1.
Sanskrit language
–
Sanskrit is the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, a philosophical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and a literary language and lingua franca of ancient and medieval South Asia. As a result of transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia and parts of Central Asia, as one of the oldest Indo-European languages for which substantial written documentation exists, Sanskrit holds a prominent position in Indo-European studies. The body of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical, the compositions of Sanskrit were orally transmitted for much of its early history by methods of memorization of exceptional complexity, rigor, and fidelity. Thereafter, variants and derivatives of the Brahmi script came to be used, Sanskrit is today one of the 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which mandates the Indian government to develop the language. It continues to be used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals and Buddhist practice in the form of hymns. The Sanskrit verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- may be translated as refined, elaborated, as a term for refined or elaborated speech, the adjective appears only in Epic and Classical Sanskrit in the Manusmṛti and the Mahabharata. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini, around the fourth century BCE. Sanskrit, as defined by Pāṇini, evolved out of the earlier Vedic form, the present form of Vedic Sanskrit can be traced back to as early as the second millennium BCE. Scholars often distinguish Vedic Sanskrit and Classical or Pāṇinian Sanskrit as separate dialects, although they are quite similar, they differ in a number of essential points of phonology, vocabulary, grammar and syntax. Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, a collection of hymns, incantations and theological and religio-philosophical discussions in the Brahmanas. Modern linguists consider the metrical hymns of the Rigveda Samhita to be the earliest, for nearly 2000 years, Sanskrit was the language of a cultural order that exerted influence across South Asia, Inner Asia, Southeast Asia, and to a certain extent East Asia. A significant form of post-Vedic Sanskrit is found in the Sanskrit of Indian epic poetry—the Ramayana, the deviations from Pāṇini in the epics are generally considered to be on account of interference from Prakrits, or innovations, and not because they are pre-Paninian. Traditional Sanskrit scholars call such deviations ārṣa, meaning of the ṛṣis, in some contexts, there are also more prakritisms than in Classical Sanskrit proper. There were four principal dialects of classical Sanskrit, paścimottarī, madhyadeśī, pūrvi, the predecessors of the first three dialects are attested in Vedic Brāhmaṇas, of which the first one was regarded as the purest. In the 2001 Census of India,14,035 Indians reported Sanskrit to be their first language, in India, Sanskrit is among the 14 original languages of the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution. The state of Uttarakhand in India has ruled Sanskrit as its official language. In October 2012 social activist Hemant Goswami filed a petition in the Punjab. More than 3,000 Sanskrit works have been composed since Indias independence in 1947, much of this work has been judged of high quality, in comparison to both classical Sanskrit literature and modern literature in other Indian languages
Sanskrit language
–
Rigveda (
padapatha) manuscript in
Devanagari, early 19th century
Sanskrit language
–
The word saṃskṛtam written in
Devanagari.
Sanskrit language
–
Devi Mahatmya palm-leaf manuscript in an early
Bhujimol script,
Bihar or
Nepal, 11th century
Sanskrit language
–
A poem by the ancient Indian poet Vallana (ca. 900 – 1100 CE) on the side wall of a building at the Haagweg 14 in Leiden, Netherlands
2.
Prakrit
–
A Prakrit is any of several Middle Indo-Aryan languages. The Ardhamagadhi Prakrit, which was used extensively to write the scriptures of Jainism, is considered to be the definitive form of Prakrit. Prakrit grammarians would give the full grammar of Ardhamagadhi first, for this reason, courses teaching Prakrit are often regarded as teaching Ardhamagadhi. Other Prakrits are reported in old sources but are not attested. Alternatively, Prakrit can be taken to mean derived from an original, Prakrit is foremost a native term, designating vernaculars as opposed to Sanskrit. The Prakrits became literary languages, generally patronized by ancient Indian kings identified with the Kshatriya Varna of Hinduism, the earliest extant usage of Prakrit is the corpus of inscriptions of Emperor Aśoka. Besides this, Prakrit appears in literature in the form of Pāli Canon of Theravada Buddhists, Prakrit canon of the Jains, Prakrit grammars and in lyrics, plays and epics of the times. The various Prakrit languages are associated with different patron dynasties, with different religions and different literary traditions, each Prakrit represents a distinct tradition of literature within the history of Pakistan, India and Nepal. In linguistic terms, this is used in contrast with saṃskṛta, Dramatic Prakrits were those that were devised specifically for use in dramas and other literature. Whenever dialogue was written in a Prakrit, the reader would also be provided with a Sanskrit translation, none of these Prakrits came into being as vernaculars, but some ended up being used as such when Sanskrit fell out of favor. The phrase Dramatic Prakrits often refers to three most prominent of them, Shauraseni, Magadhi Prakrit, and Maharashtri Prakrit, however, there were a slew of other less commonly used Prakrits that also fall into this category. These include Pracya, Bahliki, Daksinatya, Sakari, Candali, Sabari, Abhiri, Dramili, there was an astoundingly strict structure to the use of these different Prakrits in dramas. Maharashtri Prakrit, the ancestor of modern Marathi, is an interesting case. Maharashtri was often used for poetry and as such, diverged from proper Sanskrit grammar mainly to fit the language to the meter of different styles of poetry, the new grammar stuck, which led to the unique flexibility of vowels lengths – amongst other anomalies – in Marathi. Ardhamagadhi Dramili Elu Gandhari Magadhi Maharashtri Paisaci Shauraseni Jain Maharashtri Jain Shauraseni Apabransh National Institute of Prakrit Study, shravanabelagola, Karnataka, India Banerjee, Satya Ranjan. The Eastern School of Prakrit Grammarians, a linguistic study, deshpande, Madhav, Sanskrit & Prakrit, sociolinguistic issues. Pischel, R. Grammar of the Prakrit Languages
Prakrit
–
The Suryaprajnaptisutra, an astronomical work dating to the 3rd or 4th century BC, written in Jain Prakrit language (in
Devanagari book script), c. 1500 AD.
Prakrit
–
Pillar capital with addorsed lions and Prakrit inscriptions in the
Kharosthi script,
British Museum
3.
Pali
–
Pali is a Prakrit language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of much of the earliest extant literature of Buddhism as collected in the Pāli Canon or Tipiṭaka and is the language of Theravāda Buddhism. The word Pali is used as a name for the language of the Theravada canon, Childers translates the word as series and states that the language bears the epithet in consequence of the perfection of its grammatical structure. However, modern scholarship has regarded Pali as a mix of several Prakrit languages from around the 3rd century BCE, combined together and partially Sanskritized. The closest artifacts to Pali that have found in India are Edicts of Ashoka found at Gujarat, in the west of India. There is persistent confusion as to the relation of Pāḷi to the vernacular spoken in the ancient kingdom of Magadha, Pali, as a Middle Indo-Aryan language, is different from Sanskrit more with regard to its dialectal base than the time of its origin. A number of its morphological and lexical features show that it is not a continuation of Ṛgvedic Vedic Sanskrit. Instead it descends from one or more dialects that were, despite many similarities, however, this view is not shared by all scholars. Some, like A. C. Woolner, believe that Pali is derived from Vedic Sanskrit, Paiśācī is a largely unattested literary language of classical India that is mentioned in Prakrit and Sanskrit grammars of antiquity. e. Evidence which lends support to this interpretation is that literature in Paiśācī is fragmentary and extremely rare, many Theravada sources refer to the Pali language as Magadhan or the language of Magadha. This identification first appears in the commentaries, and may have been an attempt by Buddhists to associate more closely with the Maurya Empire. The Buddha taught in Magadha, but the four most important places in his life are all outside of it and it is likely that he taught in several closely related dialects of Middle Indo-Aryan, which had a high degree of mutual intelligibility. There is no attested dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan with all the features of Pali, Pali has some commonalities with both the western Ashokan Edicts at Girnar in Saurashtra, and the Central-Western Prakrit found in the eastern Hathigumpha inscription. In Sri Lanka, Pali is thought to have entered into a period of decline ending around the 4th or 5th century, the work of Buddhaghosa was largely responsible for its reemergence as an important scholarly language in Buddhist thought. Another scholar states that at time it was a refined. Modern scholarship has not arrived at a consensus on the issue, after the death of the Buddha, Pali may have evolved among Buddhists out of the language of the Buddha as a new artificial language. According to K. R. Norman, it is likely that the viharas in North India had separate collections of material, in the early period it is likely that no degree of translation was necessary in communicating this material to other areas. Around the time of Ashoka there had been more linguistic divergence, following this period, the language underwent a small degree of Sanskritisation
Pali
–
The upper half shows a text in
Sanskrit (praise of
Vishnu) written in
devanagari while the lower half shows a text in Pali from a Buddhist ceremonial scripture called "Kammuwa" from
Burma, probably in the
Mon script.
4.
Indian English
–
Indian English is any of the forms of English characteristic of India. English is a lingua franca of India, though English is one of the two official languages of the Union Government of India, only a few hundred thousand Indians have English as their first language. Among women, the percentages were 83 percent speaking no English,17 percent speaking at least some English. The number of English-medium school students in India increased from over 15 million in 2008–09 to 29 million by 2013–14, in December 2015, the Supreme Court of India ruled that English is the only court language. India ranks 22 out of 72 countries in the 2016 EF English Proficiency Index published by the EF Education First, the index gives the country a score of 57.30 indicating moderate proficiency. India ranks 4th out of 19 Asian countries included in the index, among Asian countries, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines received higher scores than India. Indian English generally uses the Indian numbering system, idiomatic forms derived from Indian literary languages and vernaculars have been absorbed into Indian English. Nevertheless, there remains general homogeneity in phonetics, vocabulary, English language public instruction began in India in the 1830s during the rule of the East India Company. In 1835, English replaced Persian as the language of the Company. Lord Macaulay played a role in introducing English and western concepts to education in India. He supported the replacement of Persian by English as the language, the use of English as the medium of instruction in all schools. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, primary-, middle-, and high-schools were opened in districts of British India. In 1857, just before the end of Company rule, universities modelled on the University of London and using English as the medium of instruction were established in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. During subsequent Crown Rule in India, or the British Raj, lasting from 1858 to 1947 and this was driven in part by the gradually increasing hiring of Indians in the civil services. At the time of Indias independence in 1947, English was the only lingua franca in the country. After Indian Independence in 1947, Hindi was declared the first official language, due to protests from Tamil Nadu and other non-Hindi-speaking states, it was decided to temporarily retain English for official purposes until at least 1965. By the end of period, however, opposition from non-Hindi states was still too strong to have Hindi declared the sole language. With this in mind, the English Language Amendment Bill declared English to be an associate language until such time as all non-Hindi States had agreed to its being dropped and this hasnt yet occurred, and it is still widely used
Indian English
5.
