Curated category
Subject–object–verb languages
- Bengali languageBengali, known to its own speakers by the endonym Bangla, carries more than 1,400 years of history in its grammar and script.
- Hungarian languageFourteen million people speak Hungarian, and that single fact makes it the most widely spoken language of the entire Uralic family.
- Marathi languageMarathi is a classical Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people, primarily in the Indian state of Maharashtra, and it carries one of the oldest…
- Armenian languageArmenian, known to its speakers as hayeren, stands alone. Among the dozens of branches that make up the Indo-European language family, it occupies its own…
- Dutch languageDutch, known to its speakers as Nederlands, is spoken by roughly 25 million people as a first language and another 5 million as a second.
- 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.
- Odia languageOdia, spoken today by more than 37 million people in India alone, holds a distinction that only five other Indian languages can claim: it has been recognized…
- Old FrisianOld Frisian stretched along the North Sea coast from roughly modern-day Bruges in Belgium all the way to the Weser River in northwestern Germany.
- 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…
- HindiHindi is the fourth-most-spoken first language in the world, trailing only Mandarin, Spanish, and English. Count it together with its mirror twin Urdu, and…
- Tamil languageTamil, written as தமிழ் and spoken as Tamiḻ, is a language that has survived for more than two thousand years without going silent.
- Persian languagePersian, known by its own speakers as Farsi, broke a monopoly that had held across the Muslim world. Arabic had dominated writing, but Persian became the…
- 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…
- LatinLatin, known to its speakers as lingua Latina, has been declared dead for centuries. Yet right now, in Vatican City, an automated teller machine dispenses…
- SanskritSanskrit carries a claim that almost no other language on earth can make: it was designed to be perfect. Not merely useful, not simply elegant, but…