World Languages

Did you know there are 7 billion people on earth and about 7000 languages in the world, but more than half of the world’s population speaks one of just 23 languages? That’s why, here at Pronouncing American English, we provide accent reduction lessons for the most commonly spoken languages.

Would you like to learn more about your native language? Or maybe you are a student or teacher who would like to learn more about the linguistic, phonetic and cultural composition of the world’s languages. You can use this map of languages as a helpful and informative reference.

Click on the Pronouncing American English languages or the countries on the map to learn about some of the world’s languages

Arabic

Arabic is a Central Semitic language, closely related to Aramaic, Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Phoenician. Classic Arabic, the language of the Quran, has remained largely unchanged since the 7th century. Throughout the Arab world, there are two primary forms of the Arabic language that coexist: Modern Standard Arabic and Colloquial Arabic.

Modern Standard Arabic or Literary Arabic is the only official form of Arabic. It is a modernized version of Classical Arabic used with little variation in all Arabic-speaking countries for written and formal oral communication. It is widely taught in schools and universities and is used in most written documents as well as in formal spoken occasions, such as lectures and news broadcasts. It is also one of the six official languages of the UN and is the official language of 26 countries. Read more...

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Bulgarian

Bulgarian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is a member of the Slavic Languages which divide into three primary groupings: 1) South Slavonic: Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene: 2) West Slavonic: Czech, Slovak, Polish, Upper and Lower Sorbian (Lusatian): 3) East Slavonic: Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Belorussian (White Russian). Bulgarian, along with the Macedonian language collectively form the East South Slavic languages that have several grammatical characteristics setting it apart from all other Slavic languages, including elimination of case declension, development of a suffixed definite, and the lack of a verb infinitive, but it retains and has further developed the Proto-Slavic verb system.

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Cantonese is viewed as part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swathes of southern China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two varieties are not mutually intelligible because of pronunciation, grammatical, and also lexical differences. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of verbs, sometimes differs between the two varieties. The use of vocabulary in Cantonese also tends to have more historic roots.

One of the most notable differences between Cantonese and Mandarin is how the spoken word is written; with Mandarin the spoken word is written as such, whereas with Cantonese there may not be a direct written word matching what was said.[6][7] This results in the situation in which a Mandarin and Cantonese text look almost the same, but are pronounced differently.

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Cantonese

Czech

The Czech language was formerly known as Bohemian. It is a West Slavic language and is spoken by over 11 million people. Czech is spoken in the regions of Bohemia, Moravia and southwestern Silesia in the Czech Republic. It is the official language in the Czech Republic (where most of its speakers live), and has minority language status in Slovakia. Czech's closest relative is Slovak, with which it is mutually intelligible. It is closely related to other West Slavic languages, such as Silesian and Polish, and more distantly to East Slavic languages such as Czech . Although most Czech vocabulary is based on shared roots with Slavic and other Indo-European languages, many loanwords (most associated with high culture) have been adopted in recent years. Read more...

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Greek

Greek, the first language of Western civilization, is considered by many to be the most effective and admirable means of communication ever devised. On its own, Greek constitutes a separate branch of the Indo-European family though it shows some affinity with Armenian and Indo-Iranian. It is, with Hittite and Sanskrit, among the oldest attested Indo-European languages. It also has the longest record in the family, from 1400 BCE until now (with an interruption between 1150-800 BCE). For these reasons, Greek is essential to the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European language and culture. On the other hand, even though a great part of the language has been lost, Greek literature occupies a special place in Western culture and humanistic studies. From Greece, the Greek language spread early to Cyprus (12th c. BCE), and southern Italy (8th c. BCE). Today, Greek is the Official language of Greece, with about 11,000,000 speakers and another 700,000 of Cypriot Greek in southern Cyprus. The language spoken in northern Cyprus is Cypriot Turkish. Read more...

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Gujarati

Overview of the Gujarati Language

Gujarati is spoken primarily in the state of Gujarat, located in the westernmost region of India, bordering Pakistan and the Arabian Sea. From 1858 to 1947 the British Crown ruled over the Indian subcontinent. In 1947 India gained independence, at which time the Bombay State was formed, comprising an area that housed two primary linguistic groups: Marathi-speaking and Gujarati-speaking. Due to tensions between the two linguistic groups and demands for sovereignty by both parties, the Bombay State was divided into two parts in May 1960: the Gujarat State and the Maharashtra State. Bombay remained a part of the Maharashtra State and was renamed Mumbai in the 1990s.

In 1965, violence broke out between India and Pakistan concerning the disputed area Rann of Kachchh. Read More...

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Hebrew

Historically, Hebrew is regarded as the language of the Israelites. It is one of the world’s oldest languages, spoken and written today nearly the same as it was over 2,000 years ago. Sometime between 200 and 400 AD, Hebrew ceased to exist as an everyday spoken language. However, through the centuries, is remained in its written form as the language of Jewish liturgy, literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and poetry. Then, in the 19th century, it was revived once again as a spoken and written language; now referred to as “Modern Hebrew.”