Portuguese language
–
Portuguese is a Romance language and the sole official language of Portugal, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It also has co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, and has kept some Celtic phonology. Portuguese is also termed the language of Camões, after Luís Vaz de Camões, one of the greatest literary figures in the Portuguese language and author of the Portuguese epic poem, the museum is the first of its kind in the world. In 2015 the museum was destroyed in a fire, but there are plans to reconstruct it, when the Romans arrived in the Iberian Peninsula in 216 BCE, they brought the Latin language with them, from which all Romance languages descend. Between 409 CE and 711 CE, as the Roman Empire collapsed in Western Europe, Portuguese evolved from the medieval language, known today by linguists as Galician-Portuguese, Old Portuguese or Old Galician, of the northwestern medieval Kingdom of Galicia. It is in Latin administrative documents of the 9th century that written Galician-Portuguese words and this phase is known as Proto-Portuguese, which lasted from the 9th century until the 12th-century independence of the County of Portugal from the Kingdom of León, by then reigning over Galicia. In the first part of the Galician-Portuguese period, the language was used for documents. For some time, it was the language of preference for poetry in Christian Hispania. Portugal became an independent kingdom in 1139, under King Afonso I of Portugal, in the second period of Old Portuguese, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the Portuguese discoveries, the language was taken to many regions of Africa, Asia and the Americas. The language continued to be popular in parts of Asia until the 19th century, some Portuguese-speaking Christian communities in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Indonesia preserved their language even after they were isolated from Portugal. The end of the Old Portuguese period was marked by the publication of the Cancioneiro Geral by Garcia de Resende, Most literate Portuguese speakers were also literate in Latin, and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing—and eventually speech—in Portuguese. Portuguese is the language of the majority of people in Brazil and Portugal, perhaps 75% of the population of Angola speaks Portuguese natively, and 85% are fluent. Just over 40% of the population of Mozambique are native speakers of Portuguese, Portuguese is also spoken natively by 30% of the population in Guinea-Bissau, and a Portuguese-based creole is understood by all. No data is available for Cape Verde, but almost all the population is bilingual, there are also significant Portuguese speaking immigrant communities in many countries including Andorra, Bermuda, Canada, France, Japan, Jersey, Namibia, Paraguay, Macau, Switzerland, Venezuela. In some parts of former Portuguese India, namely Goa and Daman and Diu, in 2014, an estimated 1,500 students were learning Portuguese in Goa. Equatorial Guinea made an application for full membership to the CPLP in June 2010. In 2011, Portuguese became its official language and, in July 2014. Portuguese is a subject in The school curriculum in Uruguay
Portuguese language
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Multilingual sign in Japanese, Portuguese, and English in
Oizumi,
Japan. Return immigration of
Japanese Brazilians has led to a large Portuguese-speaking community in the town.
Portuguese language
–
Percentage of worldwide Portuguese speakers per country.
Portuguese language
–
Library of the
Mafra National Palace, Portugal
Portuguese language
–
Baroque Library of the
Coimbra University, Portugal
6.
French language
–
French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. It descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire, as did all Romance languages, French has evolved from Gallo-Romance, the spoken Latin in Gaul, and more specifically in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues doïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to Frances past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, a French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French. French is a language in 29 countries, most of which are members of la francophonie. As of 2015, 40% of the population is in Europe, 35% in sub-Saharan Africa, 15% in North Africa and the Middle East, 8% in the Americas. French is the fourth-most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union, 1/5 of Europeans who do not have French as a mother tongue speak French as a second language. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 17th and 18th century onward, French was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, most second-language speakers reside in Francophone Africa, in particular Gabon, Algeria, Mauritius, Senegal and Ivory Coast. In 2015, French was estimated to have 77 to 110 million native speakers, approximately 274 million people are able to speak the language. The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie estimates 700 million by 2050, in 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek ranked French the third most useful language for business, after English and Standard Mandarin Chinese. Under the Constitution of France, French has been the language of the Republic since 1992. France mandates the use of French in official government publications, public education except in specific cases, French is one of the four official languages of Switzerland and is spoken in the western part of Switzerland called Romandie, of which Geneva is the largest city. French is the language of about 23% of the Swiss population. French is also a language of Luxembourg, Monaco, and Aosta Valley, while French dialects remain spoken by minorities on the Channel Islands. A plurality of the worlds French-speaking population lives in Africa and this number does not include the people living in non-Francophone African countries who have learned French as a foreign language. Due to the rise of French in Africa, the total French-speaking population worldwide is expected to reach 700 million people in 2050, French is the fastest growing language on the continent. French is mostly a language in Africa, but it has become a first language in some urban areas, such as the region of Abidjan, Ivory Coast and in Libreville. There is not a single African French, but multiple forms that diverged through contact with various indigenous African languages, sub-Saharan Africa is the region where the French language is most likely to expand, because of the expansion of education and rapid population growth
French language
–
The
"arrêt" signs (French for "stop") are used in
Canada while the international stop, which is also a valid French word, is used in France as well as other French-speaking countries and regions.
French language
–
Regions where French is the main language
French language
–
Town sign in
Standard Arabic and French at the entrance of
Rechmaya in
Lebanon.
French language
–
An obsolete 100
Lebanese pound note with the French language inscriptions "Banque du Liban" and "Cent livres".
7.
Antillean Creole French
–
Antillean Creole is a French-based creole, which is primarily spoken in the Lesser Antilles. Its grammar and vocabulary include elements of Carib and African languages, Antillean Creole is related to Haitian Creole but has a number of distinctive features, however, they are mutually intelligible. The language was more widely spoken in the Lesser Antilles. While the islands of Dominica and Saint Lucia are officially English-speaking, there are efforts to preserve the use of Antillean Creole, as well as in Trinidad & Tobago and its neighbour, Venezuela. In recent decades, Creole has gone from being seen as a sign of lower status, banned in school playgrounds. Since the 1970s, there has been a revival of Creole in the French-speaking islands of the Lesser Antilles, with writers such as Raphaël Confiant. Edouard Glissant has written theoretically and poetically about its significance and its history, Dominican, Grenadian, St. Lucian, Trinidadian, Brazilian and Venezuelan speakers of Antillean Creole call the language patois. It is also spoken in various Creole-speaking immigrant communities in the United States Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, Antillean Creole has approximately 1 million speakers and is a means of communication for migrant populations traveling between neighbouring English- and French-speaking territories. Pierre Belain dEsnambuc was a French trader and adventurer in the Caribbean who established the first permanent French colony, Saint-Pierre, Belain sailed to the Caribbean in 1625, hoping to establish a French settlement on the island of St. Christopher. In 1626, he returned to France, where he won the support of Cardinal Richelieu to establish French colonies in the region, Richelieu became a shareholder in the Compagnie de Saint-Christophe, created to accomplish this with dEsnambuc at its head. The company was not particularly successful, and Richelieu had it reorganized as the Compagnie des Îles de lAmérique, in 1635, dEsnambuc sailed to Martinique with one hundred French settlers to clear land for sugarcane plantations. After six months on Martinique, dEsnambuc returned to St. Christopher and his nephew, Jacques Dyel du Parquet, inherited dEsnambucs authority over the French settlements in the Caribbean. Dyel du Parquet became governor of the island and he remained in Martinique and did not concern himself with the other islands. The French permanently settled on Martinique and Guadeloupe after being driven off Saint Kitts, Fort Royal on Martinique was a major port for French battle ships in the region from which the French were able to explore the region. In 1638, Dyel du Parquet decided to have Fort Saint Louis built to protect the city against enemy attacks, the king would name the governor general of the company, and the company would name he governors of the various islands. However, by the late 1640s, Mazarin had little interest in colonial affairs, in 1651, it dissolved itself, selling its exploitation rights to various parties. The Du Paquet family bought Martinique, Grenada, and Saint Lucia for 60,000 livres, the sieur dHouël bought Guadeloupe, Marie-Galante, La Desirade and the Saintes. The Knights of Malta bought Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin, which were made dependencies of Guadeloupe, in 1665, the Knights sold the islands that they had acquired to the newly formed Compagnie des Indes occidentales
Antillean Creole French
–
Road sign in residential area in Guadeloupe. Slow down. Children are playing here.
8.
