Languages

English is required to work in multinational corporations, study abroad, or find a job around the world. English is also the language of the web and social media.

Those who are keen to learn Italian must consider that in each region, even though they all speak Italian, tones, accents, rhythms, syntax, and even words can vary.

"Language of the oppressors", as it was called by the Black population in South Africa. Never forget that Apartheid (separation in Afrikaans) was abolished only in 1994.

Its origins are still a matter of debate among linguists, but they all agree that Albanian is the oldest language in Europe.

It uses an alphasyllabary composed of 260 syllabic signs, divided into various orders according to vowel sounds.

The letters of the alphabet change shape depending on their position in a word, and you write from left to right, unlike other languages.

It is almost identical to French spoken in Paris, but the pronunciation of certain terms may differ.

The official alphabets are the Latin, in the Croatian version (the most widely used writing method), and the Cyrillic in the Serbian version.

Portuguese is also spoken in Brazil, but its pronunciation is different from European Portuguese.

Monosyllabic language: each word is a root to which suffixes are added. The same happens with verbs.

It is a language and not a dialect, as many believe, and it has various dialects, developed over the last centuries.

We are referring to a very large language family, including hundreds of languages and dialects that are often not mutually intelligible.

This language utilizes the Latin alphabet, but special diacritic marks are added to some letters to vary their sound.

Also called Bohemian, it is divided into Literary Czech and Colloquial Czech. The Literary is used for writing and the Colloquial for speaking.

Based on the Latin alphabet, with the addition of these three letters: æ (same sound as e in red), ø (equivalent to an ö) and å (same sound as o in horse).

With France, Germany, and England bordering the Netherlands, Dutch evolved into a mix of German, French, and English.

Finnish only started to have a written form after 1500. Before then, it was only a spoken language.

The nasal vowels and the uvular r characterise this language, plus three accents and the cedilla, which turns the letter c into an s.

If you are planning to study German, be aware that it has one of the most complicated grammars. Let alone the pronunciation.

When speaking about Greek, you can refer to ancient Greek, medieval or Byzantine Greek, modern Greek, or Neo-Greek, the Greek spoken today.

The modern is very different from the biblical Hebrew because it contains neologisms and words borrowed from foreign languages.

The Hungarian language utilizes the Latin alphabet, enriched with diacritical signs and accents.

A few decades ago, the letter Z was still used in the Icelandic alphabet, but the rules for using it were so complicated that it was changed to S (the pronunciation is more or less the same).

According to an Oxford University study, Indonesian is one of the easiest languages to learn.

Commonly called Irish, this is a Gaelic language, spoken on the island of Ireland, where it is an official language along with English.

The Japanese language has two separate forms of phonetic alphabets, which are used along with the Chinese ideograms.

In the past, it used runic characters, then the Arabic alphabet. From 1929 to 1940 it switched to Latin and then to Cyrillic, which is still used today. A return to Latin characters is planned for 2025.

Since 1443, Korean has a distinct alphabet and a writing system. Before, Chinese ideograms were used for writing.

The alphabet varies according to the countries where Kurdish is spoken. A modified Arabic alphabet is used In Iraq and Iran, the Latin one in Armenia, Turkey, and Syria. Cyrillic is used in the former USSR countries.

India has a multitude of languages. At least 23 different languages and about 2,000 dialects have been identified in this large country in South Asia.

Romance languages are all those idioms that descend from Vulgar Latin, such as Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, or Romanian.

It is a peculiar language: the sentence is not organised in subject-verb-object, but verb-subject-object.

There are two written forms, both official: Bokmål (based on written Danish), and Nynorsk (also called New Norwegian: a fusion of various dialects and used by a minority of the population).

Afghan, Armenian, Nigerian… Once the number of pronunciations increases, each of these languages will have a dedicated page.

Originated from Slavic, Polish has been influenced by foreign languages such as Latin, Greek, German, Italian, French, Russian, and English.

Less “musical” than Brazilian Portuguese, the two languages also differ in the pronunciation of some vowels and consonants.

By Romanian, we mean Daco-Romanian, one of the 4 language variants. The other 3 (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian) are minority languages in Romania.

Its Cyrillic alphabet has 33 letters: 10 vowels, 21 consonants and 2 silent letters. Consonants can be hard or soft (they are soft when followed by an apostrophe).

Both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabet are used in this language. Using the Latin alphabet, diacritical signs are added to some consonants (Ž Ć Č Š).

 This language follows the Latin alphabet with the addition of diacritical signs on some vowels and consonants, changing their pronunciation.

This language doesn't use articles, it is the context that makes it clear whether the noun is one of many or a specific one.

Many of its words are borrowed from preceding colonial languages. Arabic and Persian influence was left by the maritime trade of the earlier centuries.

The Spanish spoken in Spain is not the same as the one spoken in Mexico or Cuba: there are differences, both lexical and in pronunciation.

It is the official language of Sweden only since 2009, although it was already spoken by the majority of the population.

The Thai alphabet consists of 44 consonants, 32 vowels and four tone indicators. Nouns have no gender, there are no articles, verbs do not change form for person, tense, or mode.

Turkish was spoken in the Ottoman Empire and was written using the Arabic alphabet. They switched to the Latin alphabet in 1928 to modernize Turkey.

Ukrainian is very similar to Russian. Both use the Cyrillic alphabet (with a few minor differences), share some of their basic vocabulary, and have similar grammatical rules and pronunciation.

The Vietnamese alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet with the addition of several diacritical signs and accents which change the pronunciation of some letters.

Once apartheid was finally abolished, the Zulu, which are the largest ethnic group in South Africa, finally received the same rights as all other South African citizens.