Vietnamese (or tiếng Việt, pronounced as [‘tɪən ‘vɪet]) is a part of the Austroasiatic language family, spoken natively by more than 70 million people in Vietnam and its overseas communities. The Vietnamese alphabet in use today is a Latin alphabet with additional diacritics for tones, and certain letters. A typical feature of Vietnamese is that the voice tone is employed to distinguish words with identical consonant and vowel sequences, and the word order is able to express and change the syntactic relations of words to each other.
Writing system: Latin (Vietnamese alphabet)
Official in: Vietnam
Uzbek (oʻzbek tili in Latin script; ўзбек тили in Cyrillic script; اوُزبېک تیلی in Arabic script) is the official language of Uzbekistan. It has anywhere between 20 and 26 million native speakers in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Uzbek belongs to the Eastern Turkic branch of the Turkic language family. External influences include Persian, Arabic and Russian. Before 1928 Uzbek was written in Arabic script, in 1940 switched to the Cyrillic one and recently it’s been replaced with Latin alphabet.
Writing system: Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic (Uzbek alphabet)
Official in: Uzbekistan
Urdu (or اُردُو, pronounced [‘ʊrd̪uː]) is a standardized register of the Hindustani language. Urdu is historically associated with the Muslims of the region of Hindustan. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, and an official language of six Indian states and one of the 22 scheduled languages in the Constitution of India. Urdu and Hindi are nearly identical in basic structure and grammar, and at a colloquial level also in vocabulary and phonology. Urdu is written right-to left in an extension of the Persian alphabet.
Writing system: Urdu alphabet (Arabic script), Devanagari
Official in: Pakistan, India
Posted on: March 14th, 2014 by asapbademko No Comments
Ukrainian (or українська мова, pronounced [ukraˈjiɲskɐ ˈmɔvɐ] in Ukrainian) has its origin back in the Old East Slavic of the early medieval state of Kievan Rus’. From 1804 until the Russian Revolution, the Ukrainian language was banned from schools in the Russian Empire, of which Eastern Ukraine was a part at the time, but succeeded to keep its authenticity by using informal methods such as songs and folklore, along with Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s Eneyida, which was the first book to be published in Ukrainian and has become a classic.
Writing system: Cyrillic (Ukrainian alphabet)
Official language in: Ukraine
The Turkmen or Turkoman language (تورکمن ﺗﻴﻠی ,تورکمنچه, pronounced as [tʊəʳk’men dɪ’li:) is a member of the East Oghuz branch of the Turkic family of languages; its closest relatives being Anatolian Turkish and Azerbaijani, with which it shares a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility. Before 1929, Turkmen was written in an Arabic alphabet. In 1929–1938 a Latin alphabet replaced it, and then the Cyrillic alphabet was used from 1938 to 1991. In 1991, the current Latin alphabet was introduced, although the transition to it has been rather slow.
Writing system: Latin (Turkmen alphabet)
Official in: Turkmenistan
Posted on: March 14th, 2014 by asapbademko No Comments
The Turkish language (or Türkçe, pronounced [‘tjuːk’tʃe] in Turkish) is a member of the Oghuz group of languages, a subgroup of the Turkic language family. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and the other Oghuz languages, including Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, and Balkan Gagauz Turkish. In 1928 the first president of Turkey Kemal Atatürk replaced the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, a version of Perso-Arabic alphabet, with the Latin script which was one of the important steps of the country to its cultural reform.
Writing system: Latin (Turkish alphabet)
Official language in: Turkey, Cyprus, Kosovo
The Thai language (оr ประเทศไทย, pronounced [‘prɑ:θet ‘taɪ]) is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. It is a tonal and analytic language which also has a complex orthography and relational markers. The Thai writing system is abugida, i.e. each consonant may invoke an inherent vowel sound, and the words are predominantly monosyllabic with many borrowings from Pali, Sanskrit and Old Khmer The language makes use of the voice tone to distinguish between otherwise identical words. There are five distinct tones in Thai: mid, low, falling, high, and rising, each of which able to carry meaning.
Writing system: Thai script
Official in: Thailand
Posted on: March 14th, 2014 by asapbademko No Comments
Tatar language (ор تاتار تيلی, Татар тілі, pronounced as [ta’tɑ:r tɪ’lɪ]) is a Turkic language spoken by Volga Tatars located at modern Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and Nizhny Novgorod. It should not be confused with the Crimean Tatar language, to which it is remotely related but is mutually unintelligible. The official script of Tatar language is based on the Cyrillic script with some additional letters, although between 1999 and 2002 in the country was established an official Tatar Latin alphabet. Unofficially, other scripts are used today as well, mostly Latin and Arabic.
Writing system: Cyrillic, Latin, Arabic
Official in: Tatarstan
Tamil (or தமிழ், pronounced [ˈtæmɪl]) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly in South India, North-east Sri Lanka and Singapore. It is one of the longest surviving classical languages in the world – Tamil literature has existed for over 2000 years, as the earliest period of Tamil literature, Sangam literature, is dated from ca. 300 BC – AD 300. The variety and quality of classical Tamil literature has led to its being described as “one of the great classical traditions and literatures of the world”.
Writing system: Tamil alphabet (Brahmic)
Official in: India, Sri Lanka, Singapore
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