World Languages & Scripts

Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, recognizable for the horizontal line linking its letters.

Arabic serves as the liturgical language of Islam and is written right to left in its own script.

Russian leads all Slavic languages in speakers and is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Japanese writing mixes Chinese-derived kanji characters with two native syllabaries, hiragana and katakana.

Korean is written in Hangul, a script commissioned by King Sejong in the 15th century to improve literacy.

Vietnamese moved from Chinese-derived characters to a Latin-based script with tone marks.

Turkish switched from Arabic script to a Latin-based alphabet as part of a 1928 language reform.

Persian is written right to left in a script adapted from Arabic, though the language itself is not Semitic.

Thai is written in its own script and, unlike many languages, does not separate words with spaces.

Greek's long written history produced an alphabet that shaped both the Latin and Cyrillic writing systems.

Amharic is written in the Ge'ez script, a syllabary developed for Ethiopian languages.

Urdu and Hindi share much everyday vocabulary and grammar but are written in different scripts.

The traditional Mongolian script runs in vertical columns from top to bottom.

Georgian uses its own distinctive alphabet, unrelated to the Latin, Cyrillic, or Greek writing systems.

The Armenian alphabet was devised in the early 5th century specifically to write the Armenian language.

Spanish is an official language across more than twenty countries and leads all Romance languages in speakers.

English absorbed vocabulary from Latin, French, and its Germanic roots on its way to becoming a global business language.

Swahili combines Bantu grammar with extensive Arabic vocabulary from centuries of coastal trade.

Polish leads the West Slavic languages in speakers and is known for dense consonant clusters.

Mandarin Chinese has more native speakers than any other language and relies on tone to change word meaning.

Bengali developed from Sanskrit roots and serves as the national language of Bangladesh.

Portuguese spread from Portugal to Brazil, which today holds the great majority of its speakers.

French descended from the Vulgar Latin spoken in Roman Gaul and is now official across five continents.

German leads the European Union in native speakers and is known for building long compound nouns.

Hebrew was mainly a liturgical language for centuries before its revival as an everyday spoken language.

Italian retains a structure close to Latin and became the standard language used in opera.

Ukrainian is written in Cyrillic and shares roots with Russian while remaining a distinct language.

Tamil's literary record stretches back over two thousand years, among the longest of any living language.

Icelandic has changed little enough that modern speakers can still read medieval sagas in the original.

Basque stands apart as a language isolate, unrelated to the Indo-European languages spoken around it.

Esperanto was constructed in the late 1800s to serve as an easy-to-learn international second language.

Quechua served as the administrative language of the Inca Empire and is still spoken across the Andes.

Malagasy is an Austronesian language whose closest relatives are spoken in Borneo, far from Madagascar.