This renaissance of Hebrew as a spoken language is largely ascribed to Eliezer ben Yehudah who devoted his life to its revival and adapted it for modern use through the introduction of thousands of modern terms. Hebrew gradually came into use among the Jewish settlers in Palestine and became the official language of the state of Israel when that nation was created in 1948. Read more...

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Hindi

Hindi is the official national language of India. The homeland of Hindi is in the North of India, but it is studied, taught, spoken and understood widely throughout the sub-continent, and may be a mother tongue or as a second or a third language. After Independence in 1947, India became a nation state, and it was intended that English would gradually be phased out, but there was no simple solution as to which language should replace it. To this day English remains as an “Associate Language in India, along side Hindi.

Hindi is written in Devnagari or 'Nagari' script. This script is phonetic and, thus, unlike English, Hindi is pronounced as it is written.

There are 33 consonants and 11 vowels in Hindi. Additionally, there are also many conjunct consonants. Hindi consonants are divided into groups on the basis of phonetic properties of their formations: plosives, nasals, fricatives, flapped and tapped sounds, and semi vowels.

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Hungarian

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the

European Union. It is spoken as a native language by about 13 million people, of whom approximately 10 million live in Hungary. Outside of Hungary, it is also spoken by communities of Hungarian people in neighboring countries, especially in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine. Contrary to popular belief, Hungarian is neither a member of the Indo-European family, nor a branch of the Slavic languages. Instead, it is a branch of the Uralic language family, primarily Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian.

Hungarian has 14 vowel phonemes and 25 consonant phonemes. The vowel phonemes can be grouped as pairs of long and short vowels. Most of these pairs have a similar pronunciation, only varying significantly in their duration. Consonant length is also distinctive in Hungarian.

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Italian

Italian (Italiano) is an Indo-European, Italic, Romance language and is the National language of Italy, and an Official language of San Marino, and (together with Latin) of the Vatican City. It is spoken as a first language by over 63 million people and is the third most widely spoken language in the European Union. Italian is also spoken in parts of France, Switzerland and Malta.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, spoken Latin gave birth to many regional Romance languages in the Italic peninsula. During the Renaissance, an early form of Tuscan was chosen as the standard language but remained more a literary language than an oral one. An important event that helped the diffusion of Italian was the... Read more...

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Japanese

Japanese is an East Asian language spoken by about 127 million speakers, which represents nearly the entire population of Japan. Some 1.5 million Japanese have migrated abroad, mainly to Hawaii and other parts of the US (nearly half a million), Brazil (380,000) and Peru (80,000). As the population is decreasing at a rate of 0.1 % annually, the number of Japanese speakers tends to diminish slightly with time.

Japanese is the national language of Japan and is spoken almost exclusively in the Japanese chain of islands and had been physically cut off from other tongues for a very long time. As a result of this isolation, the Japanese language has never been clearly linked to any language family. There is no proven evidence...Read more...

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Korean

Korean is the official language of both South Korea and North Korea, as well as one of the two official languages in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. About 80 million people speak Korean worldwide. For over a millennium, Koreans wrote with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems like hyangchal, gugyeol, and idu. In the 15th century, Sejong the Great commissioned a national writing system called Hangul, but it only came into widespread use in the 20th century, because of the yangban aristocracy's preference for hanja.

Historical linguists classify Korean as a language isolate. The idea that Korean belongs to a putative Altaic language family has been generally discredited. The Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax.

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Punjabi

The word Punjabi is derived from the word Panj-āb, Persian for "Five Waters", referring to the five major eastern tributaries of the Indus River. The historical Punjab region, now divided between India and Pakistan, is defined physiographically by the Indus River and five tributaries. Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language. It is the native language of about 130 million people and is the 10th most widely spoken language in the world. The flags above represent the four most populated regions of Punjabi speakers, but there are certainly many more too numerous to include in this summary.

Panjabi is the native language of the people who inhabit the historical Punjab regions of Pakistan and India. It is the most widely spoken language in Pakistan. In India it is eleventh-most widely spoken language. Punjabi is also the third most spoken native language in the Indian Subcontinent (southern tip of Asia including portions of India and Pakistan) It is also widely spoken in the United Kingdom, Canada, United Arab Emirates, United States of America, Saudi Arabia and Australia. Read more...

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Romanian

Romanian (obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; autonym: română, limba română [ˈlimba roˈmɨnə] ( listen), "the Romanian language", or românește, lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 million people as a native language, primarily in Romania and Moldova, and by another 4 million people as a second language. It has official status in Romania and the Republic of Moldova. It is one of the official languages of the European Union and the Latin Union.

Romanian is a part of the Balkan-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin separated from the Western Romance during the 5th-8th centuries. To distinguish it within that group in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian.

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Russian

Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is a member of the Slavic Languages which divide into three primary groupings: 1) South Slavonic: Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene: 2) West Slavonic: Czech, Slovak, Polish, Upper and Lower Sorbian (Lusatian): 3) East Slavonic: Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian (White Russian). Russian is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and is also the largest spoken native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers.

