Languages of MIDDLE ASIA

Languages of the World KENAX Translation Services

Aramaic	Aramaic was the language of Semitic peoples throughout the ancient Near East. It was the language of the Assyrians, Chaldeans, Hebrews and Syrians. Aram and Israel had a common ancestry and the Hebrew patriarchs who were of Aramaic origin maintained ties of marriage with the tribes of Aram. The Hebrew patriarchs preserved their Aramaic names and spoke in Aramaic. The term Aramaic is derived from Aram, the fifth son of Shem, the firstborn of Noah.

Assamese	Assamese is spoken in eastemmost India, in the state of Assam which borders Burma and China. Though it is spoken by only 15 million people (less than 2 percent of India's population), it is one of the constitutionally recognized languages of the country. Assamese is one of the Indic languages and is thus a member of the Indo-European family. Its alphabet is similar to that of Bengali, with slightly different characters for the letters r and w. Assamese, by contrast, shares with English the unusual feature of Alveolar consonants (English T,D): these are formed when the tongue touches the alveolar ridge above the upper teeth.

Azeri	The language spoken of Azerbaijan Azerbaijani is spoken by approximately 7 million people in Azerbaijan as well as in the former USSR, in southern Dagestan, along the Caspian coast, and beyond the Caucasus Mountains (Grimes 1992). It is spoken in north-western Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, as well. Four million speakers of Azerbaijani are monolingual, and 98 percent of Azerbaijani's speakers regard it as their first language. Azerbaijani has a long literary history and was, at one time, promoted as the lingua franca for Turkic speakers in Central Asia. The main religion of the Azerbaijani is Islam, and like other Islamic peoples their language has been influenced to a considerable extent by Arabic, especially in terms of vocabulary, the sound system, and grammar. Azerbaijani speakers in Iran are often bilingual, resulting in a strong Persian language influence as well as Arabic language influence in those dialects (Comrie 1981).

Bahasa < Malay	Bahasa Malay (or Melayu < ) is the national and official language of Malaysia. BAHASA MELAYU/INDONESIA are two different languages: 1. Bahasa Melayu (Malay): used in Malaysia, Brunei 2. Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian): used in Indonesia Both originated from Old Malay, they have grown separately into two different languages. While the structure and grammar relatively unchanged, many Malay words are not known in Indonesian, and vice versa. Bahasa itself only means language, which can be applied to any other language as well: English: Bahasa Inggris Spanish: Bahasa Spanyol On your question regarding the differences in Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia, there are quite a number of differences. Being two independent nations, the two languages have evolved over time to be quite different from one another even though both originated from Malay language (both Malaysia & Indonesia are predominantly Malays). I would say the similarity of the 2 languages is about 60 - 70% only. Therefore, I would not understand about 30 - 40% of written Bahasa Indonesia. To help you in consolidating your database, I can say that Malaysian language is not the same with Indonesian language. Although both of them have much of similarity, but they have quiet much differences. Malysian use Melayu as the mother language, and Indonesian use Indonesian as a mother language. But both of them come from Melayu language as their ancestor. Indonesian and Malaysian are two different (but similar) languages with one root (Bahasa Melayu: Malay language) which originally came from Sumatra island. Indonesian and Malaysian can communicate with each other using their own language. However, in its development, Malaysian is heavily influenced by English language and a lot of English words are adopted into Malaysian (it sounds English, but written in Malaysian's spelling). Indonesian also adopted some Dutch words and local dialects. At the moment both countries, together with Brunei, are trying to make a standard of Bahasa.

Bashkir	one of the Turkic languages. Spoken in the Republic of Bashkortostan, Orenburg, Chelyabinsk, Samara, Kurgan and Sverdlovsk regions. The number of the Bashkirs in Russia is 1 million 345,3 thousand. 72,8 % of them regard Bashkir as their mother tongue, 10,1 % Russian. 227,8 thousand Bashkirs regard Tatar as their mother tongue. Until the beginning of the 20th century the Bashkirs used a local variety of the Central Asian Turkic written language and later adopted the Tatar literary language. The Bashkir literary language was created after 1917. Arabic script was used until 1928. In 1929 the literary language was switched into the Latin and in 1939 into the Cyrillic script.

