Colloquial language

Colloquial language means informal spoken language, i.e. language as it is used in everyday life and in informal situations. Colloquial language differs in particular from written language in that it is has another register which is by far less formal and in some cases also less formal than it is the case for spoken language in general. This means among other things that a specific lexicon is proper to colloquial language. Dialects belong in general to the colloquial language. As such they are to be distinguished from standard language, the latter being most of the time used for writing.

Because colloquiial and written language are in general considered variants of the same language, the distance between them is not very great in most of the cases, unless a situation of diglossia exists. This latter thing concerns for example the Arabic language.

Colloquial language contains a lot of short phrases. They are called colloquialisms.