Dutch language
–
It is the third most widely spoken Germanic language, after English and German. Dutch is one of the closest relatives of both German and English and is said to be roughly in between them, Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and incorporates more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English. In both Belgium and the Netherlands, the official name for Dutch is Nederlands, and its dialects have their own names, e. g. Hollands, West-Vlaams. The use of the word Vlaams to describe Standard Dutch for the variations prevalent in Flanders and used there, however, is common in the Netherlands, the Dutch language has been known under a variety of names. It derived from the Old Germanic word theudisk, one of the first names used for the non-Romance languages of Western Europe. It literarily means the language of the people, that is. The term was used as opposed to Latin, the language of writing. In the first text in which it is found, dating from 784, later, theudisca appeared also in the Oaths of Strasbourg to refer to the Germanic portion of the oath. This led inevitably to confusion since similar terms referred to different languages, owing to Dutch commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries, the English term came to refer exclusively to the Dutch. A notable exception is Pennsylvania Dutch, which is a West Central German variety called Deitsch by its speakers, Jersey Dutch, on the other hand, as spoken until the 1950s in New Jersey, is a Dutch-based creole. In Dutch itself, Diets went out of common use - although Platdiets is still used for the transitional Limburgish-Ripuarian Low Dietsch dialects in northeast Belgium, Nederlands, the official Dutch word for Dutch, did not become firmly established until the 19th century. This designation had been in use as far back as the end of the 15th century, one of them was it reflected a distinction with Hoogduits, High Dutch, meaning the language spoken in Germany. The Hoog was later dropped, and thus, Duits narrowed down in meaning to refer to the German language. g, in English, too, Netherlandic is regarded as a more accurate term for the Dutch language, but is hardly ever used. Old Dutch branched off more or less around the same time Old English, Old High German, Old Frisian and Old Saxon did. During that period, it forced Old Frisian back from the western coast to the north of the Low Countries, on the other hand, Dutch has been replaced in adjacent lands in nowadays France and Germany. The division in Old, Middle and Modern Dutch is mostly conventional, one of the few moments linguists can detect somewhat of a revolution is when the Dutch standard language emerged and quickly established itself. This is assumed to have taken place in approximately the mid-first millennium BCE in the pre-Roman Northern European Iron Age, the Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups, East, West, and North Germanic. They remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period, Dutch is part of the West Germanic group, which also includes English, Scots, Frisian, Low German and High German
Dutch language
–
The Utrecht baptismal vow Forsachistu diobolae...
Dutch language
–
Distribution of the Dutch language and its dialects in
Western Europe
Dutch language
–
Second edition of this column decorated with a title of
Charles V 's portrait, with archaic Dutch inscriptions
Dutch language
–
Dutch language street sign in the Netherlands
9.
Hindi
–
Hindi, or Modern Standard Hindi is a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language. Along with the English language, Hindi written in the Devanagari script, is the language of the Government of India. It is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India, Hindi is the lingua franca of the so-called Hindi belt of India. Outside India, it is a language which is known as Fiji Hindi in Fiji, and is a recognised regional language in Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana. Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, apart from specialized vocabulary, Hindi is mutually intelligible with Standard Urdu, another recognized register of Hindustani. Part XVII of the Indian Constitution deals with Official Language, under Article 343, official language of the Union has been prescribed, which includes Hindi in Devanagari script and English. Gujarat High Court, in 2010, has observed that there was nothing on record to suggest that any provision has been made or order issued declaring Hindi as a language of India. Article 343 of the Indian constitution states The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script, the form of numerals to be used for the official purposes of the Union shall be the international form of Indian numerals. It was envisioned that Hindi would become the working language of the Union Government by 1965. Each may also designate a co-official language, in Uttar Pradesh, for instance, depending on the formation in power. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of language in the following Union Territories, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu. National-language status for Hindi is a long-debated theme, an Indian court clarified that Hindi is not the national language of India because the constitution does not mention it as such. Outside Asia, Hindi is a language in Fiji as per the 1997 Constitution of Fiji. It is spoken by 380,000 people in Fiji, Hindi is also spoken by a large population of Madheshis of Nepal. Hindi is quite easy to understand for some Pakistanis, who speak Urdu, apart from this, Hindi is spoken by the large Indian diaspora which hails from, or has its origin from the Hindi Belt of India. Like other Indo-Aryan languages, Hindi is considered to be a descendant of an early form of Sanskrit, through Sauraseni Prakrit. It has been influenced by Dravidian languages, Turkic languages, Persian, Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi emerged as Apabhramsha, a degenerated form of Prakrit, in the 7th century A. D. By the 10th century A. D. it became stable, Braj Bhasha, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Khari Boli etc. are the dialects of Hindi
Hindi
–
The word "Hindi" in
Devanagari script
10.
Malayalam
–
Malayalam /mʌləˈjɑːləm/ is a language spoken in India, predominantly in the state of Kerala. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and was designated as a Classical Language in India in 2013 and it was developed to the current form mainly by the influence of the poet Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan in the 16th century. Malayalam has official status in the state of Kerala and in the union territories of Lakshadweep. It belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is spoken by some 38 million people, according to one theory, Malayalam originated from Middle Tamil in the 7th century. However, the current understanding proposes the separation of Malayalam from Proto-Dravidian in the pre-historic era, Malayalam incorporated many elements from Sanskrit through the ages. Before Malayalam came into being, Old Tamil was used in literature and courts of a region called Tamilakam, including present day Kerala state, silappatikaramit was written by Chera prince Ilango Adigal from Chunkaparra, and is considered a classic in Sangam literature. Modern Malayalam still preserves many words from the ancient Tamil vocabulary of Sangam literature, the earliest script used to write Malayalam was the Vatteluttu alphabet, and later the Kolezhuttu, which derived from it. As Malayalam began to borrow words as well as the rules of grammar from Sanskrit. This developed into the modern Malayalam script, many medieval liturgical texts were written in an admixture of Sanskrit and early Malayalam, called Manipravalam. The oldest literary work in Malayalam, distinct from the Tamil tradition, is dated from between the 9th and 11th centuries, the first travelogue in any Indian language is the Malayalam Varthamanappusthakam, written by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar in 1785. Due to its lineage deriving from both Tamil and Sanskrit, the Malayalam script has the largest number of letters among the Indian language orthographies, the Malayalam script includes letters capable of representing almost all the sounds of all Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages. Malayalam serves as a language on the islands including the Mahl-dominated Minicoy Island. The word Malayalam originated from the Sanskrit resp, Malayalam words malai or mala, meaning hill, and elam, meaning region. Malayalam thus translates as hill region and used to refer to the land of the Chera dynasty, the language Malayalam is alternatively called Alealum, Malayalani, Malayali, Malean, Maliyad, and Mallealle. The word Malayalam originally meant only for the name of the region, Malayanma or Malayayma represented the language. With the emergence of modern Malayalam language, the name of the language started to be known by the name of the region, hence now, the word Malayanma is considered by some to represent the olden Malayalam language. The language got the name Malayalam during the mid 19th century, the origin of Malayalam, an independent offshoot of the proto-Dravidian language, has been and continues to be an engaging pursuit among comparative historical linguists. Together with Tamil, Toda, Kannada and Tulu, Malayalam belongs to the group of Dravidian languages
Malayalam
–
Cover page of Nasranikal okkekkum ariyendunna samkshepavedartham which is the first book to be printed in Malayalam in 1772.
Malayalam
–
Malayalam-speaking area
Malayalam
–
Thunchathu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan
Malayalam
–
Shakuntala writes to Dushyanta. Painting by
Raja Ravi Varma. The poetry was translated by
Kerala Varma as
Abhijnanasakuntalam
11.
Bengali language
–
Bengali, also known by its endonym Bangla, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia. With over 210 million speakers, Bengali is the seventh most spoken language in the world. Dominant in the last group was Persian, which was also the source of some grammatical forms, more recent studies suggest that the use of native and foreign words has been increasing, mainly because of the preference of Bengali speakers for the colloquial style. Today, Bengali is the language spoken in Bangladesh and the second most spoken language in India. Both the national anthems of Bangladesh and India were composed in Bengali, in 1952, the Bengali Language Movement successfully pushed for the languages official status in the Dominion of Pakistan. In 1999, UNESCO recognized 21 February as International Mother Language Day in recognition of the movement in East Pakistan. Language is an important element of Bengali identity and binds together a diverse region. Sanskrit was spoken in Bengal since the first millennium BCE, during the Gupta Empire, Bengal was a hub of Sanskrit literature. The Middle Indo-Aryan dialects were spoken in Bengal in the first millennium when the region was a part of the Magadha Realm and these dialects were called Magadhi Prakrit. They eventually evolved into Ardha Magadhi, Ardha Magadhi began to give way to what are called Apabhraṃśa languages at the end of the first millennium. Along with other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Bengali evolved circa 1000–1200 AD from Sanskrit, for example, Ardhamagadhi is believed to have evolved into Abahatta around the 6th century, which competed with the ancestor of Bengali for some time. Proto-Bengali was the language of the Pala Empire and the Sena dynasty, during the medieval period, Middle Bengali was characterized by the elision of word-final অ ô, the spread of compound verbs and Arabic and Persian influences. Bengali was a court language of the Sultanate of Bengal. Muslim rulers promoted the development of Bengali as part of efforts to Islamize. Bengali became the most spoken language in the Sultanate. This period saw borrowing of Perso-Arabic terms into Bengali vocabulary, major texts of Middle Bengali include Chandidas Shreekrishna Kirtana. The modern literary form of Bengali was developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries based on the dialect spoken in the Nadia region, a west-central Bengali dialect. Bengali presents a case of diglossia, with the literary
Bengali language
–
Shohid Minar, or the Martyr's monument, in
Dhaka, commemorates the struggle for the Bengali language.
Bengali language
–
The word "Bangla" in the
Bengali alphabet
Bengali language
–
Pages from the
Charyapada.
Bengali language
–
An example of handwritten Bengali. Part of a poem written in Bengali (and with its English translation below each Bengali paragraph) by Nobel Laureate
Rabindranath Tagore in 1926 in Hungary.
12.
