English

The English language — the seed gmeow:Language individual (gmeow:langEnglish) anchoring the internal private-use tag en carried by the framework's own literals. Registry codes are alignments, never identity.

Structure

Types: gmeow:Language

Practical Pattern

Use gmeow:langEnglish as a controlled value typed as gmeow:Language.

Example Snippets

These snippets are generated from canonical slice examples and trimmed to the Turtle blocks where this term appears.

Multilingual Document

# --- Languages: first-class, BCP-47-tagged. English already exists as the core
#     seed gmeow:langEnglish — reused, not re-minted. Japanese has no seed, so it
#     is minted, declaring its internal private-use tag for @lang annotations.
ex:japanese a gmeow:Language ;
    rdfs:label        "Japanese"@en ;
    gmeow:bcp47Tag    "ja" ;
    gmeow:languageTag "ja" .

# --- A bilingual document: two co-equal languages, neither primary. The title is
#     carried as separate co-equal language-tagged literals, one per language.
ex:manual a gmeow:InformationObject ;
    gmeow:title             "Installation Manual"@en , "インストールマニュアル"@ja ;
    gmeow:writtenInLanguage gmeow:langEnglish , ex:japanese .

Proficiency

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: language proficiency is PER-MODALITY . A flat
# gmeow:nativeLanguage / gmeow:knowsLanguage says WHICH languages an agent has;
# the reified gmeow:LanguageProficiency says HOW WELL — and crucially per
# gmeow:proficiencyModality (reading / speaking / listening / signing …), because
# the same person is often strong reading a language and weak speaking it. Each
# proficiency is read against an explicit named gmeow:proficiencyScale (here
# CEFR), so a level is never a bare adjective. Languages reuse the core seeds
# (gmeow:langEnglish / langFrench).
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/languages/> .
@prefix rdfs:  <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .

ex:dana a gmeow:Person ;
    gmeow:name           "Dana Reyes"@en ;
    gmeow:nativeLanguage gmeow:langEnglish ;
    gmeow:knowsLanguage  gmeow:langFrench .

Common Companion Terms

gmeow:Language