Malay is derived from Austronesian, which is one of the world’s largest language families, and spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei and Thailand. Standard Malay speakers number about 18 million but there are a further 170 million people who speak Indonesian, which is a form of Malay. Malay became the official language of Malaysia in 1968. It developed from a dialect which was used in the southern Malay Peninsula. Modern Indonesian, a standardized form of Malay, and Malay Language share about 80% of the same vocabulary. Indonesian and Malaysian speakers can usually communicate quite easily. Malay has been widely influenced and borrowed words from many languages such as Arabic, Sanskrit, Portuguese, Dutch, certain Chinese dialects and more recently,...
A South Slavic language, Macedonian is spoken as a first language by about 2–3 million people chiefly in Macedonia. It has a large number of borrowings from the Turkish language and a significant number from the Greek language. It is closely related to and shares a high degree of mutual intelligibility with the Bulgarian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian languages. The standard writing style appeared in 1945. Literary Macedonian is considered a derived dialect from the West Central region. The Cyrillic alphabet is commonly used in Macedonia but the Roman alphabet was also incorporated with the Cyrillic...
Lithuanian is spoken primarily in the Republic of Lithuania, where it is the official language. It has been designated as one of the official languages of the European Union. It is a Baltic language related to Latvian and Old Prussian with about 3.5 million speakers. It is considered the oldest surviving Indo-European language. Some words in Lithuanian are very similar to Sanskrit and Latin. It developed from Latin and is also influenced by many languages such as Polish, German, and Czech in writing style. There are two dialects, Aukštaitian (Highland Lithuanian), considered the standard dialect, and Samogitian (Lowland...
Latvian is the official language of Latvia and spoken by 1.5 million people. It is also one of the official languages of the European Union since 2004. Most Latvian people also speak Russian therefore they are considered similar however Latvian is not related to Russian. The only language similar to Latvian is Lithuanian. It is one of two Baltic languages, a group of its own within the family of Indo-European languages. There are three dialects used in Latvia which are Livonian, Latgalian, and standard...
Latin, one of two branches of the Italic language family, is an ancient language that is officially used only in the Vatican State in Italy. It has no native speakers. However, most western languages have some influence of Latin. It was the native language of the Romans, who spread it throughout their empire. After the collapse of Rome, it evolved into Italian, French, Spanish, and several other languages. Latin is often considered a dead language but many scholars and missionaries speak it fluently and it is still taught in many schools and universities. It is said that 80% of English words are derived from Latin through...
Laotian belongs to the Tai-Kadai language family and is spoken by approximately 15 million people in Laos and the northeast of Thailand. Laotian speakers have no difficulties understanding spoken Thai because Laotian is closely related to Thai. However, Thai speakers have difficulties understanding Laotian due to a lack of exposure to the language. Although there are many ethnic groups in Laos and each group has their own language, they usually speak Laotian as well. The Laotian alphabet was modified many times in last 50 years, including a reduction of consonants. This change made the language easier to use for non-native Laotian...