Tamil language
–
Tamil is a Dravidian language predominantly spoken by the Tamil people of India and Sri Lanka, and also by the Tamil diaspora, Sri Lankan Moors, Burghers, Douglas, and Chindians. Tamil is a language of two countries, Singapore and Sri Lanka. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and it is also used as one of the languages of education in Malaysia, along with English, Malay and Mandarin. Tamil is also spoken by significant minorities in the four other South Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and it is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. Tamil is one of the classical languages in the world. Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions from 500 BC have been found on Adichanallur and 2 and it has been described as the only language of contemporary India which is recognizably continuous with a classical past. The variety and quality of classical Tamil literature has led to it being described as one of the classical traditions. A recorded Tamil literature has been documented for over 2000 years, the earliest period of Tamil literature, Sangam literature, is dated from ca.300 BC – AD300. It has the oldest extant literature among other Dravidian languages, the earliest epigraphic records found on rock edicts and hero stones date from around the 3rd century BC. More than 55% of the inscriptions found by the Archaeological Survey of India are in the Tamil language. Tamil language inscriptions written in Brahmi script have been discovered in Sri Lanka, the two earliest manuscripts from India, acknowledged and registered by the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 1997 and 2005, were written in Tamil. In 1578, Portuguese Christian missionaries published a Tamil prayer book in old Tamil script named Thambiraan Vanakkam, the Tamil Lexicon, published by the University of Madras, was one of the earliest dictionaries published in the Indian languages. According to a 2001 survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, Tamil belongs to the southern branch of the Dravidian languages, a family of around 26 languages native to the Indian subcontinent. It is also classified as being part of a Tamil language family, the closest major relative of Tamil is Malayalam, the two began diverging around the 9th century CE. According to linguists like Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, Tamil, as a Dravidian language, descends from Proto-Dravidian, linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of the associated with the Neolithic complexes of South India. The next phase in the reconstructed proto-history of Tamil is Proto-South Dravidian, the linguistic evidence suggests that Proto-South Dravidian was spoken around the middle of the second millennium BC, and that proto-Tamil emerged around the 3rd century BC. The earliest epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally taken to have been shortly thereafter
Tamil language
–
Silver coin of king
Vashishtiputra Sātakarni (c. AD 160). Obv: Bust of king; Rev: Ujjain/Sātavāhana symbol, crescented six-arch chaitya hill and river with
Tamil Brahmi script
Tamil language
–
Tamil
Tamil language
–
Agastya, Chairman of first Tamil
Sangam,
Madurai,
Pandiya Kingdom
Tamil language
–
Mangulam Tamil Brahmi inscription
13.
Punjabi language
–
Punjabi /pʌnˈdʒɑːbi/ is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by over 100 million native speakers worldwide, making it the 10th most widely spoken language in the world. It is the language of the Punjabi people who inhabit the historical Punjab region of India. Among the Indo-European languages it is unusual in being a tonal language, Punjabi is the most widely spoken language in Pakistan, the 11th most widely spoken in India and the third-most spoken native language in the Indian Subcontinent. Punjabi is the fourth-most spoken language in the United Kingdom and third-most spoken native language in Canada, the language also has a significant presence in the United Arab Emirates, United States, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. The Punjabi language is written in the Shahmukhi and Gurmukhi scripts, 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. Panj is cognate with Sanskrit pañca and Greek πέντε five, the historical Punjab region, now divided between India and Pakistan, is defined physiographically by the Indus River and these five tributaries. One of the five, the Beas River, is a tributary of another, Punjabi developed from Sanskrit through Prakrit language and later Apabhraṃśa From 600 BC Sanskrit gave birth to many regional languages in different parts of India. These all languages are called Prakrit language collectively, Shauraseni Prakrit was one of these Prakrit languages, which was spoken in north and north-western India and Punjabi and western dialects of Hindi developed from this Prakrit. Later in northern India Shauraseni Prakrit gave rise to Shauraseni Aparbhsha, Punjabi emerged as an Apabhramsha, a degenerated form of Prakrit, in the 7th century A. D. and became stable by the 10th century. By the 10th century, many Nath poets were associated with earlier Punjabi works, Arabic and Persian influence in the historical Punjab region began with the late first millennium Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent. The Persian language was introduced in the subcontinent a few centuries later by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic, many Persian and Arabic words were incorporated in Punjabi. Punjabi has more Persian and Arabic vocabulary than Bengali, Marathi, later, it was influenced by Portuguese and English, though these influences have been minor in comparison to Persian and Arabic. However, in India English words in the language are more widespread than Hindi. Punjabi is the most widely spoken language in Pakistan, the seventh-most widely spoken in India, Punjabi is the most widely spoken language in Pakistan. Punjabi is the language in the Punjab Province of Pakistan. Punjabi is spoken as a language by over 44. 15% of Pakistanis. About 70. 0% of the people of Pakistan speak Punjabi as either their first or second language, Lahore, the capital of the Punjab Province of Pakistan, is the largest Punjabi-speaking city in the world. 86% of the population of Lahore is native Punjabi and Islamabad
Punjabi language
–
Varan Gyan Ratnavali by 16th century historian
Bhai Gurdas
Punjabi language
–
Gurmukhi alphabetic excluding vowels.
Punjabi language
–
Administrative divisions of Punjab Pakistan
Punjabi language
–
Southall Station (United Kingdom) sign in Punjabi, in the Gurmukhī script
14.
Gujarati language
–
Gujarati /ɡʊdʒəˈrɑːti/ is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Indian state of Gujarat. It is part of the greater Indo-European language family, Gujarati is descended from Old Gujarati. In India, it is the language in the state of Gujarat, as well as an official language in the union territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra. Gujarati is the language of the Gujjars, who had ruled Rajputana, according to the Central Intelligence Agency,4. 5% of the Indian population speaks Gujarati, which amounts to 54.6 million speakers in India. There are about 65.5 million speakers of Gujarati worldwide, Gujarati was the first language of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Gujarati is a modern IA language evolved from Sanskrit, Central, in Gujarati/Rajasthani, Western Hindi, and Punjabi/Lahanda/Sindhi, on the basis of innovation of auxiliary verbs and postpositions in Gujarati/Rajasthani. Gujarati/Rajasthani into Gujarati and Rajasthani through development of such characteristics as auxiliary ch-, grammatically, a new plural marker of -o developed. In literature, the quarter of the 19th century saw a series of milestones for Gujarati. The printing was introduced in Gujarati in 1812, the first printed book published was the Gujarati translation of Dabestan-e Mazaheb prepared and printed by Parsi priest Fardunjee Marzban in 1815. 1822, first Gujarati newspaper, Mumbai Samachar, the oldest newspaper in India still in circulation, 1840s, personal diary composition, Nityanondh, Durgaram Mehta. 1845, first modern Gujarati poem, Bapani Piparu, Dalpatram 1851, first essay, Mandaḷī Maḷvāthi Thātā Lābh, Narmadashankar Dave 1866, first original novel, Karaṇ Ghelo, Nandshankar Mehta. 1866, first social novel, Sasu Vahu ni Ladai, Mahipatram Rupram Nilkanth 1866, first autobiography, Mārī Hakīkat,1900, first original short story, Shantidas, Ambalal Desai. Of the approximately 46 million speakers of Gujarati in 1997, roughly 45, however, Gujarati community leaders in Pakistan claim that there are 3 million Gujarati speakers in Karachi. There is an amount of Mauritian population and a large amount of Réunion Island people who are from Gujarati descent among which some of them still speak Gujarati. According to the 2011 census, Gujarati is the seventeenth most spoken language in the Greater Toronto Area, most, with British passports, settled in the UK. Gujarati is offered as a GCSE subject for students in the UK, a distribution of the geographical area can be found in Linguistic Survey of India by George A. Grierson. Gujarati is one of the recognized constitutional languages and fourteen regional languages of India. It is officially recognized in the state of Gujarat, India, in A simplified grammar of the Gujarati language by William Tisdall, two major dialects of Gujarati are mentioned, a standard Hindu dialect and a Parsi dialect
Gujarati language
Gujarati language
–
Distribution of native Gujarati speakers in India
Gujarati language
Gujarati language
–
India Square,
Jersey City,
New Jersey, USA. Gujarati has achieved high linguistic prominence in many urban districts worldwide, including the
New York City Metropolitan Area.
15.
Kashmiri language
–
Kashmiri, or Koshur, is a language from the Dardic subgroup of the Indo-Aryan languages and it is spoken primarily in the Kashmir Valley and Chenab valley of Jammu and Kashmir. There are approximately 5,527,698 speakers throughout India, according to the 1998 Census there were 132,450 Kashmiri speakers in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan. According to Professor Khawaja Abdul Rehman the Kashmiri language, spoken in the Neelum Valley, is on the verge of dying out, Kashmiri is close to other Dardic languages spoken in Gilgit, Pakistan and in northern regions of Kargil, India. Outside the Dardic group, tonal aspects and loanwords of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, the Kashmiri language is one of the 22 scheduled languages of India, and is a part of the eighth Schedule in the constitution of the Jammu and Kashmir. Along with other languages mentioned in the Sixth Schedule, as well as Hindi and Urdu. Most Kashmiri speakers use Urdu or English as a second language, since November 2008, the Kashmiri language has been made a compulsory subject in all schools in the Valley up to the secondary level. In 1919 George Abraham Grierson wrote that “Kashmiri is the one of the Dardic languages that has a literature”. Kashmiri literature dates back to over 750 years, this is, more-or-less, Kashmiri, like German and Old English and unlike other Indo-Aryan languages, has V2 word order. There are four cases in Kashmiri, nominative, genitive, though Kashmiri has thousands of loan words due to the arrival of Islam in the Valley, however, it remains basically an Indo-Aryan language close to Rigvedic Sanskrit. There is a difference between the Kashmiri spoken by a Hindu and a Muslim. For fire, a traditional Hindu will use the word agun while a Muslim more often use the Arabic word nar. Kashmiri has strong links to Rigvedic Sanskrit, for example, cloud is obur, rain is ruud. Kashmiri retains several features of Old Indo-Aryan that have been lost in other modern Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, for instance, it preserves the dvi- form for prefixes in numbers which is found in Sanskrit, but has been replaced entirely by ba-/bi- in other Indo-Aryan languages. Seventy-two is dusatath in Kashmiri and dvisaptati in Sanskrit, but bahattar in Hindi-Urdu, some vocabulary features that Kashmiri preserves clearly date from the Vedic Sanskrit era and had already been lost even in Classical Sanskrit. This includes the word-form yodvai, which is found in Vedic Sanskrit texts. Classical Sanskrit and modern Indo-Aryan render the word as yadi, certain words in Kashmiri even appear to stem from Indo-Aryan even predating the Vedic period. For instance, there was an /s/ → /h/ consonant shift in some words that had occurred with Vedic Sanskrit. The word rahit in Vedic Sanskrit and modern Hindi-Urdu corresponds to rost in Kashmiri, similarly, sahit corresponds to sost in Kashmiri
Kashmiri language
–
The word "Koshur" in
Sharada script,
Perso-Arabic script and
Devanagari script
16.