Basque	The Basque language is an inflected language whose origin is still somewhat puzzling. The fact that it is not an Indoeuropean language, and shows no ressemblance to languages in neighbouring countries, has led to the formulation of a variety of hypotheses to explain its existence. Owing to some similarities with the Georgian language, some linguists think it could be related to languages from the Caucasus. Others relate the language to non-Arabic languages from the north of Africa. One of the most likely hypotheses argues that the Basque language developed "in situ", in the land of the primitive Basques. That theory is supported by the discovery of some Basque-type skulls in Neolithic sites, which ruled out the thesis of immigration from other areas. Many think it is a very old language because there are words, such as that for axe ("aizkora" or "haizkora") for example, that have the same root as the word rock ("aitz"> or "haitz")

Bengali	Language of Bangladesh and West Bengal. Popular internationally. Bengali belongs to the easternmost branch, called Aryan or Indo-Iranian, of the Indo-European family of languages. Its direct ancestor is a form of Prakrit or Middle Indo-Aryan which descended from Sanskrit or Old Indo-Aryan. Sanskrit was the spoken as well as the literary language of Aryandom until circa 500 B.C., after which it remained for nearly two thousand years the dominant literary languages as well as the lingua franca among the cultured and the erudite throughout the subcontinent.

Bhojpuri	also been called Purbi or Purabiya, the language in front or ' to the east' of New Delhi. There are relatively few loanwords from Sankrit: it is rather more drawn from Bengali and Hindi. There are about 40,000,000 speakers of this language.

Bikol	One of the Austronesian languages, Biko is the major language of the Philipine provinces of Southern Luzon. It is closely related to Tagalog - the de facto national language, spoken to the north and to the Bisayan dialects of the Visayas islands to the south. The language name can be spelt as Bikol, Bicol, or Vicol.

Burmese	The Sino-Tibetan language family consists of the Chinese, or Sinitic, languages (dialects), all spoken in China, and several hundred Tibeto-Burman languages spoken as far west as Pakistan and as far east as Vietnam. The most important of the Tibeto-Burman group are Tibetan, the dominant language of Tibet, and Burmese, the official language of Burma.

Buryat	One of the Mongolian languages. Spoken in the Republic of Buryatia, Ust-Ordyn and Aginsk autonomic districts, in northern Mongolia and in the northwestern part of China. The number of the Buryats in Russia is 417,4 thousand. 86,6 % of them regard Buryat as their mother tongue, 13,3 % Russian.

Cambodian	The language spoken in Cambodia. The Khmer < (Cambodian) Language has been spoken in Southeast Asia for several thousand years. It is part of a family of languages called Mon-Khmer. It is related to the languages spoken by some of the hill peoples of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Malaysia, and of the Mon language, which is spoken by about one million Buddhist rice farmers living in Thailand and southern Myanmar (Burma). Linguists have found over one hundred distinct Mon-Khmer languages and dialects still being spoken in Southeast Asia, some by only a few hundred people.

Cebuano	Cebuano is one of the dialects here in the Philippines. It is mostly used and understood in the Visayas and Mindanao islands of the country. Although the Philippines uses Filipino or "Tagalog" as our national language, almost 60% of the Philippines speak Cebuano.

Chinese (Cantonese)	Cantonese (also known as Yue) is one of several major languages in China and has approximately 64 million speakers (Grimes 1992). Of those 64 million, there are more than 46 million speakers in southern China and over 5 million in Hong Kong. Cantonese speakers are also found in Malaysia (750,000), Vietnam (500,000), Macao (500,000), Singapore (33,000), and Indonesia (18,000). The term Cantonese comes from the name of the place called Canton, now known as Guangzhou, the port city in southeast China and capital of Guangdong province. However, recent studies (China Encyclopedia Publishers 1988) reveal that Cantonese is exclusively used in less than half of the areas in the province. As one of the Chinese languages, Cantonese belongs to the Sino Tibetan language family, which also includes Tibetan and Lolo Burmese and Karen (both spoken in Burma). The major linguistic distinctions within Chinese are Mandarin, Wu, Min, Yue (Cantonese), and Hakka (See Li and Thompson 1979). Cantonese is more closely related to Min and Hakka than it is to Mandarin and Wu.

