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...
The Turkish language is spoken by about 90 million people in the world. It is spread over a large geographical area in Europe and Asia and spoken in Turkey as well as in 35 more countries. Therefore, there are a great number of dialects of Turkish used. However, Istanbul Turkish is considered the official standard Turkish. The oldest Turkish written records are 1300 years old. The Ottoman script was long used as the administrative and governmental script until the 20th century, when it was replaced by the Latin...
Thai originates from the Tai-Kadai language family and is spoken by over 20 million people in Thailand, and 60 million people worldwide. Although Thai is recognized as one of many Tai dialects, it is the official language of Thailand. The official Thai language is influenced by a Central Thailand dialect and the educated elite of Bangkok. The Thai alphabet was made in the 13th century by the King of Thailand. Not only is the alphabet form unique, its writing system is very different from most languages. There are no spaces used between words; spaces in Thai text mean the end of a clause or...
Tigrinya is a Semitic language spoken in Central Eritrea by about 7 million speakers, which is half of the Eritrean population. It was one of two official languages with Arabic but in 1958 it was replaced by the Amharic language. More over, Eritrean was colonized by Italy until 1941, therefore, many, mainly older Eritreans, speak Italian as well. The language has its own script, which contains more than 200 characters with different sounds, derived from the ancient language “Gee ’ez”, which is only used in the Orthodox Church...
Telugu is a part of the South-central branch of the Dravidian language family and spoken by about 75 million native speakers, mainly in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where it is the official language. It is thought that there are a total of 130 million speakers in the world, making it the second largest Indian language after Hindi. It is also recognized as one of the 22 national languages of...
