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Afrikaans is a member of the western Germanic language group and has many similarities with 18th century Dutch. The word afrikaans means “African” in Dutch.
The language developed from the dialect spoken by the Boer colonists and employees of the Dutch East India Company, who arrived in Cape Colony at the end of the 17th century.
From 1815 onwards, Afrikaans, still written in the Arabic alphabet at that time, started to replace Malay as the language of Muslim schools in South Africa, and since 1925 it has been considered a language rather than a dialect.
Today, Afrikaans is written in the Roman alphabet and is spoken above all in Namibia and South Africa, although Africaans speakers are to be found as far afield as Australia, Belgium, Botswana, Canada, Germany, Lesotho, Malawi, Netherlands, New Zealand, Great Britain, USA, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
It is the mother tongue of 6 million people, and the second language of more than 10 million.
The language has a very particular grammar: there is almost no conjugation of the verb and the imperfect tense.
It also has just one gender and uses the double negative.
The language contains numerous words from the Bantu, from Portuguese and Malay.
FAQ Does Afrikaans use any special characters which there might be problems displaying?
No, the language uses the Roman alphabet and there are no problems in displaying it.
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Albanian is spoken by over 4 million people in Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Croatia, Romania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro, as well as in some areas of Greece and Italy, by the Arbëreshë minority community. Other Albanian and Arbëreshë communities, who keep the language and traditions of their countries of origin alive, are to be found in USA, Canada, Argentina, Egypt and Brazil.
Albanian is an Indo-European language, but despite its numerous borrowings from Greek, Latin, Bulgarian and Turkish, due to its geographical location and contacts with neighbouring language communities, it has no similarity with other Indo-European languages.
The Roman alphabet was adopted in 1909, following the use of Greek and even Turko-Arabic scripts, and the first written document in modern Albanian dates to 1462.
There are two main dialects of Albanian: ghego, current in the North, and tosco, in the South of the country. The tosco dialect is mainly spoken by minorities in Italy and Greece, while Albanian poulations in Kosovo and Macedonia speak ghego. However, the differences between these dialects are not very substantial, and mainly regard pronunciation.
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Arabic was originally only one of the numerous Semitic dialects of the Arabian Peninsula. Today it is the official language of the member states of the Arab League as well as being the holy language of the Koran for more than one billion Muslims.
Arabic is the majority language of Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, UAE, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Sudan, Sirya, Tunisia, Palestinian Territories (West Bank and Gaza), Western Sahara and Yemen, and the minority language in many other countries, includingIsrael.
Arabic is spoken by more than 200 million native speakers, and is the sixth most widely spoken language in the world, ahead of French and German. It is also one of the official languages of the United Nations.
Many non-semitic languages used the Arabic script in the past: Persian, Turkish, Maltese and Wolof in Africa. Even today, Persian and other Indo-European languages use the Arabic script.
The Arabic language has the peculiarity of being very rich in consonants and poor in vowels. Due to the influence of the Koran, which has been read in the same way for centuries, Arabic has retained this phonetic richness rather than suffering the erosion typical of the development of most other languages.
The alphabet is composed of 28 letters (17 of which have completely different sounds from those of Italian), and a special grapheme (hamza). Three of these letters have a semi-consonantic (or semi-vocalic) value, and also serve to indicate the prolongation of the only three vowels used in classical Arabic (fusha).
In reality, the vowels "e" and "o" are hardly used in the language’s dialectal forms. This makes transliterating the language into Roman alphabet a particularly arduous task. It is advisable to use the "classic" system with rigour. This avoids the numerous phonetic variants used in Arab speaking countries – to the extent that instead of di-glossia (difference between written and spoken forms) one should really speak of multi-glossia.
The short vowels (a, u, i) are indicated with three different signs placed over or under the consonant immediately preceding them: a small oblique mark (fatha) above the letter to indicate "a", an identical mark (kasra) below the letter to indicate "i" and a small number nine with a long tail (damma) over the letter to indicate "u". Readers familiar with the language’s grammar and vocabulary need no more than the consonants to understand a text – the vowels can be dispensed with. It is only in dictionaries, schoolbooks, the Koran and literary texts, where absolute precision is required, that the vowels are marked, along with other signs to indicate doubled vowels, and so on.