Chinese (Mandarin)	Mandarin is the most widely spoken of all Chinese languages/dialects and is used by upwards of 720 million people in China, or 70 percent of the population of China (Grimes 1992). It is spoken in a huge area of the mainland running diagonally from the extreme southwest to Manchuria and also along the entire east coast north of Shanghai. To generalize, most of China with the exception of the southeastern provinces from Vietnam in the southwest to Shanghai in the northeast is Mandarin speaking. Other exceptional areas are in the far west. Mandarin, belongs to an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. This includes several major subfamilies: Tibetan, spoken in Tibet; Lolo-Burmese, in Burma, and in discontinuous parts of southern China, etc.; and Karen, in lower Burma. Tibetan, Lolo-Burmese, and Karen are more closely related than the Chinese languages/dialects are to any of the other subfamily members.

Dari	Member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian family of languages; it is, along with Pashto, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. Dari is the Afghan dialect of Farsi (Persian). It is written in a modified Arabic alphabet, and it has many Arabic and Persian loanwords. The syntax of Dari does not differ greatly from Farsi, but the stress accent is less prominent in Dari than in Farsi. To mark attribution, Dari uses the suffix -ra. The vowel system of Dari differs from that of Farsi, and Dari also has additional consonants. About one-third of the population of Afghanistan, i.e., about 5,000,000 people (Tadzhik, Uzbak, Turkman, Hazarah, Some Pashtoon), speak Dari. It is the primary language of the Tadzhik, Hazara, and Chahar Aimak peoples. Dari, rather than Pashto, serves as the means of communication between speakers of different languages in Afghanistan.

Farsi	Modern Persian language. Persian Language, also known as Farsi, is the most widely spoken member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is the language of Iran (formerly Persia) and is also widely spoken in Afghanistan and, in an archaic form, in Tajikistan and the Pamir Mountain region.

Filipino	Tagalog and Visayan are the two predominate languages of the Philippines. While these two languages share some similar words, they are two separate languages. < cancel Filipino as a language?

Georgian	There is considerable linguistic diversity in the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea that is divided into the North and South Caucasus by the Caucasus mountains. The Kartvelian languages of the South Caucasus are: Svan, spoken by about 40,000 in the high mountainous areas of the north-west Caucasus centred on Mest'ia and Lent'ekhi; Georgian, spoken by more than 3 million over an area stretching from the Black Sea to east of the Alazani river; Mingrelian, with about 360,000 speakers in an area between the Black Sea and the Tskhenists'q'ali river and bordering the Svan homeland to the north; and Laz (Ch'an), spoken by about 50,000 on the Black Sea littoral between Pazar (Atina) and Sarpi.

Gujarati	Gujarati is one of the widely spoken languages of India. It is mainly spoken in the western state of Gujarat in India. Gujarati speaking people have immigrated to many countries worldwide. Some of them are: US, UK, Kenya, South Africa, Fiji New Zealand etc.

Hindi	An official language of India. Hindi is a direct descendant of Sanskrit through Prakrit and Apabhramsha. It has been influenced and enriched by Dravidian, Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Portugese and English. It is a very expressive language. In poetry and songs, it can convey emotions using simple and gentle words. It can also be used for exact and rational reasoning. More than 180 million people in India regard Hindi as their mother tongue. Another 300 million use it as second language.

Hiligaynon	A regional language of the Philippines, Hiligaynon is the lingua franca of the Western Visayas, particularly in the region around Iloilo (Panay Island) but also in parts of Negros, Romblon. There are approximately 7 million speakers of Hiligaynon.

