Languages of Asia
From Halbeeg, the open encyclopedia · Af-Soomaali
1 languages
Asia is the continent with the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. It is spoken by more than four billion people, who use thousands of languages descended from different language families. A language family is a group of related languages that derive from a single ancestral language.
The diversity of Asian languages can be measured in two ways: the number of speakers of each language, and the number of languages in each region. Some Asian languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic, have hundreds of millions of speakers. Other regions, such as eastern India (Papua and the Indonesian islands), have many languages each with relatively few speakers.
Major language families
The Sino-Tibetan family comprises Chinese languages (which itself has distinct varieties such as Mandarin, Cantonese, and Wu), Tibetan, and Burmese. The Indo-European family appears in Asia through the Indo-Iranian branch: Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Persian, and Pashto. The Afroasiatic family is found in the Middle East in the form of Arabic and Hebrew. The Dravidian family is concentrated in southern India and includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.
The Austronesian family originated in Taiwan and spread to Indonesia, the Philippines, and as far as Madagascar. The Austroasiatic family is found in Vietnam and Cambodia. The Turkic family ranges from Turkey through Central Asia to Siberia. Others include Kra-Dai (Thai, Lao), Mongolic, and Tungusic. Korean and Japanese are typically classified as language isolates or small families of their own.
Writing systems and scripts
Asia has various writing systems. Chinese characters are a logographic system in which signs represent both words and meaningful components. The scripts of India and Southeast Asia derive largely from the Brahmi script. Arabic script is used for Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. The Latin alphabet was adopted for Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Turkish in the twentieth century.
Common features
Many languages of East and Southeast Asia are tonal languages, in which the pitch of a word's pronunciation affects its meaning. This occurs in Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai, though they are not mutually related. These similarities reflect the long-standing contact between the region's languages, though not necessarily a shared origin.