Bosnian – босански

Jul 15, 2011 | Blog

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 – বাংলা

Jul 15, 2011 | Blog

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 – Беларуская мова

Jul 15, 2011 | Blog

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 – بلوچى

Jul 15, 2011 | Blog

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...

Azerbaijani – آذربايجانجا ديلي Azerbaycan

Jul 15, 2011 | Blog

Azerbaijani is the official language of the Republic of Azerbaijan and is spoken by 30 million people in the world, although the population of Azerbaijan is only 9 million. The Arabic alphabet was introduced to Azerbaijan in the 7th century and used until the 1920s. In 1929, the Latin alphabet was introduced in Northern Azerbaijan in an attempt to avoid the influence of Islam. Then the Cyrillic alphabet was adopted in 1939. In 1991 they switched back to the Latin alphabet once again, but a slightly different version from the one used in 1929. These switches obviously caused considerable confusion! To this day, the Latin alphabet is used in...

Assamese – অসমীয়া

Jul 15, 2011 | Blog

Assamese is used mainly in the state of Assam in North-East India and spoken by 13 million people. In the state of Assam, Hindi, Bengali, and Nepal languages are widely spoken as well. Assamese is closely related to Bengali, and a version of the Bengali alphabet is used in written Assamese. Interestingly, there are only two characters that are different between the two written...