Arabic is written from right to left. Books are therefore bound at the right of the page, and are read backwards compared to those we are used to: the front cover is where we would put the back of the book, and even images are in a reversed position in comparison to our usage.
The script itself is only cursive; there are no uppercase characters. The form of letters varies according to their position: whether at the beginning, middle or end of a word. Arabic words are never broken at the end of a line, but are squeezed or stretched to enable a full word to complete each line.
Arabic has two genders, masculine and feminine, declines adjectives with nouns, and uses prepositions and articles. It has three cases: single, plural and dual; the latter is used when referring to two subjects. Plural nouns often have irregular forms. The verb goes before the subject. Adjectives always go after nouns. Personal pronouns are suffixed to verbs.
As for numbers, the Arabs learned the use of decimal positional notation from the Indians (using zero, in other words), and transmitted it to Europe in the Middle Ages (now called European numerals in English). Although Arabic script runs from right to left, numbers are written left to right. Arabic countries use both European and Arabic numerals (the latter use an Arabic notation). Note that since the dot in Arabic numerals corresponds to zero, both thousands and decimals are separated by a comma in Arabic notation.
In Libya, however, only Arabic numerals are in use.
Although Arabic is a uniform language, always concerned with its own purity, it is spoken in so many areas that it has significant dialectal variants, which however do not compromise mutual comprehension: an Algerian can be understood by an Egyptian, Syrian etc. and vice versa.
FAQ
Can a Windows .doc file in Arabic be read by Macintosh? It is legible if a Word Processor such as TextEdit is used; at present Word for Macintosh is unable to read bidirectional texts.
When translating into Arabic, must proper nouns and abbreviations be transliterated? In many cases it is best to transliterate proper nouns (e.g. personal names), i.e. reproduce the sound of the name using the most appropriate letters of the Arabic alphabet. As for abbreviations and tradenames, it is best not to change them.
Does Arabic have upper and lower case characters? No, there is no uppercase in Arabic script.
Does Arabic use italic and bold typefaces? Italic is not generally used. There may be special cases, but this really corresponds to linking together characters (like handwriting) rather than sloping them. Bold is used and there is no longer any need to change font to do so, thanks to improved software.
Is Arabic only written from right to left, or are other options available? Arabic is a bi-directional language: words are written and read exclusively from right to left, but if the text includes words in Roman alphabet or numbers, they are written from left to right.
Are there rules in Arabic for splitting words into syllables? This is not permitted in Arabic. Computer software stretches the script to justify it, rather than breaking words at line breaks.
When translating a company report into Arabic, should I use Arabic numerals or European numerals? Arabic numerals are the preferred option, although this is not indispensable. However in relations with the West it is best to use European numerals, as this is more convenient for checking numerical data.
To request a quote for a translation into Arabic, click here
Basque, or euskera, is not an Indo-European language, and since it has no relationship with any other languages, nor relations with French or Spanish, it can be considered the only language to have survived the Indo-European invasion, a genuine enigma for linguists and glottologists, who still consider it to be a completely separate language.
It is spoken by 600,000 persons in Northern Spain (in the País Vasco in Spain and the area north of Navarra) and the extreme South West of France (French Basque country) in the Département des Pyrénées Atlantiques, although it was originally spoken as far away as Aquitaine and the Central Pyrenees, and seems to have had considerable influence on the phonetics of Castilian.
Having been prohibited for almost 40 years under Franco (speaking it was a criminal offence), it almost completely disappeared in the last century. It was forbidden to give children Basque names, display signs and signals in Basque and the Academy of the Basque language was only recognised anew in 1976. It only started to flourish again in the late Fifties and early Sixties. With the arrival of a democratic regime in Spain, the Constitution of 1978 and the Estatuto di Gernika both achieved official recognition in the Basque Country, and Basque slowly returned to public life. The language is called “euskera” since there was a need to unite the new dialects under a common set of linguistic rules.
The Basque people attribute so much importance to their language that they define and identify themselves above all in terms of the language itself.
They go so far as to call themselves Euskal Herria - the people of the Basque language – a term which identifies both the country and its population. The Euskal Herria today covers the provinces of Araba, Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia in Spain, and in France and Navarra, through which the national border runs.
