languages or dialects, but genealogical groups of languages (or areal groups, or indeed any other groups treated together by linguists for some reason) may also be considered together with languages and dialects and hence be subsumed with them under a single concept.

• "a cover term for any type of lingual entity: language, dialect, family, language area, etc. It is roughly similar to the term taxon from biological taxonomy, except it is agnostic as to whether the relevant linguistic grouping is considered to be genealogical or areal (or based one some other possible criteria for grouping languages)" (Good & Hendryx-Parker 2006:5)

Comments

This term arose in the context of cross-linguistic databases, where it is often useful to refer to languages, groups of languages, and groups of lects with a single term.

Origin

The term was coined by Jeff Good in 2006. It consists of the root langu- (from English language) and the suffix -oid ('X-like entity').

Reference

• Good, Jeff & Calvin Hendryx-Parker. 2006. Modeling Contested Categorization in Linguistic Databases. In Proceedings of the EMELD 2006 Workshop on Digital Language Documentation: Tools and Standards: The State of the Art. Lansing, Michigan. June 20–22, 2006. PDF