The official language of Burma is called “Myanmar language” or Burmese. It is spoken by 32 million people and an additional 10 million people also speak Burmese as a second language in neighbouring countries. The standard dialect of Burmese is influenced by Yangon, which is a former capital of Burma. A southern Indian alphabet called Mon became the basis of the unique Burmese alphabet. The second language in Burma is English: it is taught from kindergarten on and most academia and media is in English. One interesting fact about Myanmar culture is that they have no family name and the initial of their name is decided by the day of birth (Monday –Sunday). It also changes depending on age and social standing throughout their...
Bulgarian is a Southern Slavic language with about 12 million speakers mainly in Bulgaria. In 2007 it was added as a European Union language. Bulgarian was the first Slavic language to be written in history. The modern Bulgarian language developed from the 16th to 19th centuries. It led the Bulgarian people to make demands for language education as well. Modern Bulgarian borrows many Turkish words and is influenced by Romanian, Albanian, Russian and others. One interesting example of body language in Bulgaria is that shaking the head back and forth means ‘Yes’ and nodding the head up and down means...
Bosnian is spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina by 3 million people. It developed from the South Slavic language family. In fact, it is considered a Shavian dialect. However, Bosnian was introduced as the sole official language of Bosnia in the early 1900s. The Latin alphabet is used in the modern Bosnian language...
Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh with 230 million speakers, which is high on the list of the most spoken languages in the world, and the second most in India. There are six spoken dialects. After claiming independence from Britain, Bengali became the Eastern Bengali of Pakistan. However, Eastern and Western Pakistan had different official languages and this triggered the independence of Bengali from Pakistan in 1971. This historical affair is well known as the Bengali Language Movement and it is celebrated by a memorial day in Bengali called International Mother Language...
Belarusian is an Eastern Slavonic language spoken by about 7.5 million speakers in Belarus. It is closely related to Russian and Ukrainian. Russian became the official language of Belarus in 1995 by referendum so most Belarusians are bilingual in Belarusian and Russian. Due to the complicated history of Belarus (invasions by others), its spelling system is structured by Polish, Russian and other languages based on the Latin alphabet. As a result, in the 19th century, it became a combination spelling system and took many years for people to agree on a standard. Nevertheless, there are only two major dialects in the Belarusian language, North-Eastern and...
Baluchi is a North-Western Iranian language spoken by about 7 million people. Most Baluchi speakers live in Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan and it is also known as Balochi, Baloci or Baluci. Originally, the Latin alphabet was used but after Pakistan acquired independence in 1947, Perso-Arabic script was adopted for the written form. In general, the language was identified as a dialect of Persian before the post-colonial period. At the time, it was just an oral language and there was no traditional writing system. There are two major dialects: Sulaymani (Eastern) and Makrani (Western). The Makrani dialect is most widely...