Hmong	The Hmong language branches into two dialects: White Hmong and Blue (or Green) Hmong. The colors in these names represent the colors used in the traditional women's costumes of the different groups, reflecting somewhat different cultural heritages and residential distributions in distinct regions of China. The Hmong language is one of a group of closely related languages of Southeast Asia and Southern China often referred to as the Miao-Yao languages. Besides being spoken by Hmong people in Laos, Thailand, Burma, and Vietnam, the Hmong language is widely spoken by the Miao minority in Southern China. The Hmong language is also related to the Yao languages which include Iu Mien, spoken in Laos and Thailand as well as China, and five other languages spoken by minority groups in the larger region.

Ilokano	A Philippine dialect. An Austronesian language of the Philippine type spoken by about ten million people. It is a member of the Cordilleran language family which comprises the following languages of Luzon Island, Philippines

Indonesian	The language spoken in Indonesia

Japanese	The language spoken in Japan.

Javanese	Javanese is the native language of the people of the island of Java. On Java live 140 million people. Indonesian is not Javanese. Indonesian is a Malay root language devised to tie together all the various ethnic groups of Indonesia, of which there are many. Javanese is spoken in the central and eastern parts of Java, the most populous island of the Republic of Indonesia. A member of the Malayo-Polynesian family, it has about 75 million speakers. The traditional Javanese script is of ancient origin, having been brought to Java from southern India more than a thousand years ago. The passage below appears first in the Javanese, then in the Roman script to which it is gradually yielding ground.

Jordanian	The language spoken in Jordan.

Kannada	Kannada is the regional language of the state of Karnataka (Capital city - BANGALORE). It is a full fledged language as much as Hindi or any other indian language - Script, literature, etc. Hope this answers your questions.

Kapampangan	About fifty years after the arrival and death of Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines < , the Spanish conquistadores heard of the Kapampangan progressive civilization when their conquest of the Maynilad (Manila) and Tondo kingdoms was practically accomplished. These Spaniards in their search for food, spices and other forms of wealth, came upon the Kapampangan people with a rich culture, traditions, arts and an alphabet of their own. The Kapampangans were described then to be the most warlike and prominent ethnic group in the Philippines. Together with their rich culture and excellent traditions, the early settlers in Pampanga perpetuated their unique language now called either as Pampangan or Kapampangan or Pampango. This language is one of the Austronesian languages and according to the Dictionary of Languages by Andrew Dalby, as of 1998, there are 1,850,000 Kapampangan speakers. Kapampangan was once written in a native script, a descendant of the Brahmi script of India. This remained in use until the late 19^th century when the Spanish era was about to end. However, printing in Kapampangan – in Latin script – commenced as early as the year 1618.

Kazakh	The language of Kazakhstan. Kazakh is the official language and principle native language of the Republic of Kazakhstan. It is also spoken in southern Siberia, northwestern China (Sinkiang-Uighur) and northwestern Mongolia. It is one of the most widely spoken Turkic languages in central Asia. An estimated 8 million people speak Kazakh: 6.5 million in Kazakhstan (of which 98 percent speak it as a first language); 1.2 million in China; and 100,000 in Mongolia. Smaller groups of speakers can also be found in Iran and Afghanistan, as well as in expatriate communities in Turkey and Germany, and, to a lesser extent, throughout Europe (Grimes 1992) Forty percent of Kazakhstan's total population (17.1 million) are ethnic Kazakhs, 38 percent are Russian, and most of the rest are Slavs or Germans (CIA 1993).

Khmer	Khmer = Kampuchea (ex-Cambodia) official language. The earliest written language to have been found in the region is in Sanskrit, an Indian sacred language. The writings were carved in stones which could be dated back to 5th and 6th century, which show a strong influence of the Indian culture over the indigenous people. Sometimes later, the Khmer Language seems to appear with many of its characters and words derived from Sanskrit. An oldest stone inscription written in Khmer language were found to be carved in 612 A.D. as its text said.

Kirghiz	Kirghiz, Tajiki and Turkmen are national languages of the 3 former Soviet republics: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenia respectively (Asia).

Korean	The language spoken in Korea.

