Visual Language

Definition: Visual language is any communication which is primarily visual. It is an emerging field which focuses on improving thinking, learning and communication by making it more visual. Visual language integrates visual elements with words, both spoken and written, to enhance and expand the meaning of all.

Bob Horn's Definition: Visual language is a new language composed of tightly integrated textual and visual elements. Its emergence is a result of such driving forces as globalization, increasing complexity both in commerce and technology, and the convergence of vocabularies from many previously distinct fields.

Neil Cohn's Definition: Visual languages (VL) are systems of communication that use sequencesof graphic representations guided by a grammar of cognitive rules — just like thesequential units of verbal and sign languages. While most modern societies use visuallanguages primarily in the social objects of "comics," VLs are bothculturally relative and have been a pervasive part of the human expressivecapacity for (hundreds of?) thousands of years, stemming from our innateability to draw. 

Alan Stillman's history of human communication in Visual Language (VL)