 The folk, and plenty of self-proclaimed experts, tend to operate with an ontology of social languages that most linguists reject. This folk ontology includes English, Hungarian, Tagalog, Old Norse, etc., and commitment to this ontology has real-world effects, which politicians are sensitive to and which sociolinguists can study. But the objects themselves, as opposed to the folk’s beliefs in and about them, are generally regarded, by linguists anyway, as fictional or ideological. Although linguists will inevitably talk of “Hungarian” and the like, they tend to take themselves as using a convenient shorthand for “the idiolect of some typical inhabitant of Hungary”.