Kurdish	While there are four (more, according to which Kurdish sources one consults) major spoken dialects, only two distinctive alphabets are in common use: Kurmanci (using an arabized alphabet and right-to-left) (Based on the groups encountered during my work as a liaison and interpreter for Kurdish families arriving in California, Kurmanci, also spelled variously as Kurmanji, is the prevalent dialect used by many - if not most- of the Kurdish communities that fled from NW Iraq and undergoing resettlement in Europe, Canada and the U.S.); Sorany (using a latinized alphabet and left-to-right)

Kuwaiti	The language spoken in Kuwait. <or is it Arabic...

Kyrgyz	Kyrgyz = The Kyrgyz Republic (formerly known as Kyrgyzstan) is a newly independent nation in Central Asia. Kyrgyz is spoken by a little under 2 million people in the Republic of Kyrgyzstan where it is the national language. In adjacent countries there are 150,000 speakers in China, mainly in Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous Region, and considerably smaller but significant communities of speakers in western Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Even smaller numbers can be found in Afganistan, Turkey, and Pakistan. Kyrgyz is a member of the Central Turkic (or Aralo-Caspian) group of languages which also includes Kazakh and other less well-known languages. Central Turkic is a subgroup of Common Turkic which also includes Turkish, Azerbaijani, Tartar, Uighur, Uzbek, and others. The Turkic languages, and the Mongolian-Tungus (Manchu-Tungusic) languages of Siberia and northeastern China are major divisions of the Altaic family or phylum (see Ruhlen 1987). Some experts also consider Japanese and Korean part of this phylum, although evidence of this is debated.

Lao	The official language of the Lao People's Democratic Republic is "Lao". The language of the ethnic majority. Lao is basically monosyllabic, tonal language. It has 6 tones, 33 consonants and 28 vowels. All dialects of Lao are members of the Tai half of the Tai-Kadai family of languages and are closely related to the languages spoken in Thailand, northern Burma (Myanmar),Yunnan and Guangxi provinces (China). Standard Lao is indeed close enough to standard Thai (Thailand), for native speakers, the two are mutually intelligible. Even closer to Standard Lao are Thailand's northern and north-eastern Thai dialects. North-eastern Thai (also called Isan is virtually 100% Lao in vocabulary and intonation; in fact there are more Lao speakers in Thailand (around 20 million native Lao, speak dialects which are closer to Vientiane than Bangkok) than in Laos (around 5.2 millions people).

Latvian	The language spoken in Latvia. The Latvian language is part of the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family. The Baltic languages are divided into two branches, the West and East Baltic languages. Today, only the East Baltic languages (Latvian and Lithuanian) survive as spoken languages, the last West Baltic language to die was Old Prussian, which ceased to be a spoken language in the late 16th or 17th Century. The Baltic languages are considered to be among the most archaic of the Indo-European languages.

Malayalam	Malayalam (/malayALam/) is the principal language of the South Indian state of Kerala and also of the Lakshadweep Islands (Laccadives) of the west coast of India. Malayalis (speakers of Malayalam), who - males and females alike - are almost totally literate, constitute 4 percent of the population of India and 96 percent of the population of Kerala (29.01 million in 1991). In terms of the number of speakers Malayalam ranks eights among the fifteen major languages of India. The word /malayALam/ originally meant mountainous country) (/mala/- mountain + /aLam/-place). Tamil is its neighbor on the south and east and Kannada on the north and east. With Tamil, Kota, Kodagu and Kannada, Malayalam belongs to the southern group of Dravidian languages. Its affinity to Tamil is the most striking. Proto-Tamil Malayalam, the common stock of Tamil and Malayalam apparently disintegrated over a period of four of five centuries from the ninth century on, resulting in the emergence of Malayalam as a language distinct from Tamil. As the language of scholarship and administration Tamil greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam. Later the irresistable inroads the Brahmins made into the cultural life of Kerala accelerated the assimilation of many Indo-Aryan features into Malayalam at different levels.

