Definition of "prelinguistic" [prelinguistic]

• Preceding the use of true language (adjective)

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• "Intimations Ode is sounded early on in the cognate object "sing a joyous song" (l. 19): echoic token of that pastoral "There was a time" (l. 1) when birds were everywhere and full-throated — and where the epithet "joyous" was as taken for granted, in the tautologies of the prefallen, as that prelinguistic song sung."
• "And it is the subsequent mourning for two English romantics in this same poem, Wordsworth following Byron, that gets more than its share of the prelinguistic "Ah" — and with it a subtextual roiling of further elegiac energy at the phonemic level."
• "In his book The Singing Neanderthals, University of Reading archaeologist Steven Mithen proposes these early people had a prelinguistic communication system more like music than speech."