Russian possesses five vowels (or six, under the St. Petersburg Phonological School), which are written with different letters depending on whether or not the preceding consonant is palatalized. The consonants typically come in plain vs. palatalized pairs, which are traditionally called hard and soft. The hard consonants are often velarized, especially before front vowels. The standard language, based on the Moscow dialect, possesses heavy stress and moderate variation in pitch. Stressed vowels are somewhat lengthened, while unstressed vowels tend to be reduced to near-close vowels or an unclear schwa.

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Serbian

The language continuum known as Serbo-Croatian was the most widely spoken language in the former Yugoslavia. At its peak, There were as many as 20 million speakers. Culturally, Yugoslavia's eastern region, which consisted of present-day Serbia, Montenegro and parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina, was divided both religiously and linguistically from its western region consisting of present-day Croatia and parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina. As a result, the Serbian and Croatian official languages as they exist today are based on distinct dialects and are written with different alphabets, although because of their close similarity, some still consider the languages as a unit called ‘Serbo-Croatian’.

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Turkish

Turkish, also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 10–15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe (mostly in East and West Thrace) and 60–65 million native speakers in Western Asia (mostly in Anatolia). Outside of Turkey, significant smaller groups of speakers exist in Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Cyprus (only recognized by Turkey), Greece, the Caucasus, and other parts of Europe and Central Asia.

To the west, the influence of Ottoman Turkish—the variety of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire—spread as the Ottoman Empire expanded. In 1928, as one of Atatürk's Reforms in the early years of the Republic of Turkey, the Ottoman Turkish alphabet was replaced with a Latin alphabet.

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The Urdu language is a member of the Indo-Aryan group within the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken by more than 100 million people, predominantly in Pakistan and India. It is the official state language of Pakistan and is also officially recognized, or “scheduled,” in the constitution of India. Significant speech communities exist in the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well. Notably, Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible. Urdu was the language of poetry and literature of Mughal India and retains a high status even in modern times. Although Urdu is the official language of Pakistan, it is the native tongue of only about ten percent of the population. Punjabi is the native language of 60 percent of the population of Pakistan followed by Sindi and Paktu, with 12 percent and 11 percent respectively. However, Urdu is the language of choice of Muslims in India.

Urdu is closely related to a language that originated and developed in the Indian subcontinent. They share the same Indic base and are so similar in phonology and grammar that they appear to be one language. In terms of lexicon, however, they have borrowed extensively from different sources—Urdu from Arabic and Persian, Hindi from Sanskrit—so they are usually treated as independent languages. Their distinctions are most marked in terms of writing systems: Urdu uses a modified form of Perso-Arabic script, while Hindi uses Devanagari.

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Urdu

Vietnamese

Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language that originated in the north of Vietnam and is the national and official language of the country. It is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a first or second language for the many ethnic minorities of Vietnam. As the result of Vietnamese emigration and cultural influence, Vietnamese speakers are found throughout the world, notably in East and Southeast Asia, North America, Australia and Western Europe. Vietnamese has also been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic.

It is part of the Austroasiatic language family of which it has by far the most speakers (several times as many as the other Austroasiatic languages combined). Vietnamese vocabulary has borrowings from Chinese, and it formerly used a modified set of Chinese characters called chữ nôm given vernacular pronunciation. The Vietnamese alphabet (quốc ngữ) in use today is aLatin alphabet with additional diacritics for tones, and certain letters.

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German

It is the native language of about 100 million people, making it the most widely spoken native language in the European Union. German is the only official language of Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein; one of the official languages of Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Belgium. (Information derived from Wikipedia)

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French

French is a Romance language, descended from the spoken Latin language of the Roman Empire, as is Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan. The French alphabet is the same as that of English, except that the letter “w” only appears in foreign words. As a passing observation, the English sound /ʒ/, borrowed from French, only occurs in English at the ends of words and usually only in those of French origin, i.e., “vision, beige, rouge” etc. The spelling of French generally reflects the language as it was spoken for the past four or five centuries and, therefore is a poor guide to modern pronunciation. Many letters are silent, especially those at the ends of words. However, a normally silent final consonant is “sounded” when followed by a word beginning with a vowel. In these instances, the final consonant actually becomes part of the first syllable of the following word. This process of final consonant “shifting” to the 1st syllable of the next word is known as “liaison”.

Although French pronunciation is generally governed by fairly consistent rules, the actual sounds of the language are very difficult for English speakers, and a good “French Accent” is something not easily acquired.

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French

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French

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German (Deutsch) is a West Germanic language that derives most of its vocabulary from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Several German words are derived from Latin and Greek, and fewer are borrowed from French and English. Written German uses the Latin alphabet. In addition to the 26 standard letters, German has three vowels with umlauts (Ä/ä, Ö/ö and Ü/ü).

It is the native language of about 100 million people, making it the most widely spoken native language in the European Union. German is the only official language of Germany, Austria, and Liechtenstein; one of the official languages of Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Belgium. (Information derived from Wikipedia)

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German

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German

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