Malaysian	refer to Bahasa <move to here and explain Bahasa above

Marathi	Spoken in Maharashtra, India. Bombay is a part of Maharashtra, a district of India. Marathi is the language spoken by the native people of Maharashtra. Marathi belongs to the group of Indo-Aryan languages which are a part of the larger of group of Indo-European languages, all of which can be traced back to a common root. Among the Indo-Aryan languages, Marathi is the southern-most language. All of the Indo-Aryan languages originated from Sanskrit <link to same on this page, and other cases..). Three Prakrit languages, simpler in structure, emerged from Sanskrit. These were Saurseni, Magadhi and Maharashtri. Marathi is said to be a descendent of Maharashtri which was the Prakrit spoken by people residing in the region of Maharashtra.

Mongolian	The language of Mongolia. Mongolian is the language of most of the population of Mongolia and also of Inner Mongolia and of separate groups living in several other provinces and regions of China and the Russian Federation. By origin, it is one of the languages of the Mongolian group of the Altaic family. This group consists of Mongolian (Mongolia), Buriad, Kalmyk (Russia), Dungshian or Santa (Kansu province PRC), Dagur (Heilongjian province and Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia, PRC), Mongour (Qinghai, Kansu and other provinces PRC), Bao'ang (Kansu and Qinghai provinces PRC) and Mogol (Herat, Badakhsan and Maimana regions, Rep. of Afghanistan). The history of the Mongolian language is long and complex. From the evidence of inscriptions on monuments, its development can be divided into three periods.

Oriya	Oriya is sometimes called Odri or Utkali, it is officially spoken in the Indian state of Orissa, the total number of speakers exceeds 20 million people. The literature in Oriya is traced back to the 11th century, the modern language was shaped in the 19th century. Dialectally Oriya is quite unified, the only variety is called Bhatri and is closer to the Marathi language.

Pangasinan	A Philippine dialect. Pangasinan is one of the 77 provinces of the Republic of the Philippines

Pashto	Pushto is one of the national languages of Afghanistan (Dari Persian is the other). Major Pushto speaking cities in Afghanistan are Kandahar (Qandahar), Kabul. There are over 9 million speakers of Pushto in Afghanistan.

Persian	As the second language of the Muslim world and the main language of the Iranian cultural and civililzation literary, mystical, countless precious works in different literary, mystical, philosophical, theological, historical, artistic, and religious areas, Persian has always caught the attention of Iranians and other people in different countries of the world.

Punjabi	Punjabi is a intercontinental language. Its speakers are spread all over the world. The natives of Punjab region of India and Pakistan speak this language. Basically the Punjabi is the language of Punjab

Putonghua	An official language of China.

Sanskrit	Ancient language of Hindus in India. Sanskrit is the common language of the Hindu Scriptures. It is the oldest language in the world. It is the language of the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, Ramayana and the Puranas. Sanskrit literature is easily the richest literature in the history of mankind. The word Sanskrit literally means "Perfected Language" or "Language brought to formal perfection". This is quite an appropriate name since NASA declared it to be "the only unambiguous language on the planet". Sanskrit is a scientific and systematic language. Its grammar is perfect and has attracted scholars worldwide.

Shanghai	The vast majority of Shanghainese speak Putonghua although converse among themselves in the Shanghainese dialect.

Sinhalese	Singhalease is the language spoken by the majority of people in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is an ethnicaly very diverse countyr consisting of Sinhalease, Tamil, Muslim and Burger races. The sinhalese, who make up the majority speak the sinhalese language. The sinhalese is a Aryan langauge related to other Indo-Aryan languages and is derived from the Pali and Sanskrit languages. More interestingly Sinhalese is also connected to all the Indo European languages such as German, English, Russian, Swedish etc.

Syrian	Syriac is the important branch of the group of Semitic languages known as Aramaic. In the time of Alexander the Great, Aramaic was the official language of all the nations from Asia Minor to Persia, from Armenia to Arabian Peninsula. It was divided into two dialects: the western, used in Palestine and Syria by the Jews, Palmyrans, and Nabateans; the eastern, spoken in Babylonia by the Jews, Mandeans, Manichaens, and the people of Upper Mesopotamia. The Syriac language, as we know it from its literature, did not spring from the dialect spoken in Syria, but from the eastern Mesopotamian dialect. When the weakened Seleucides ceased to defend the Euphrates, small independent principalities were formed in that region. The most famous was the little Kingdom of Edessa whose capital Osrhoene was the religious centre of the country. This city also became an intellectual centre, and even then the language of its people attained great perfection. A little later under the influence of Christianity it developed considerably, and eventually became the liturgical and literary language of all the Churches from the shores of the Mediterranean to the centre of Persia. The suppleness and flexibility of this dialect and its loose and variable syntax readily lent itself to the most different constructions, and offered to Christianity a more appropriate instrument than Greek for the expression and spread of new ideas.

