Curated category
Lingua francas
- Portuguese languageIn 216 BC, Roman soldiers and merchants arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. They brought Latin with them to a land already home to Celtic tribes like the…
- Russian languageThe Ostromir Gospels of 1056 stand as one of the oldest East Slavic books known today. This manuscript preserves a form of language that would eventually…
- French languageFrench is a Romance language with about 310 million speakers, of which roughly 74 million are native speakers. It is an official language in 26 countries and…
- Chinese languageOracle bones from the Shang dynasty, dated to around 1250 BCE, bear the earliest known inscriptions of Chinese. These divinatory marks carved into animal…
- HindiThe word Hindi traces back to Old Persian, which derived the name from Sanskrit Sindhu, referring to the Indus River. Early inhabitants of the Indo-Gangetic…
- Spanish languageThe name Spanish derives from the Kingdom of Castile, a historical region in north-central Spain. The term Castile itself likely comes from the word for…
- ArabicIn 125 CE, a man named Garm(')allāhe carved three lines of poetry into stone at En Avdat in Israel. This inscription stands as the earliest continuous Arabic…
- 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.
- English languageIn the 5th century, Germanic tribes known as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes crossed the North Sea to settle in Britain. These people spoke dialects that would…
- Hindustani languageScholars trace the language's first written poetry to the Delhi Sultanate era around the twelfth and thirteenth century.