The risk for Basque, which has recently increased in popularity as a spoken language in the south of the Basque Country, is that euskera will become an academic language rather than the language of everyday, spoken by all those who agree with the Basques and identify their people with the language.
This trend, already evident in the Seventies, gave birth to the (originally clandestine and now officially recognised) counter-movement of the Ikastola – in other words, schools which use Basque as the medium of instruction.
Like Catalan and Galician, for example, Basque is an official language of the European Union, and Spain has agreed, since 1 January 2007, that certain secondary legislative acts will be published in Basque as well as Spanish.
FAQ Does Basque use any special characters which create problems in Word? No, it uses only the Roman alphabet without any special characters, and can be displayed and printed without any particular problems.
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Breton is an Insular Celtic idiom belonging to the Britannic language group. It has similarities with Irish, Welsh and, like other Celtic languages, is an Indo-European language.
The only Celtic language to be spoken in Continental Europe, it is spoken in France, by a population of 300,000 in Brittany. Brittany has two main linguistic areas: upper Brittany to the east, where a number of neo-Roman dialects are spoken, and lower Brittany to the west, in the area of Finistère, Morbihan and Côtes d’Armor, where Breton is spoken.
Breton is not an official language, and like all modern Celtic languages, it is written in Roman alphabet.
The language was brought to France by immigrants from Wales, Cornwall and Devon in the Fifth century: Armorica became Brittany ("little Brittany") with Breton as its language. At a later date, Breton experienced a certain growth in popularity in the mid-seventeenth century, following the publication of grammars and a vast literature of works for the theatre, legends and ballads.
Breton suffered a sharp decline at the end of the nineteenth century. During the Third Republic the French Ministry of Education took action to cancel the language from public schools.
The Deixonne Law of 1951 restored Breton as a subject of study in France. From the Seventies to the Nineties the language once more declined, and the number of its speakers has fallen from around one million in the Fifties to about half that number today.
However, the language is once more gaining in popularity. Breton became a university degree subject in 1981. There are also a number of radio and TV broadcasts in the Breton tongue.
Like the other Celtic languages, Breton is characterised by consonantal mutation. The initial consonant (for example, b or m) changes if it is preceded by certain sounds. Vowels may also change within a word to indicate the plural case.
Like Welsh, Breton has also lost many declensions of the nouns; the conjugation of verbs, however, is particularly complicated.
In comparison with Welsh and Cornish, Breton makes use of nasal vowels and a large number of French words. It has only two genders, masculine and feminine. The verb always goes at the start of a sentence, and the agent is expressed with the impersonal passive.
FAQ Does Breton use any special characters which there might be problems displaying? No, the language uses the Roman alphabet and there are no problems in displaying it.
To request a quote for a translation into Breton, click here
Bulgarian is a southern Slavic Indo-European language. It is the official language of Bulgaria and is spoken by 9 million people in at least 70 countries, including Greece, Israel, Canada, Moldavia, Romania, USA, Serbia, Turkey, Hungary and Ukraine.
Bulgarian is the oldest written and literary Slavic language. The language’s development can be divided into three phases: ancient Bulgarian, used in the late eleventh century by Saints Cyril and Methodius in their Slavic translation of the Bible; middle Bulgarian, spoken in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries; and modern Bulgarian, which became a literary language in the nineteenth century, taking Russian as its model.
It is written in Cyrillic, with a number of special characters for the sounds particular to the language. The alphabet has thirty letters.
Modern Bulgarian has a number of particular characteristics, compared to other Slavic languages: the definite article is a suffix to the noun, as in Romanian and Macedonian; its tendency to lose the function of declension, i.e. to express the cases with prepositions rather than inflections (one of the few traces of a case is the vocative, which is still in use, especially with male proper nouns); and the disappearance of the infinitive, as in modern Greek. The analytic spirit of the language is evident also in the periphrastic syntax of the future tense, which uses a auxiliary modal verb.
Bulgarian has three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral. The gender of a noun is evident from its inflection.
Commercial and historical contacts with Greek and Turkish have resulted in more abundant borrowings from those languages than in other southern Slavic languages. Furthermore, the link between Bulgarian and Serbian is represented by Macedonian, now considered a language, although for many still a dialect of Bulgarian itself.
FAQ Is the Bulgarian alphabet the same as Russian? No there are some letters missing, while other different ones are used. Furthermore, the pronunciation of certain letters is different in Bulgarian.
