Curated playlist
Subject–object–verb languages
- Bengali languageIndo-Aryan language
- Hungarian languageFourteen million people speak Hungarian, and that single fact makes it the most widely spoken language of the entire Uralic family. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Yet its…
- 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 literary traditions of any modern Indian language. With 83 million speakers recorded in…
- 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 branch entirely, with no surviving sibling. Between five and seven million people…
- 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. That makes it the third most spoken Germanic language on earth, after German and English. Yet for a…
- 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. Its speakers have written it down in three completely different alphabets within a single century:…
- 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. In the south it is Hangugeo, written 한국어. In the north it is Chosŏnŏ, written 조선어. The same…
- 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 by the government as a classical language. That designation is not ceremonial. It…
- 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. It was spoken from the late 13th century to the end of the 16th century by a people who had…
- 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 world's family tree of tongues. Scholars have tried to tie it to Ainu, to Korean, to…
- 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 it climbs to third place, behind only Mandarin and English. Yet the language has no…
- Tamil languageTamil, written as தமிழ் and spoken as Tamiḻ, is a language that has survived for more than two thousand years without going silent. It is attested since around 300 BCE, making it one of the longest-surviving classical languages anywhere in…
- 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 first language to push past it. Its poetry took root in courts far from where it…
- 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 southwestern France meets northern Spain, it is the only language in all of Europe…
- 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 instructions in Latin. Soldiers in the United States Marine Corps carry a Latin…
- 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 deliberately refined by generations of ancient Indian thinkers into what they believed was…