Sindhi language
–
Sindhi /ˈsɪndi/ is an Indo-Aryan language of the historical Sindh region, spoken by the Sindhi people. It is the language of the Pakistani province of Sindh. In India, Sindhi is one of the scheduled languages officially recognized by the federal government, most Sindhi speakers are concentrated in Pakistan in the Sindh province, and in India, the Kutch region of the state of Gujarat and in the Ulhasnagar region of the state of Maharashtra. The Sindhi language and other languages of Pakistan are struggling to be officially given the status of national language in Pakistan. Before the inception of Pakistan, Sindhi was the language of Sindh. There are many Sindhi language television channels broadcasting in Pakistan such as KTN, Sindh TV, Awaz Television Network, besides this, Indian television Doordarshan have been asked by the Indian court to start a news channel for Hindu Sindhis of India. Sindhi Computing is the used for the Software developed for the Sindhi language. Sindhi language software such as Sindhi language keyboards have been developed for the Windows OS, various other online websites provide Sindhi keyboard such as, M. B Sindhi keyboard by Majid Bhurgri. The name Sindhi is derived from Sindhu, the name of the Indus River. When Sindh was occupied by British army and was annexed with Bombay, Sir Bartle Frere, the then commissioner of Sindh, issued orders on August 29,1857 advising civil servants in Sindh to qualify examination in Sindhi. He also ordered Sindhi to be used in all official communication, seven-grade education system commonly known as Sindhi-Final was introduced in Sindh. Sindhi Final was made a prerequisite for employment in revenue, police, like other languages of this family, Sindhi has passed through Old Indo-Aryan and Middle Indo-Aryan stages of growth, and it entered the New Indo-Aryan stage around the 10th century CE. In the year 1868, the Bombay Presidency assigned Narayan Jagannath Vaidya to replace the Abjad used in Sindhi, the script was decreed a standard script by the Bombay Presidency thus inciting anarchy in the Muslim majority region. A powerful unrest followed, after which Twelve Martial Laws were imposed by the British authorities, according to Islamic Sindhi tradition, the first translation of the Quran into Sindhi was completed in the year 883 CE /270 AH in Mansura, Sindh. The first extensive Sindhi translation was done by Akhund Azaz Allah Muttalawi, the first to appear in print was by Muhammad Siddiq. Sindhi has a large inventory of both consonants and vowels compared to other languages. Sindhi has 46 consonant phonemes and 16 vowels, the consonant to vowel ratio is around average for worlds languages at 2.8. All plosives, affricates, nasals, the flap and the lateral approximant /l/ have aspirated or breathy voiced counterparts
Sindhi language
Sindhi language
–
Sindhi
17.
Dogri language
–
Dogri speakers are called Dogras, and the Dogri-speaking region is called Duggar. Although formerly treated as a Punjabi dialect, Dogri is now considered to be a member of the Western Pahari group of languages, the language is referred to as Pahari in Pakistan. Unusually for an Indo-European language, Dogri is tonal, a trait it shares with other Western Pahari languages, Dogri has several varieties, all with greater than 80% lexical similarity. Before gaining language status, per the Census of India, Dogri was classified as one of the varieties of Punjabi. Western Pahari languages, Punjabi and Punjabi dialects are frequently tonal and this tonality makes it difficult for speakers of other Indo-Aryan languages to gain facility in Dogri, though native Punjabi speakers may find it easier to make the transition. Some common examples are shown below, in the year 1317, Amir Khusro, the famous Urdu and Persian poet, referred to Duger while describing the languages and dialects of India as follows, Sindhi-o-Lahori-o-Kashmiri-o-Duger. The linguist George Grierson connected the term Duggar with the Rajasthani word Doonger, which means hill and this opinion has lacked support because of the inconsistency of the ostensible changes from Rajasthani to Dogri, and been contradicted by some scholars. Yet another proposal stems from the presence of the word Durger in the Bhuri Singh Museum, in Himachal, Dogri is majorly spoken in Hamirpur, Barsar, Una, Chintpurni, Kangra, and Bilaspur regions. In a subsequent All India Oriental Conference held at Jaipur in 1982 and it was also suggested that the words Duggar and Dogra are common in some parts of Rajasthan. Specifically, it was asserted that areas with a number of forts are called Duggar. The land of Duggar also has a number of forts. An article by Dharam Chand Prashant in the literary magazine Shiraza Dogri suggested that the opinion that the word Duggar is a form of the word Duggarh sounds appropriate. The Turkish Döğer is also the name of a Turkmen Oğuz tribe originating in Central Asia, in Turkey one of the towns named after them can be written as Doker, Duger, Döker and Düğer. In modern times, a notable Dogri translation of the Sanskrit classic mathematical opus Lilavati, by the noted mathematician Bhaskaracharya, was published by the Vidya Vilas Press, Jammu in 1873. As Sanskrit literacy remained confined to a few, the late Maharaja Ranbir Singh had the Lilavati translated into Dogri by Jyotshi Bisheshwar, Dogri has an established tradition of poetry, fiction and dramatic works. Recent poets range from the 18th-century Dogri poet Kavi Dattu in Raja Ranjit Dev’s court to Professor Ram Nath Shastri, Kavi Dattu is highly regarded for his Barah Massa, Kamal Netra, Bhup Bijog and Bir Bilas. Popular recent songs include Pala Shpaiya Dogarya, Manney di Mauj, the noted Pakistani singer Malika Pukhraj had roots in the Duggar region, and her renditions of several Dogri songs continue to be popular in the region. Some devotional songs, or bhajans, composed by Karan Singh have gained increasing popularity over time, Dogri programming features regularly on Radio Kashmir, and Doordarshan broadcasts in Jammu and Kashmir
Dogri language
–
Areas in India and Pakistan where Dogri and related dialects are spoken
18.
Kannada language
–
The language has roughly 40 million native speakers who are called Kannadigas, and a total of 50.8 million speakers according to a 2001 census. It is one of the languages of India and the official. The Kannada language is written using the Kannada script, which evolved from the 5th-century Kadamba script, Kannada is attested epigraphically for about one and a half millennia, and literary Old Kannada flourished in the 6th-century Ganga dynasty and during the 9th-century Rashtrakuta Dynasty. Kannada has a literary history of over a thousand years. Based on the recommendations of the Committee of Linguistic Experts, appointed by the ministry of culture, in July 2011, a centre for the study of classical Kannada was established as part of the Central Institute of Indian Languages at Mysore to facilitate research related to the language. Kannada is a Southern Dravidian language, and according to Dravidian scholar Sanford B, steever, its history can be conventionally divided into three periods, Old Kannada from 450–1200 CE, Middle Kannada from 1200–1700, and Modern Kannada from 1700 to the present. Kannada is influenced to an extent by Sanskrit. Influences of other such as Prakrit and Pali can also be found in the Kannada language. Literary Prakrit seems to have prevailed in Karnataka since ancient times, the vernacular Prakrit-speaking people may have come into contact with Kannada speakers, thus influencing their language, even before Kannada was used for administrative or liturgical purposes. Kannada phonetics, morphology, vocabulary, grammar and syntax show significant influence from these languages, some examples of naturalised words of Prakrit origin in Kannada are, baṇṇa derived from vaṇṇa, hunnime from puṇṇivā. Examples of naturalized Sanskrit words in Kannada are, varṇa, arasu from rajan, paurṇimā, Kannada has numerous borrowed words such as dina, kopa, surya, mukha, nimiṣa and anna. Pre-old Kannada was the language of Banavasi in the early Common Era, the Ashoka rock edict found at Brahmagiri has been suggested to contain words in identifiable Kannada. According to Jain tradition, Brahmi, the daughter of Rishabhadeva, the first Tirthankara of Jainism, invented 18 alphabets, including Kannada, which points to the antiquity of the language. Supporting this tradition, an inscription of about the 9th century CE, containing specimens of different alphabets and it has been claimed that the Greek dramatists of the 5th–4th century BCE were familiar with the Kannada country and language. This would show a far more intimate contact of the Greeks with Kannada culture than with Indian culture elsewhere, the palm manuscripts contained texts written not only in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, but also in Sanskrit and Kannada. In the 150 CE Prakrit book Gaathaa Saptashati, written by Haala Raja, Kannada words like tIr, tuppa, on the Pallava Prakrit inscription of 250 CE of Hire Hadagalis Shivaskandavarman, the Kannada word kOTe transforms into koTTa. In the 350 CE Chandravalli Prakrit inscription, words of Kannada origin like punaaTa, in one more Prakrit inscription of 250 CE found in Malavalli, Kannada towns like vEgooraM, kundamuchchaMDi find a reference. Pliny the Elder was a naval and army commander in the early Roman Empire and he writes about pirates between Muziris and Nitrias
Kannada language
–
The
Halmidi inscription at
Halmidi village, in old-Kannada, is usually dated to AD 450 (
Kadamba Dynasty)
Kannada language
–
Kannada
Kannada language
–
Old-Kannada inscription dated AD 578 (Badami Chalukya dynasty) at
Badami cave temple no.3
Kannada language
–
Old-Kannada inscription of c. AD 726, discovered in
Talakad, from the rule of King Shivamara I or Sripurusha (
Western Ganga Dynasty)
19.