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Catalan is a romance language derived from Provencal, and spoken by several million people (estimates vary from 6 to 10) in parts of Spain, France and Andorra and also in Alghero, Sardinia.
In the past, it was the language of the court of Aragon; the first Spanish to arrive in Sardinia spoke Catalan. After centuries of literary activity, a period of decadence started around 1600 with the growth in the prestige of Castilian. In the early 1800’s various attempts were made to promote the use of Catalan, mostly considered a mere dialect at that time. In the early Twentieth century, Pompeu Fabra standardised the orthography of the language. This gave new energy to its literary and theatrical use, as well as in the press, which led to the recognition of Catalan as an official language. During the Franco years, Catalan was prohibited and classified as a dialect once more.
With the return to a democratic regime, the constitution of 1978 recognised the linguistic plurality of the Spanish Peninsula, and established the official status of languages other than Castilian, on the basis of the statues of autonomy. The statutes of Catalonia (1979) and the Balearic Islands (1983) thus recognised Catalan as the true language of their territories and declare it to be an official language, alongside Castilian; the same decision was taken, under the legal denomination of Valencian, by the Valencian Community (1982). At the same time, the constitution of Andorra (1993) established Catalan as the country’s official language. Thanks to the statutes, the autonomous parliaments of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and the Valencian Community approved, from 1983 to 1986, laws to promote the Catalan tongue in schools, administration and institutional communications. In 1998 the parliament of Catalonia approved a new law aimed at promoting Catalan as a business language, and in cultural industries and privately owned media.
Standardisation of the language’s orthography has led to a writing based on its western variants (València, Lleida) with a pronunciation derived from its central eastern variants (Barcelona).
Compared with Spanish, Catalan is characterised by the lack of many Arab words, and the survival of numerous words derived from French and Occitan, for example, verbs which take -c in the first person present.
Some modern variants, including Balearic or the local dialect of Cadaquès, use the articles es/so/sa, derived from the Latin ipsu(m)/ipsa(m), as also occurs in Sardinian. The others use lo or el.
The main differences from Spanish are phonetic and orthographical. For example, unaccented e/a are neutral vowels; unaccented o is pronounced like u; s is pronounced clearly, unlike Castilian; final n is lost in singular nouns and adjectives, resulting in truncated words; final r is not pronounced; sh is written with ix, x; there are numerous double consonants such as tg, tj, tx and ig; ll is pronounced as Italian gli; ny is pronounced as Italiangn.
From the point of view of morphology, Catalan has a feminine plural in –es and the masculine plural in –s, it has a composite historic past, uses three forms (base, weak, reinforced) for each personal pronoun and uses a neutral personal pronoun (as in Occitan).
As a curious sidelight, some words of Catalan also occur in the dialect of the Veneto region of Italy.
Like Galician and Basque, Catalan was recognised as a co-official language of the European Union in 2005, and certain texts have been published, since 1 January 2007, in Catalan as well as Spanish, under and agreement with the Spain.
FAQ Does Catalan use any special characters which there might be problems displaying in Word? No, Word handles the special characters of Catalan without any difficulty in both the Windows and Macintosh versions.
To request a quote for a translation into Catalan, click here
Czech is a western Slavic language, along with Polish, Serbian and Slovakian, and has very close links to the latter in particular.
It is spoken by the majority of the population of the Czech Republic (10 million people) and by around 12 million people worldwide, in Slovakia, Croatia, Austria, Poland and Germany.
Czech uses the Roman alphabet, modified to represent specifically Czech phonemes.
Of the Slavic languages, Czech is considered to be one of the hardest to learn: its complexity is due to its extensive morphology and free syntax with 7 cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental, which express the relations of number and case by their inflection.
There is no article in Czech. To make up for this lack, nouns are declined by case, number and gender. This gives every word its logical status within the sentence. Nouns have three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral, and two numbers: singular and plural.
Since it uses cases to construct the logical framework of the sentence, Czech tends to leave considerable syntactical freedom to the speaker, although the basic model is still subject-verb-object.
Czech adjectives, as in Italian, decline with the noun according to gender, number and even case. In general, they tend to precede the noun, but may sometimes follow it.