Tagalog	Spoken in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. It is not the main language of the Philippines. Tagalog is the most widely know language of the Philippines. It is the predominate language of Manila and Luzon. Also, it is widely spoken throughout the Philippines. Filipino (Pilipino) is a language based on Tagalog, renamed and modified in order to create a national language. Before 1989 Pilipino was the national language. Filipino is said to be a combination of all the different Philippine languages, but is essentially Tagalog. Filipino and English are the official languages in the Philippines.

Taishanese	The majority of the [Canadian] immigrants came from the two southern coastal provinces of Guangdong , particularly the four adjacent counties of Xinhui, Taisan, Kaiping, and Enping - collectively known as Siyi, and Fujian. The similar dialect spoken by these Siyi people are commonly referred to as Taishanese. It became the defacto Chinese language in North America up to and until the early 1970's Since then Hong Kong has become the primary source of Chinese immigrants and Cantonese is now the most commonly spoken dialect in the communities.

Taiwanese	The language spoken in Taiwan.

Tajik	Kirghiz, Tajiki and Turkmen are national languages of the 3 former Soviet republics: Kirghizia, Tajikistan and Turkmenia respectively (Asia) Tajik is spoken by about 4 million people in the Republic of Tajikistan as well as in adjoining areas of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan (Grimes 1992). Tajik is also the first language of such small Central Asian ethnic groups as the Central Asian Gypsies (Romanies) and the Jews of Samarkhand and Bukhara. Several pidgins are spoken in Tajikistan; Tajik forms their grammatical basis. Tajik is so closely related to the Persian spoken in Iran and Afghanistan that Tajik is sometimes considered as a dialect of Persian. Because of intense contact with Turkic language speakers, however, and a high rate of bilingualism with Uzbek and Kyrgyz, Tajik has been more influenced by Turkic than Persian has (Comrie 1981, Lazard 1970). The vocabulary of Persian and Tajik have diverged because Tajik borrowed so many terms from Russian, especially political, cultural, and technical terms, and because Persian borrowed more from western European languages (Majidi 1990). Dari Persian (spoken in Afghanistan) is often called Tajik by Russian linguists.

Tamil	More than 5,000 years old. Of Indian origin (more southern India - in Tamilnadu). Older than Sanskrit and popular language used in Indian courts. Not derived from Sanskrit, as most of the other Indian languages are, such as Hindi, Telgugu, Malayam etc. This is solely because, at the time, India was invaded by the Mongols and Persians. The south of India remained literally safe, hidden behind the Vindhyachal mountains. Since the invaders did not know a civilisation existed beyond those mountains, the Dravidian culture remained untouched by foreigners. So, Tamil, even today, retains the flavour of bygone days with no changes except for a little bit of modern ways of today's youth. Everything else is the same. the customs and traditions have not changed either. Tamil is spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, which hugs the bay of Bengal Coast. The dialect varies from region to region but the essence is the same. Although all the other areas of India have been influenced by invaders, this part of India with its culture have somehow managed to escape all this. Tamil, a language with a long and ancient literary tradition, has been spoken in southern India for several millennia. Ninety-two percent of its speakers live in India's southern Tamil Nadu State, where it is spoken by 48 million first language speakers. By some accounts, second-language speakers also number in the millions in the southern part of the Indian subcontinent. In northern Sri Lanka between three and four million people, about 20 percent of the population of that island state, speak Tamil. Elsewhere there are several hundreds of thousands of speakers in each of South Africa, Malaysia, and Singapore; some 6,000 live in Fiji. There are significant minorities in Mauritius, Great Britain, the US, and Canada. Total speakers, including second-language speakers, number about 66 million (Grimes 1992).