Oriya language
–
Odia or Oriya, both renderings of oḍiā, is a language spoken by 3. 2% of Indias population. Odia is one of the official languages of India, it is the official language of Odisha. The language is spoken by a sizable population of at least 10 million people in Chhattisgarh. Odia is the sixth Indian language to be designated a Classical Language in India on the basis of having a long literary history, the earliest known inscription in Odia dates back to the 10th century AD. The Odia diaspora constitute a number in several countries around the world. Midnapori Odia, Spoken in the undivided Midnapore District of West Bengal, singhbhumi Odia, Spoken in East Singhbhum, West Singhbhum and Saraikela-Kharsawan district of Jharkhand Baleswari Odia, Spoken in Baleswar, Bhadrak and Mayurbhanj district of Odisha. Ganjami Odia, Spoken in Ganjam and Gajapati districts of Odisha, desiya Odia, Spoken in Koraput, Rayagada, Nowrangpur and Malkangiri Districts of Odisha and in the hilly regions of Vishakhapatnam, Vizianagaram District of Andhra Pradesh. Bhatri, Spoken in South-western Odisha and eastern-south Chhattisgarh, halbi, Spoken in undivided Bastar district of Chhattisgarh state is a mixture of Odia and Chatishgarihi tribal languages with major Marathi influence on it. Sounti, Spoken in Northern Odisha and South west Bengal, bathudi, Spoken in Northern Odisha and South west Bengal. Kondhan, A tribal dialect spoken in Western Odisha, laria, Spoken in bordering areas of Chatishgarh and Western Odisha. Aghria, Spoken mostly by the people of Aghria caste in Western Odisha. Bhulia, Tribal form spoken in Western Odisha, sadri, A mixture of Odia and Hindi language with major regional tribal influence. Bodo Parja / Jharia, Tribal dialect of Odia spoken mostly in Koraput district of Southern Odisha, matia, Tribal dialect of Odia spoken in Southern Odisha. Bhuyan, Tribal dialect of Odia spoken in Southern Odisha, reli, Spoken in Southern Odisha and bordering areas of Andhra Pradesh. Kupia, Spoken by Valmiki caste people in the Indian state of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, mostly in Hyderabad, Mahabubnagar, Srikakulam, Vizianagaram, East Godavari, Odia is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Aryan language family. Odia appears to have had little influence from Persian and Arabic. The history of the Odia language is divided into eras, Old Odia, The earliest evidence of Old Odia is found in the 3rd century BC Ashoka edit of Dhauli and 1st century BC Hathigumpha inscription. The old colloquial literature is the Charyapada, poetry written in an Apabhraṃśa ancestral to Odia, Bengali, early Middle Odia, The earliest use of prose can be found in the Madala Panji of the Jagannath Temple at Puri, which dates back to the 12th century
Oriya language
–
A detailed chart depicting evolution of the Odia script as displayed in a museum at
Ratnagiri, Odisha
Oriya language
–
Odia
Oriya language
–
Eastern Hemisphere in the year 200.
Oriya language
–
Governance
20.
Telugu language
–
Telugu is a Dravidian language native to India. It is also spoken by significant minorities in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and it is one of six languages designated a classical language of India by the Government of India. Telugu ranks third by the number of speakers in India. It is one of the scheduled languages of the Republic of India. Approximately 10,000 inscriptions exist in the Telugu language, the speakers of the language call it Telugu or Tenugu. The older forms of the name include Teluṅgu, Tenuṅgu and Teliṅga, the etymology of Telugu is not certain. Some historical scholars have suggested a derivation from Sanskrit triliṅgam, as in Trilinga Desa, tradition holds that Shiva descended as a lingam on three mountains, Kaleshwaram, Srisailam, and Bhimeswaram, which are said to have marked the boundaries of the Trilinga Desa. Atharvana Acharya in the 13th century wrote a grammar of Telugu, Appa Kavi in the 17th century explicitly wrote that Telugu was derived from Trilinga. Scholar Charles P. Brown comments that it was a strange notion as all the predecessors of Appa Kavi had no knowledge of such a derivation. George Abraham Grierson and other linguists doubt this derivation, holding rather that Telugu was the older term, another view holds that tenugu is derived from the proto-Dravidian word ten– south to mean the people who lived in the south/southern direction. The name telugu then, is a result of n -> l alternation established in Telugu, according to the natve tradition Telugu grammar has a hoary past. Sage Kanva was said to be the first grammarian of Telugu, a Rajeswara Sarma discussed the hisoricity and content of Kanvas grammar written in Sanskrit. He cited twenty grammatical aphorisms ascribed to Kanva, and concluded that Kanva wrote an ancient Telugu Grammar which was lost, according to the Russian linguist M. S. Andronov, Telugu split from the Proto-Dravidian languages between 1500 and 1000 BC. According to linguist Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, Telugu, as a Dravidian language, descends from Proto-Dravidian, linguistic reconstruction suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian were of the associated with the Neolithic societies of South India. A legend gives the Lepakshi town a significant place in the Ramayana — this was where the bird Jatayu fell, when Sri Rama reached the spot, he saw the bird and said compassionately, “Le Pakshi” — ‘rise, bird’ in Telugu. This indicates the presence of Telugu Language during Ramayana period, there is a mention of Telugu people or Telugu country in ancient Tamil literature as Telunka Nadu. Telugu words were found in Hebrew literature, inscriptions with Telugu words dating back to 400 BC to 100 BC have been discovered in Bhattiprolu in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh
Telugu language
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Wall painting at a shop in Telangana, India. It first shows the painted party symbols of all the major political parties in the region during the nationwide elections in India in 2014. It also has a Telugu inscription showing availability of political flags, banners, caps, badges and other election material.
Telugu language
–
Distribution of native Telugu speakers in India (as of 1961)
Telugu language
–
Numeral systems
21.
Tulu language
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It belongs to the Dravidian family of languages. In India, circa 2 million people speak it as their native language, according to one estimate reported in 2009, Tulu is currently spoken by three to five million native speakers in the world. Native speakers of Tulu are referred to as Tuluva or Tulu people, separated early from Proto-South Dravidian, Tulu has several features not found in Tamil–Kannada. For example, it has the pluperfect and the perfect, like French or Spanish. Robert Caldwell, in his pioneering work A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages, called this language peculiar, according to him, Tulu is one of the most highly developed languages of the Dravidian family. It looks as if it had cultivated for its own sake. The language has a lot of literature and a rich oral literature such as the Epic of Siri. Tulu is the spoken language in Tulu Nadu, a region comprising the districts of Udupi and Dakshina Kannada in the west of the state of Karnataka. Apart from Tulu Nadu, a significant emigrant population of Tuluva people is found in Maharashtra, Bangalore, the English-speaking world, apart from Kannada script, historically Tulu Brahmins used the Tigalari script, to write Sanskrit, but some Tulu works are available. A Wikipedia in Tulu is currently being developed, Tulu belongs to the southern branch of the family of Dravidian languages. It descends directly from Proto-Southern Dravidian, which in turn directly from Proto-Dravidian. Linguists Purushottama Bilimale have suggested that the word Tulu means that which is connected with water, based on words from Tulu, Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam. Tulave means watery in Tulu, and, other water-related words in Tulu include talipu, teli, teLi, teLpu, tuLipu, tulavu, in Kannada, there are words such as tuLuku and toLe. In Tamil, thuli means drop of water, and, thulli means the same in Malayalam, the oldest available inscriptions in Tulu are from the period between 14th to 15th century AD. These inscriptions are in the Tigalari script and are found in areas in, another group of inscriptions are found in the Ullur Subrahmanya Temple near Kundapura. Panniyadi and L. V. Ramaswami Iyer as well as P. S, Subrahmanya suggested that Tulu is among the oldest languages in the Dravidian family which branched independently from its Proto-Dravidian roots nearly 2,000 years ago. This assertion is based on the fact that Tulu still preserves many aspects of the Proto-Dravidian language, in the Halmidi inscriptions one finds mention of the Tulu country as the kingdom of the Alupas. The region was known to the Greeks of the 2nd century as Tolokoyra
Tulu language
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Tulu
Tulu language
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Distribution of native Tulu speakers in India
Tulu language
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Map Showing ancient Tulu kingdom of Alva Kheda
Tulu language
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A
Yakshagana Artist
22.
Assamese language
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It is one of the easternmost of the Indo-Aryan languages it is spoken by over 13 million native speakers, and serves as a lingua franca in the region. It is also spoken in parts of Arunachal Pradesh and other northeast Indian states, Nagamese, an Assamese-based Creole language is widely used in Nagaland and parts of Assam. Nefamese is an Assamese-based pidgin used in Arunachal Pradesh, small pockets of Assamese speakers can be found in Bangladesh. In the past, it was the language of the Ahom kingdom from the 17th century. The origin of Assamese language is not clear, some believe that it originated from Kamarupi Prakrit used in ancient Kamarupa Kingdom. Its sister languages include Maithali, Odia, Chittagonian, Sylheti and it is written in the Assamese script, an abugida system, from left to right, with a large number of typographic ligatures. Assamese language was in use much before Bengali language was developed as Kamrupa was mentioned in Mahabharata, kampura has its northern boundary at Koshi River and Orissa. Assamese influence can be easily felt in Oriya and Maithali languages. Assamese originated in Old Indo-Aryan dialects, though the nature of its origin. It is generally believed that Assamese and the Kamatapuri lects derive from the Kamarupa dialect of Eastern Magadhi Prakrit. </ref>By keeping to the north of the Ganges, the Indo-Aryan language in Kamarupa had differentiated by the 7th-century, before it did in Bengal or Orissa. These changes were due to non-Indo-Aryan speakers adopting the language. The evidence of language is found in the Prakritisms of the Kamarupa inscriptions. In these works, Assamese features coexist with features from other Modern Indian Languages, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, songs – Borgeets, dramas – Ankiya Naat and the first prose writings were composed. The literary language, based on the dialects of Assam moved to the court of the Ahom kingdom in the seventeenth century. This period saw the development of prose infused with colloquial forms. The literary language, having become infused with the idiom, became the standard literary form in the nineteenth century. As the political and commercial center shifted to Guwahati after the mid-twentieth century, Assamese is native to Assam Valley which includes Upper-Assam and Lower-Assam regions of the state of Assam. It is also spoken in states of Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, presence of Assamese script can be found in Rakhine state of present Myanmar
Assamese language
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Silver rupee of Rudra Sinha in Assamese
Assamese language
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Genealogically, Assamese belongs to the group of Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, here marked in yellow.