Personal pronouns are declined separately in their own way. The nominative pronoun is not necessary, since it is expressed by the verb itself, although it can be used for emphasis. The second person singular is used only in intimate relations. In all formal situations the second person plural is used. In other cases, each pronoun has at least two forms, one for use in isolation and the other when used with prepositions, which express the case.
There are only 3 tenses: present, past and future.
Lexically, the similarities with Slovakian are numerous and the languages differ mainly orthographically and phonetically. Grammatically, on the other hand, Slovakian is simpler, since its literary traditional is more recent.
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Chinese is spoken by around 1.3 billion people, almost one fifth of the world’s population: it is thus the most spoken language in the world, ahead of English and Hindi. It is the official language of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan and is also spoken in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of Japan, North Korea, South Korea and the Philippines.
The complex relations between written and spoken Chinese are due to the fact that while the spoken language has undergone many changes over the centuries since the late Han dynasty, written Chinese has changed much less.
Spoken Chinese has numerous dialects, which are so diverse that it is almost impossible for their speakers to communicate with each other verbally. To give an example, the phonetic and lexical differences could be compared with those between the various Romance languages. The majority of Chinese (867.2 million people) speak Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua = common tongue).
Chinese is a tonal language, so that the tone of a word distinguishes it from other words, and its grammar is radically different from that of European languages; for example, there are no tenses, genders or number, but rather rules of reduplication and suffixes which complete and specify the verb.
The ideographic script goes back more than 4000 years, and its characters are composed of graphemes, as regards the written part, morphemes, for their meaning and phonemes, for their pronunciation. These factors make it possible to evaluate the complexity of written language, which has hardly changed over time.
Modern written Chinese has two basic variants – the simplified and traditional types. A character written in the traditional form is generally more complicated graphically than its simplified version. Traditional Chinese has around 13,000 characters, while simplified Chinese has around 8,000. Around 5,800 characters are shared by the two forms.
The Chinese government introduced and promoted the use of simplified Chinese in 1956 (after the foundation of the New China) and this is the type currently used in the PRC and Singapore. It is also an official language of the United Nations and other international bodies. Traditional Chinese, on the other hand, is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao.
Note however that, although the PRC uses principally the simplified version, the traditional version is still used for cultural purposes and documents intended for official events, as explained in the language and shared character laws of the People’s Republic.
Sidebar: the Chinese calendar China has two types of calendar, the Gregorian (western) calendar, used for official purposes, and the traditional calendar, a lunar or solar-lunar calendar, which is similar in many ways to the Jewish calendar. Each month starts with a new moon, determined by the conjunction of the Moon and Sun, when the Moon is completely invisible for areas close to 120° East (the meridian of the eastern coast of China).
The traditional Chinese calendar employs a 60 year cycle. Up to 1911, years were counted from the ascent to the throne of each Emperor. Each year has a two-part name: a celestial root, which is untranslatable, and aterrestrial branch, made up of 12 animal names (mouse, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, serpent, horse, sheep, monkey, cock, dog and pig).
The names are combined starting with the first celestial and first terrestrial name, running through each list in sequence; when the end of a list is reached, it starts again from the beginning. This system results in 60 combinations, or 60 names of years, which compose a complete cycle. These sixty-year cycles are counted from 2637 B.C. when, according to tradition, the Chinese calendar was invented (in reality it is about 2000 years old).
FAQ Can you write in Chinese using a PC running a western language operating system? Yes, you can use IME (Input Method Editor), which enables you to write complex characters (like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.), using a western language OS and keyboard. IME is generally used in reference to Microsoft Windows. Other operating systems may use different acronyms, like Input Method for Mac OS, FEP for MS-DOS, or XIM for X Window System.
Can a Windows .doc file in Chinese be read by Macintosh? Yes, but only Mac OS X – Word 2004 and later, and only if the system fonts are correctly installed. As for other programmes, compatibility must be verified case by case, since it depends on the type of software, version and fonts installed.
When translating into Chinese, must proper nouns and abbreviations be transliterated? In many cases it is best to transliterate proper nouns (e.g. personal names), i.e. reproduce the sound of the name using the most appropriate Chinese characters. As for abbreviations and trade names, it is best not to change them. However, one must take care when transliterating personal names and especially trade or product names, since each Chinese sound has a meaning, and it is easy to make inappropriate choices.
