speech

1 a usually formal discourse delivered to an audience <the guest of honor gave a short speech in appreciation of the award> Synonyms address, declamation, harangue, oration, peroration, talk Related Words diatribe, rant, tirade; eulogy, panegyric, tribute; keynote address (or keynote speech), lecture, salutatory; homily, sermon; monologue (also monolog), soliloquy; pitch, presentation, spiel

2 the stock of words, pronunciation, and grammar used by a people as their basic means of communication <wanting to develop a writing system for his people, Sequoya created a system of 86 symbols representing all the syllables of Cherokee speech> Synonyms lingo, mother tongue, language, tongue, vocabularyRelated Words acrolect; argot, cant, colloquial, dialect, idiolect, idiom, jargon, parlance, patois, patter, pidgin, slang, slanguage, vernacular; colloquialism, localism, provincialism, regionalism, shibboleth, vernacularism; terminology; coinage, modernism, neologism