23.
Konkani language
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Konkani is an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-European family of languages and is spoken along the South western coast of India. It is one of the 22 scheduled languages mentioned in the 8th schedule of the Indian Constitution, the first Konkani inscription is dated 1187 A. D. It is a minority language in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Kerala, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Konkani is a member of the southern Indo-Aryan language group. It retains elements of Old Indo-Aryan structures and shows similarities with both western and eastern Indo-Aryan languages and it is quite possible that Old Konkani was just referred to as Prakrit by its speakers. Among the inscriptions at the foot of the statue of Bahubali at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka are two lines reading thus, Sri Chamundaraje Karaviyale and Sri Ganga raje sutthale karaviyale. The first line was inscribed circa 981 AD and the line in 116-17 AD. The language of these lines is Konkani according to Dr. S. B, considering these arguments, these inscriptions at Sravanabelegola may be considered the earliest Konkani inscriptions in Devanagari script. Reference to the name Konkani is not found in prior to 13th century. The first reference of the name Konkani is in Abhanga 263 of the 13th century Marathi saint poet, Konkani has been known by a variety of names, Canarim, Concanim, Gomantaki, Bramana, and Goani. It is called Amchi Bhas by native speakers, and Govi or Goenchi Bhas by others, learned Marathi speakers tend to call it Gomantaki. Konkani was commonly referred to as Lingua Canarim by the Portuguese, the Portuguese later started referring to Konkani as Lingua Concanim. The name Canarim or Lingua Canarim, which is how the 16th century European Jesuit and it is possible that the term is derived from the Persian word for coast, kinara, if so, it would mean the language of the coast. The problem is that this term overlaps with Kanarese or Kannada, All the European authors, however, recognised two forms of the language in Goa, the plebeian, called Canarim, and the more regular, called Lingua Canarim Brámana or simply Brámana de Goa. The latter was the choice of the Europeans, and also of other castes, for writing, sermons. There are different views as to the origin of the word Konkan, the word Konkan comes from the Kukkana tribe, who were the original inhabitants of the land Konkani originated from. According to some Hindu legends, Parashurama shot his arrow into the sea, the new piece of land thus recovered came to be known as Konkan meaning piece of earth or corner of earth, kōṇa + kaṇa. This legend is mentioned in Sahyadrikhanda of the Skanda Purana, Konkan is synonymous with Konkani, but it is today divided into three states, Maharashtra, Goa, and Karnataka. Olivinho Gomes in his essay Medieval Konkani Literature also mentions the Mundari substratum, Goan Indologist Ramakrishna Shenvi Dhume identified many Austroloid Munda words in Konkani, like mund, mundkar, dhumak, goem-bab
Konkani language
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Konkani Inscription with 'Maee Shenvi' of 1413 AD,
Nagueshi, Goa.
Konkani language
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Distribution of native Konkani speakers in India
Konkani language
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Modern day Goan Konkani in
Devanagari
Konkani language
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The campus of the
Thomas Stephens Konknni Kendr (TSKK), a research institute working on issues related to the Konkani language, located at Alto Porvorim, near
Panaji in Goa
24.
Nepali language
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Nepali, originally known as Khas Kura, Parbate Bhasa or Gorkhali, is an Indo-Aryan language. It is the language and de facto lingua franca of Nepal. It is also spoken in parts of India, particularly by Indian Gorkha. In India, Nepali language is listed in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India having a status in the Indian state of Sikkim. Nepali developed in proximity to a number of Indo-Aryan languages, most notably the Pahari languages and Magahi, however, owing to Nepals geographical area, it has also been influenced by Tibeto-Burman languages. Nepali is mainly differentiated from Central Pahari, both in grammar and vocabulary, by Tibeto-Burman idioms owing to close contact with the language group. Nepali language shares 40% lexical similarity with the Bengali language, in the nineteenth century, the British resident at Kathmandu Brian Houghton Hodgson observed that it was, in eight-tenths of its vocabulary, substantially Hindi. Historically, the language was first called the Khas language, then Gorkhali or Gurkhali before the term Nepali was adopted, in 1920, during Rana regime in Nepal, the term Nepal which resembled the Nepal Mandala was taken from its people. Soon after that, Nepal Bhasa was renamed into Newari and Parbate/Khas language took over as Nepali language, other names include Parbatiya and Dzongkha Lhotshammikha. It is also known as the Khey language or Partya language among the Newar people and Pahari language among Madhesi, however, due to protests for identity, Newars have restored their languages name as Nepal Bhasa and voices have been raise to re-instate Parbate language in its original name. Nepali developed a significant literature within a period of a hundred years in the 19th century. This literary explosion was fueled by Adhyatma Ramayana, Sundarananda Bara, Birsikka, a collection of folk tales. The contribution of trio-laureates Lekhnath Paudyal, Laxmi Prasad Devkota, the contribution of expatriate writers outside Nepal, especially in Darjeeling and Varanasi in India, is also notable. In the past decade, there have been many contributions to Nepali literature from the Nepali diaspora in Asia, Europe, America, according to the 2011 national census,44.6 percent of the population of Nepal speaks Nepali as a first language. The Ethnologue website reports 12,300,000 speakers within Nepal, Nepali is traditionally spoken in the Hill Region of Nepal, especially in the western part of the country. Although the Newar language dominated the Kathmandu valley, Nepali is currently the most dominant, Nepali is used in government and as the everyday language of a growing portion of the local population. Nevertheless, the use of Nepali in the courts and government of Nepal is being challenged. Recognition of other languages in Nepal was one of the objectives of the Communist Party of Nepals long war
Nepali language
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Calligraphy
Nepali language
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The word "Nepali" written in
Devanagari
25.
Marathi language
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Marathi is an Indian language spoken predominantly by the Marathi people of Maharashtra. It is the language and co-official language in the Maharashtra and Goa states of Western India, respectively. There were 73 million speakers in 2001, Marathi ranks 19th in the list of most spoken languages in the world, Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India, after Hindi, Bengali and Telugu in that order. Marathi has some of the oldest literature of all modern Indo-Aryan languages, the major dialects of Marathi are Standard Marathi and the Varhadi dialect. Malvani Konkani has been influenced by Marathi varieties. Marathi has several features that set it aside from most other Indian languages, Marathi distinguishes inclusive and exclusive forms of we and possesses a three-way gender system that features the neuter in addition to the masculine and the feminine. In its phonology it contrasts apico-alveolar with alveopalatal affricates and, in common with Gujarati, Marathi is primarily spoken in Maharashtra and parts of neighbouring states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, union-territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli. The cities of Baroda, Surat, and Ahmedabad, Belgaum, Karwar, Nipani, Indore, Gwalior, Adoni, Hyderabad, Marathi is also spoken by Maharashtrian emigrants worldwide, especially in the United States, United Kingdom, Israel, Mauritius, and Canada. Marathi is the language of Maharashtra and co-official language in the union territories of Daman and Diu and Dadra. In Goa, Konkani is the official language, however. Marathi is included among the languages which stand a part of the Eight Schedule of the Constitution of India, the contemporary grammatical rules described by Maharashtra Sahitya Parishad and endorsed by the Government of Maharashtra are supposed to take precedence in standard written Marathi. Traditions of Marathi Linguistics and the rules give special status to tatsamas. This special status expects the rules for tatsamas to be followed as in Sanskrit and this practice provides Marathi with a large treasure of Sanskrit words to cope with demands of new technical words whenever needed. Jawaharlal Nehru University has announced plans to establish a department for Marathi. Marathi Day is celebrated on 27 February, the birthday of poet Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar, Indian languages, including Marathi, that belong to the Indo-Aryan language family are derived from early forms of Prakrit. Marathi is one of languages that further descend from Maharashtri Prakrit. Marathi literature began and grew owing to the rise of the Seuna dynasty of Devgiri, further growth and usage of the language was because of two religious sects – the Mahanubhava and Varkari panthans – who adopted Marathi as the medium for preaching their doctrines of devotion. Marathi had attained a place in court life by the time of the Seuna kings
Marathi language
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The popular
Marathi language newspapers at a newsstand in Mumbai, 2006
Marathi language
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regions where Marathi is the language of the majority
Marathi language
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Marathi neon signboard at
Maharashtra Police headquarters in Mumbai.
26.