Does Chinese have upper and lower case characters? No, the ideograms are not affected by this distinction.
Does Chinese use italic and bold typefaces, etc.? Yes. Bold and italic are both used in Chinese and now, thanks to continuous improvements in Chinese text editors, there is no need to change font.
Is Chinese only written from left to right, or are other options available? Traditional Chinese is written vertically, top downwards, and is read from right to left. Even when the writing is horizontal, it reads from right to left. This type of printing is still used in Taiwan and Hong Kong, even though many publications are printed left to right as in the West. Newspapers, for instance, are printed top downwards and horizontal titles run from right to left. Simplified Chinese, on the other hand, reads from left to right in almost all cases.
Are there rules in Chinese for splitting words into syllables? Yes; in general the syllables are morphemes, and since each morpheme has a complete meaning, the text can be divided as desired. There are cases, however, in the phonetic transcription into characters (pinyin), where the pronunciation of a two morphemes is identical to that of a single morpheme (homophone). To prevent misunderstanding, such transcriptions are separated with an apostrophe to distinguish the two morphemes. This is the case, for example, of the city called Xi’an (two morphemes separated by an apostrophe) and the wordxian, a single morpheme meaning 'before'....
How are numbers written in Chinese? Numbers are transliterated into Chinese, using the ideograms of Chinese script. However, Western numerals are universally used and understood.
Should a text like a company presentation be translated into traditional or simplified Chinese? Traditional Chinese is obligatory for Taiwan, but may also be the preferred option for the PRC, since it gives greater prestige to the document. However, each case must be evaluated on its own merits, and the decision must be taken before starting a translation, since the two variants are not interchangeable.
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Korean is mostly spoken in South and North Korea, but also in 18 other countries, by around 78 million people.
It is an ancient language, known in Korea for more than 2000 years.
After a long period in which the language was written using three different alphabets, it has been written since the Fifteenth Century in its own script, hangŭl.
The classification of the Korean language is still debated. However, a good number of academics assign it to the Altaic language group.
It has for long been believed to be a relative of Japanese, with which Korean has numerous structural and grammatical links (although there are almost no lexical similarities at all). In part, this linguistic relationship is denied due to the difficult history of relations between the two countries, so that after the Japanese occupation of Korea, even the linguistic borrowings from Japanese disappeared from Korean.
Andre Eckardt, a German expert on Korean, proposed that Korean is a relative of the Indo-European languages, but this thesis is no longer widely accepted.
There is also no relationship with Chinese, since Korean has no similarities with the Sino-Tibetan language group. Sino-Korean words written with Chinese characters in Korean are borrowings due to the close cultural contacts between the two countries, but do not indicate any underlying linguistic relationship. It is however a fact that 70% of Korean words are derived from Chinese.
At the lexical level there are also borrowings from English, particularly in South Korea, and a few borrowings from German.
Korean is today a unitary language without regional variants. It is an agglutinative language.
It stands out for its rigid verbal morphology and use of honorific suffixes. Both the verb and noun can be marked morphologically within a sentences, depending on the linguistic acts and the topological value, by adding prefixes, suffixes and infixes to verbs and postpositions to nouns.
Korean verbs are divided into two main groups: action verbs, which describe current activities, and stative verbs, which characterise properties or conditions, and thus also act on adjectives.
Korean has a complicated system of honorifics. Korean verbs use a wide range of forms to connote the social context. Courtesy forms thus take on a special importance depending on the relations between the two speakers or with the subject of a statement. The degree of familiarity between two interlocutors is of little importance in determining the form of courtesy. Changes in social structures have led to the levelling and devaluation of courtesy forms.
Korean nouns are generally without gender, number or case. However, according to need, an equivalent grammatical mark may be added as a postposition.
FAQ Can you write in Korean using a PC running a western language operating system? Yes, you can use IME (Input Method Editor), which enables you to write complex characters (like Chinese, Japanese, etc.), using a western language OS and keyboard. IME is generally used in reference to Microsoft Windows. Other operating systems may use different acronyms, like Input Method for Mac OS, FEP for MS-DOS, or XIM for X Window System.
Can a Windows .doc file in Korean be read by Macintosh? Yes, but only Mac OS X – MS Word 2004 and later, and only if the system fonts are correctly installed. As for other programmes, compatibility must be verified case by case, since it depends on the type of software, version and fonts installed.
