来自拉丁语verna,家仆,尤指出生在主人家的仆人后代,引申词义本土的,地方的,后用于指地方性语言,即方言。比较family.
For human speech is after all a democratic product, the creation, not of scholars and grammarians, but of unschooled and unlettered people. Scholars and men of education may cultivate and enrich it, and make it flower into the beauty of a literary language; but its rarest blooms are grafted on a wild stock, and its roots are deep-buried in the common soil. [Logan Pearsall Smith, "Words and Idioms," 1925]