Thai	The official national language of Thailand, spoken by almost 100 per cent of the population, is Thai, classified by linguists as belonging to a Chinese-Thai branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. Early Thai settlers in the late Dvaravati period gradually enlarged their own Chinese-influenced, tonal, monosyllabic language by borrowing and adapting certain Mon and Khmer words. Later, the Thais absorbed polysyllabic Sanskrit (the classical language of Hindu India) and Pali words as Brahmanism and Theravada Buddhism asserted their shaping influences. Foreign traders and Chinese immigrants made minor additions in later centuries. Today, standard Thai is spoken nationwide with regional dialects differing widely from north to south and east to west.

Tibetan	Sino-Tibetan (ST) is one of the largest language families in the world, with more first-language speakers than even Indo-European. The more than 1.1 billion speakers of Sinitic (the Chinese dialects) constitute the world's largest speech community. ST includes both the Sinitic and the Tibeto-Burman languages. Most scholars in China today take an even broader view of ST (called Han-Zang in Mandarin), including not only these two branches, but Tai (= "Daic") and Hmong-Mien (= Miao-Yao) as well. Even taking ST in its narrower sense, we are dealing with a highly differentiated language family of formidable scope, complexity, and time-depth. Tibeto-Burman (TB) comprises hundreds of languages besides Tibetan and Burmese, spread over a vast geographical area (China, India, the Himalayan region, Tibet, peninsular SE Asia).

Tocharian	An extinct language once spoken in what is now the Xinjiang Autonomous Republic of China [ . An interesting language because it traces the history of an obscure peoples who splintered from the Indo-European language family and wandered far east, importing Iranian and Indian words into their language and who became instrumental in spreading Buddhism farther east and to the migrating Turks.

Turkish	The language of Turkey. The Turkish language is spread over a large geographical area in Europe and Asia; recent studies show that this language goes back 5500 years,and perhaps even 8500. At the same time, it is one of the most widely spoken tongues in the world - the sixth most widely spoken , to be precise. It is spoken in the Azeri, the T?rkmen, the Tartar, the Uzbek, the Baskurti, the Nogay, the Kyrgyz, the Kazakh, the Yakuti, the Cuvas and other dialects. Turkish belongs to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages, and thus is closely related to Mongolian, Manchu-Tungus, Korean, and perhaps Japanese. Some scholars have maintained that these resemblances are not fundamental, but rather the result of borrowings, however comparative Altaistic studies in recent years demonstrate that the languages we have listed all go back to a common Ur-Altaic.

Turkmens	Kirghiz, Tajiki and Turkmen are national languages of the 3 former Soviet republics: Kirghizia, Tajikistan and Turkmenia respectively (Asia) The Trukhmen language belongs to the Oguz group of Turkic languages. It has maintained its Turkmen linguistic originality but has been strongly influenced mainly by the Nogai language in the Kipchak group. N. Baskakov's opinion is that it is most likely a dialect of the Turkmen language rather than an original Turkic language. The phonetic system, grammatical structure and, to some extent also, the vocabulary, have been somewhat influenced by the Nogai language.

Urdu	'Urdu' is a Turkish word which means 'foreign' or 'horde'. This just shows that the language represents it's origin being an amalgamation of foreigners with the natives of South Asia. It was formulated by the interaction of foreign army, merchants and immigrants to India. Today, it is the national language of Pakistan and is quite similar to the neighbouring country India's national language Hindi. Infact, the grammar of Urdu is quite similar to Hindi. Urdu involves numerous elements of Arabic as well as Persian. It also derives some matter from Sanskrit, a language still spoken in the city of Multan in Pakistan. Though not a very old language, Urdu is a language full of charm and elegance, a language that holds literature so courtly.

Uzbek	15,000,000 in Uzbekistan (1986 estimate), 99% speak it as mother tongue; 3,000 in China (1990); 15,003,000 total.

Vietnamese	Vietnamese is the official language in Vietnam and is spoken by about 78 millions Vietnamese in Vietnam and about 2 millions Vietnamese living oversea.


KENAX Translation Services