Curated category
Agglutinative languages
- Hungarian languageFourteen million people speak Hungarian, and that single fact makes it the most widely spoken language of the entire Uralic family.
- Finnish languageFinnish, known to its speakers as suomi, belongs to a family of languages that has no connection to the great Indo-European tree that gave rise to English…
- EsperantoEsperanto is a language invented by a single person, published in a slim pamphlet in the summer of 1887, that has since acquired an estimated one to two…
- Kazakh languageKazakh is a Turkic language spoken across a vast territory stretching from the Tian Shan mountains to the western shore of the Caspian Sea.
- Korean languageKorean is the native language of about 81 million people, most of them of Korean descent. It carries two names that map to a divided peninsula.
- Uzbek languageUzbek is spoken by more than 34 million people across Central Asia, South Asia, and beyond, making it the second-most widely spoken Turkic language on earth…
- Japanese languageThe Japanese language has around 123 million speakers, and Japan is the only country where it is the national language. Yet it sits almost alone in the…
- Tamil languageTamil, written as தமிழ் and spoken as Tamiḻ, is a language that has survived for more than two thousand years without going silent.
- Tatar languageTatar is a Kipchak Turkic language spoken by roughly 5 million people, most of them living in Russia. Its heart is the Republic of Tatarstan, a region tucked…
- Malay languageMalay is spoken as a first language by about 80 million people, and as a first or second language by close to 300 million.
- Basque languageBasque, known to its speakers as euskara, is unlike any other language on earth. Spoken today by roughly 806,000 people across a wedge of territory where…
- Uralic languagesThe Uralic languages stretch across some of the most remote terrain on Earth, from the Baltic coastline to the rivers of Western Siberia, binding together…
- Klingon languageThe Klingon language has a word for "What do you want?" that doubles as the nearest equivalent to "hello." That single fact tells you almost everything about…
- Altaic languagesIn 1730, a Swedish officer named Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published a proposal grouping Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages together.
- SwahiliSwahili, also known as Kiswahili, carries the memory of the East African coast in its very name. The word comes from an Arabic term meaning "of the coasts."…