South Africa has the largest number of native Zulu speakers; around 10 million people and 95% of the population. Zulu is also one of South Africa’s 11 official languages since 1994. Most speakers can be found in the provinces of Zululand and Natal. In these areas the language is widely used in daily life, as well as in the media and for formal educational purposes. It was just a verbal language until European missionaries came to the continent in the 19th century. Then, a writing system developed using the Latin...
Yiddish is a West Germanic language spoken by 2 million people. In fact, it is phonetically closest to Middle High German. About three-quarters of the Yiddish vocabulary is taken from German, although some meanings are different. It is commonly spoken by people of Jewish heritage originating from Central and Eastern Europe and now settled in various parts of the world such as the USA, Israel and Russia. In Sweden, Yiddish is the official minority...
Vietnamese is spoken mainly in Vietnam and a number of countries by over 70 million speakers. Although Vietnamese was spoken for thousands of years by local people, it was not the official written language of Vietnam until the 20th Century. For much of its history, Chinese characters and a Chinese-based writing system were adapted and primarily used. However, eventually the Latin writing system was integrated and used for administrative purposes. Due to many years of French colonial rule, Vietnamese has borrowed many words from French, and recently adopted many words from English due to Western...
Uzbek is spoken by around 23 million people and is the official language of Uzbekistan. Until 1928, the Arabic alphabet was used to write Uzbek but the Latin alphabet was later accepted in order to standardize the language and educate the Uzbek people. However, the Cyrillic alphabet was forced on them in 1940. After the dissolution of the USSR, there was a shift to reintroduce the Latin alphabet. To this day in Uzbekistan, the language is still in a transition period. A standardized dialect can be understood by all Uzbek speakers because it is used for mass media and publications. Both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet can be used in...
Urdu is the national language and one of two official languages (along with English) in Pakistan, and is also one of 22 of the official languages of India. Native speakers number around 60 million people and there are approximately another 40 million people speaking it as a second language. The Mughal Empire, an imperial power in South Asia that ruled a large portion of the Indian subcontinent from 1526 to 1858, saw many languages develop due to trade and travel. Urdu was influenced the most during this time because in trade business, a high level of Persian and Arabic was used therefore Urdu was needed to communicate with...
Ukrainian is a Slavic language spoken by about 47 million people in Ukraine and many other countries. Ukraine has been under the rule of many foreign countries. However, during most of these rulings, Ukrainian was not influenced that much because many people were not able to read or write. Therefore Ukrainian was continually spoken. Ukrainian is known as the second most melodic language after Italian. In 1934 it ranked as the third most beautiful language in the world after French and Persian, based on vocabulary, phrasing and sentence structure...
