Parlances

Parlance refers to the language or manner of speaking associated with a particular group, profession, time period, or social setting. The word comes from the French parler, meaning “to speak,” and in English it denotes the customary style, vocabulary, and discourse patterns that characterize a community.

Parlances can be described in the singular or plural form. In practice, people speak of legal parlance, nautical parlance, medical parlance, or the parlances of different historical eras, signaling distinct sets of terms, phrases, and ways of arguing or describing the world. A group’s parlance may reflect technical precision, ritualized expressions, or shared metaphors that facilitate communication within that community but can be opaque to outsiders.

Parlance is related to, but broader than, jargon. Jargon refers specifically to specialized terminology, often with dense or opaque meanings. Parlance encompasses jargon but also includes idioms, conventional sentence structure, discourse norms, and stylistic tendencies. It can be prescriptive in some contexts (indicating accepted phrases) and descriptive in others (reflecting actual usage). Parlance evolves as communities change, technologies advance, and social norms shift, leading to new terms and expressions while older forms fall out of use.

In linguistics and discourse studies, parlance is examined to understand how groups construct identity, authority, and solidarity through language. Analysts may compare parlances across professions, cultures, or historical periods to reveal how language shapes and reflects social practice. Parlances thus provide insight into the power, habits, and innovations of communities as they speak about the world.