Pashto language
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Pashto, known in Persian literature as Afghānistani and in Urdu and Hindi literature as Paṭhānī, is the South-Central Asian language of the Pashtuns. Its speakers are called Pashtuns or Pukhtuns and sometimes Afghans or Pathans and it is an Eastern Iranian language, belonging to the Indo-European family. Pashto is one of the two languages of Afghanistan, and it is the second-largest regional language of Pakistan, mainly spoken in the west and northwest of the country. Pakistans Federally Administered Tribal Areas are almost 100% Pashto-speaking, while it is the majority language of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pashto is the main language among the Pashtun diaspora around the world. The total number of Pashto-speakers is estimated to be 45–60 million people worldwide, Pashto belongs to the Northeastern Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch, but Ethnologue lists it as Southeastern Iranian. Pashto has two main groups, “soft” and “hard”, the latter known as Pakhto. As a national language of Afghanistan, Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south, and southwest, the exact numbers of speakers are unavailable, but different estimates show that Pashto is the mother tongue of 45–60% of the total population of Afghanistan. In Pakistan Pashto is spoken as a first language by about 15. 42% of Pakistans 170 million people and it is the main language of the Pashtun-majority regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas and northern Balochistan. It is also spoken in parts of Mianwali and Attock districts of the Punjab province and in Islamabad, modern Pashto-speaking communities are found in the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad in Sindh. Other communities of Pashto speakers are found in Tajikistan, and further in the Pashtun diaspora, there are also communities of Pashtun descent in the southwestern part of Jammu and Kashmir. Pashto is one of the two languages of Afghanistan, along with Dari. Since the early 18th century, all the kings of Afghanistan were ethnic Pashtuns except for Habibullah Kalakani, Persian as the literary language of the royal court was more widely used in government institutions while Pashto was spoken by the Pashtun tribes as their native tongue. Although officially strengthening the use of Pashto, the Afghan elite regarded Persian as a “sophisticated language, king Zahir Shah thus followed suit after his father Nadir Khan had decreed in 1933, that both Persian and Pashto were to be studied and utilized by officials. Thus Pashto became a language, a symbol for Afghan nationalism. The status of language was reaffirmed in 1964 by the constitutional assembly when Afghan Persian was officially renamed to Dari. The lyrics of the anthem of Afghanistan are in Pashto. In Pakistan, Urdu and English are the two official languages, Pashto has no official status at the federal level. On a provincial level, Pashto is the language of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas
Pashto language
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Pashto language on the map of Afghanistan.The brown areas speak Pashto.
Pashto language
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The word Pax̌tō written in the
Pashto alphabet
27.
Dzongkha
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Dzongkha, or Bhutanese, is a Sino-Tibetan language spoken by over half a million people in Bhutan, it is the sole official and national language of the Kingdom of Bhutan. The Tibetan alphabet is used to write Dzongkha, the word dzongkha means the language of the district, kha is language, and dzong is district. District-like dzong architecture characterises monasteries, established throughout Bhutan by its unifier, Ngawang Namgyal, 1st Zhabdrung Rinpoche, as of 2013, Dzongkha had 171,080 native speakers and about 640,000 total speakers. Dzongkha and its dialects are the native tongue of eight districts of Bhutan. There are also some speakers found near the Indian town of Kalimpong, once part of Bhutan, Dzongkha was declared as the national language of Bhutan in 1971. Dzongkha study is mandatory in all schools in Bhutan, and the language is the lingua franca in the districts to the south, the 2003 Bhutanese film Travellers and Magicians is entirely in Dzongkha. The Tibetan alphabet used to write Dzongkha has thirty basic letters, sometimes known as radicals, Dzongkha is usually written in Bhutanese forms of the Uchen script, forms of the Tibetan alphabet known as Jôyi cursive longhand and Jôtshum formal longhand. The print form is simply as Tshûm. There are various ways of Romanization and transliteration systems for Dzongkha, the phonetic transliteration was developed by the linguist George van Driem. Dzongkha is usually described as having three tones, high, medium and low, however, in monosyllabic words, each tone can occur with two distinct contours. The unaspirated stops /p/, /t/, /c/, and /k/ typically become voiced in the low tone and are pronounced, the sounds are regarded as allophones. Similarly, the stops, and are typically lightly aspirated in the low tone. The dialect of the social strata in Lhasa does not use voiced stops in the low tone. The alveolar trill is in distribution of the alveolar approximant, therefore. The voiceless alveolar lateral approximant resembles the voiceless lateral fricative found in languages such as Welsh. The consonants /m/, /ŋ/, /p/, /r/, /l/, the Classical Tibetan final /n/ is still present, but its modern pronunciation is normally realized as a nasalisation of the preceding vowel, rather than as a discrete consonant. However, /k/ is not pronounced in the position of a word except in very formal speech. Also, syllable-final /r/ and /l/ are often not clearly pronounced but realized as a lengthening of the preceding vowel
Dzongkha
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Jakar Dzong, representative of the distinct
dzong architecture from which Dzongkha gets its name
Dzongkha
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Districts of Bhutan in which the Dzongkha language is spoken natively are highlighted in light beige.
28.
Burmese language
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The Burmese language is the official language of Myanmar. Although the Constitution of Myanmar officially recognizes the English name of the language as the Myanmar language, Burmese is a tonal, pitch-register, and syllable-timed language, largely monosyllabic and analytic, with a subject–object–verb word order. It is a member of the Lolo-Burmese grouping of the Sino-Tibetan language family, the Burmese alphabet is ultimately descended from a Brahmic script, either Kadamba or Pallava. Burmese belongs to the Southern Burmish branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Burmese is the most widely spoken of the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages. Burmese was the fifth of the Sino-Tibetan languages to develop a system, after Chinese characters, the Pyu script, the Tibetan alphabet. However, several dialects substantially differ in Burmese with respect to vocabulary, lexical particles, the standard dialect of Burmese comes from the Irrawaddy River valley. Regional differences between speakers from Upper Burma, called anya tha အညာသား, and speakers from Lower Burma, called auk tha အောက်သား, occur in vocabulary choice, minor pronunciation differences do exist within the Irrawaddy River valley. For instance, for the term ဆွမ်း food offering, Lower Burmese speakers use instead of, the standard dialect is represented by the Yangon dialect because of the modern citys media influence and economic clout. In the past, the Mandalay dialect represented standard Burmese, moreover, with regard to kinship terminology, Upper Burmese speakers differentiate the maternal and paternal sides of a family whereas Lower Burmese speakers do not. Spoken Burmese is remarkably uniform among Burmese speakers, particularly living in the Irrawaddy valley. The figure would have much higher if non-Bamars were excluded. For the whole country, the rate was 49% for men and 5. 5% for women. The migration of Burmese speakers of Bamar descent to Lower Burma is relatively recent, as late as the mid-1700s, the Austroasiatic language Mon was the principal language of Lower Burma and the Mon people who inhabited it. After the Burmese-speaking Konbaung Dynastys victory over the Mon-speaking Restored Hanthawaddy Kingdom in 1757, by 1830, an estimated 90% of the population in the region identified themselves as Bamar due the influx from Upper Burma, assimilation, and intermarriage. In the British colonial era, British incentives, particularly geared toward rice production, as well as political instability in Upper Burma, more distinctive non-standard varieties emerge as one moves farther away from the Irrawaddy River valley toward peripheral areas of the country. These varieties include the Yaw, Palaw, Myeik, Tavoyan, despite substantial vocabulary and pronunciation differences, there is mutual intelligibility among most Burmese dialects. Dialects in Tanintharyi Region, including Palaw, Merguese and Tavoyan, are conservative in comparison to Standard Burmese. The Tavoyan and Intha dialects have preserved the /l/ medial, which is only found in Old Burmese inscriptions
Burmese language
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Sampling of various Burmese script styles
Burmese language
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Burmese
29.
Sinhalese language
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Sinhalese, known natively as Sinhala, is the native language of the Sinhalese people, who make up the largest ethnic group in Sri Lanka, numbering about 16 million. Sinhalese is also spoken as a language by other ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages, Sinhalese has its own writing system, the Sinhalese alphabet, which is one of the Brahmic scripts, a descendant of the ancient Indian Brahmi script closely related to the Kadamba alphabet. Sinhalese is one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka, Sinhalese, along with Pali, played a major role in the development of Theravada Buddhist literature. The closest relative of Sinhalese is the language of the Maldives and Minicoy Island, Sinhala is a Sanskrit term, the corresponding Middle Indo-Aryan word is Sīhala. The name is a derivation from siṃha, the Sanskrit word for lion Siṃhāla is attested as a Sanskrit name of the island of in the Bhagavata Purana, the name is sometimes glossed as abode of lions, and attributed to a supposed former abundance of lions on the island. According to the chronicle Mahavamsa, written in Pali, Prince Vijaya, in the following centuries, there was substantial immigration from Eastern India which led to an admixture of features of Eastern Prakrits. An example of an Eastern feature is the ending -e for masculine nominative singular in Sinhalese Prakrit. There are several cases of vocabulary doublets, e. g. the words mässā and mäkkā, some of the differences can be explained by the substrate influence of the parent stock of the Vedda language. Sinhalese has many words that are found in Sinhalese, or shared between Sinhalese and Vedda and not etymologically derivable from Middle or Old Indo-Aryan. Common examples are kola for leaf in Sinhala and Vedda, dola for pig in Vedda, Other common words are rera for wild duck, and gala for stones. The author of the oldest Sinhalese grammar, Sidatsangarava, written in the 13th century CE, the grammar lists naramba and kolamba as belonging to an indigenous source. Kolamba is the source of the name of the commercial capital Colombo, however, formal Sinhalese is more similar to Pali and medieval Sinhalese. g. I do not know whether it is new, as a result of centuries of colonial rule, modern Sinhalese contains some Portuguese, Dutch and English loanwords. It is now spoken by a few families in Macau and in the Macanese diaspora, Sinhalese shares many features common to other Indo-European languages. For native speakers all dialects are mutually intelligible, and they might not even realise that the differences are significant, the language of the Vedda people resembles Sinhala to a great extent, although it has a large number of words which cannot be traced to another language. The Rodiya use another dialect of Sinhalese, Rodiya used to be a caste in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka no longer recognizes castes, in Sinhalese there is distinctive diglossia, as in many languages of South Asia
Sinhalese language
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Sinhalese
. 