In what direction is Korean written? Korean may be written horizontally (left to right) or vertically, but in the latter case it also reads from right to left.
Does Korean have upper and lower case characters? No, there is no uppercase in Korean.
To request a quote for a translation into Korean, click here
Corsican is a neo-Roman language spoken in Corsica and, as a variant, in Gallura (Sardinia).
It is spoken in Corsica by around 90,000 people, and the Gallurian version is spoken by around 80,000.
Corsican is recognised as an autonomous neo-Roman language and, furthermore, as a regional language of France. It has numerous similarities with French, and also has links with the Tuscan dialects of Italy.
It is primarily a spoken language; it was first codified as a written language in the Nineteenth Century.
Corsican is an obligatory subject in public schools, from elementary to university, and the official recognition of Corsican has played a role in the French government’s strategy of relaxing relations with Corsica including, most recently, conferring greater autonomy on the region.
The Corsican Academy is the cultural association responsible for safeguarding, developing and promoting the Corsican language and culture.
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The Croatian language is spoken primarily in Croatia, where it is used by 5 million people, as well as in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There are also Croatian speaking minorities in Slovenia, Italy and Austria.
Compared to Serbian, Croatian is a variant of a substantially unitary linguistic tradition: Serbian and Croatian have a common foundation, although religious differences (Croatians are Catholics while Serbs are Orthodox) and different political histories, along with local peculiarities, have resulted in the formation of two different written languages.
Up to the early Nineties, Serbo-Croat (or Croato-Serbian) was considered to be a single language with two variants, and this vision was stated in various official agreements, the last of which was the Novi Sad accord of 1954, with the intention of underlining the bonds between Slavic peoples. However, both Croats and Serbs have long been insistent on their autonomy and separate identities, including linguistically, so that the war in ex-Yugoslavia in the Nineties put an end to the concept of linguistic identity and the two nations took an increasingly greater distance from each other.
Croatian uses the Roman alphabet with some diacritical marks. It has 34 letters.
Phonetically and morphologically, Croatian has a smaller number of Balkanisms. On the other hand, it has numerous links with Latin, Italian, the dialects of the Veneto region and German. Compared with Serbian, however, Croatian uses fewer foreign words, to which it prefers its own neologisms. This tendency has always been present, but the political situation of the Nineties reinforced it. Foreign words, furthermore, are prevalent in the spoken language (German and Hungarian borrowings in the north, Venetian Italianisms along the coast). Foreign words with a Latin root almost always take the suffix –irati.
Croatian is said to be a musical language, with a variety of intonations.
It makes considerable use of auxiliary modal verbs combined with the infinitive. It has a well-preserved system of inflections with 7 cases. On the other hand, there is no article. The genders are masculine, feminine and neutral.
Syntactically, Croatian has a different logic from Serbian, with a very rigid syntax.
FAQ When translating into Croatian, must I use the Roman alphabet? Croatian is only written in the Roman alphabet, although with certain special diacritical marks.
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Danish is the spoken language of more than 5 million people.
It belongs to the Nordic or Scandinavian group of the Germanic language family.
Danish is the official language not only of Denmark, but also of Greenland and the Faroe Islands (together withFaroese, the local tongue). It is also spoken in Norway, where it arrived in the Fourteenth Century and gave birth to a local variant which is slightly different from Danish usage and which coexists with another type of Norwegian closer to national traditions. There are also linguistic minorities in Iceland, Germany, Canada, Sweden and the USA.
Furthermore, as a colonial language, it is still in use in Iceland and is spoken by a minority of 300,000 people in the Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it is protected by the regional constitution.
Danish is written almost exclusively in Roman characters nowadays, but Gothic script was used more frequently until a few decades ago.
Together with other Scandinavian languages, Danish is one of the few Indo-European languages which does not conjugate verbs by person and number. In contrast to Swedish, there are however different forms for the grammatical tenses. Nouns are of two types: neutral and common. Scandinavian languages stand out for their use of the enclitic article: the definite article is added to the noun as a suffix.
In 1955 the Danish Ministry of Culture established the Dansk Sprognævn, the Danish Language Council, at the University of Copenhagen, with the objective of dealing with linguistic issues, updating and publishing the official Danish dictionary, and monitoring the development of the language. It is the most authoritative Danish language institute and collaborates with other Scandinavian language institutes.
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The Hebrew language ranges from classical, Biblical Hebrew to modern Hebrew, which is the official language of the state of Israel, and is spoken by around 7 million people. Although there are significant differences between them, they are both the same language. It is a Semitic language, and as such is similar to Arabic.
Originally, Hebrew was the language of the Jews when the majority of them still lived in the Middle East. Around 2300 years ago, Hebrew fell out of use as a spoken language and was replaced by Aramaic.
In the following centuries, the Jews of the Diaspora continued using Hebrew only for religious purposes. In everyday life, the Jews spoke the local languages or other Hebrew languages like Yiddish or Ladino, often written with the Hebrew alphabet.
After the birth of the Zionism, the idea of making Hebrew the everyday language of Jews immigrating to Palestine took root. This was put into practice by Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a Lithuanian Jew who emigrated to Palestine in 1881. He created new words for modern concepts, since they did not exist in classical Hebrew.
Orthodox Jews did not originally accept the secular use of the holy language, and even today some groups of orthodox Jews in Israel continue to use Yiddish for everyday purposes.
However, Hebrew rapidly spread among Jewish immigrants despite resistance to its use, and it became the official language of Israel in 1948, along with Arabic.
Today, Hebrew is used in every area of daily life, including the sciences, while maintaining its links with Biblical Hebrew. Other influences include Yiddish, Arabic, Russian and English.
The Jewish communities of the Diaspora continue to speak other languages, but Jews moving to Israel must learn Hebrew if they are to integrate.
The Hebrew alphabet, like the Arabic one, does not include vowels except as small marks above or below the consonants, although these are not generally used. Vowels are important to the meaning of the words, however.
Words have a root, usually of three consonants, which is modified by prefixes, suffixes, insertions and vowels to take on different meanings.
Verbs take seven forms, usually with different meanings. The indicative takes the present (using a participle), past, future and imperative. There are no compound tenses.
The present participle distinguishes between masculine and feminine, as do some forms of the future and past.
As with the modern neo-Roman languages, nouns only inflect by number and gender. Along with the singular and plural, many words also take the dual.
Hebrew is written from right to left.
FAQ Can a file in Hebrew be read on both Macintosh and Windows platforms? The text editor integrated into Mac OS X (Textedit) recognises and displays the Hebrew alphabet correctly. However, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac only supports European and Asian languages. These means that, although it displays Hebrew characters correctly, Word 2004 for Mac does not recognise the direction of the language, and thus is incapable of handling text correctly.
Does Hebrew have upper and lower case characters? No, there is no uppercase in Hebrew.
How do you write numbers in Hebrew? Hebrew uses Arabic numerals, written normally from left to right. However, if the number is followed by ° to indicate degrees centigrade, the degree sign goes to the left of the number.
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As is usual with small populations, the Estonian national identity is closely linked to its language, Estonian. Today, almost 1.1 million people are mother tongue Estonian speakers; of these, around 950,000 live in Estonia, and the remainder live in Sweden, Canada, USA and Russia, where the language has no official statute, among others.
Estonian is one of the smallest languages in the world to have an up-to-date vocabulary in all main areas of daily life and the sciences.
In contrast with the majority of European languages, Estonian is not an Indo-European language, but is Finno-Ugric, like Finnish and Hungarian; it is also completely different from Latvian, Lithuanian and Russian.
It is an agglutinative language, with deep sounds.
It has 14 cases (in both the singular and plural): nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, comitative. There is no accusative: the nominative, genitive or partitive are used in its place.
Estonian has no article nor gender. This means that a single pronoun may refer to a man, woman or physical object. Since the relations between words in a sentence are indicated by inflections, the order of words is relatively free.
The language has recently introduced borrowings from Swedish and Danish, Russian and English. The oldest borrowings are from German and other Germanic languages spoken in Saxony, via the Baltic Germans of Livonia.
Estonian uses the Roman alphabet. The modern orthography uses 32 letters, with 17 consonants and 9 vowels. Estonian has one of the highest frequencies of vowel sounds of any European languages.
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Flemish is not strictly speaking a language in its own right; it is actually a variety of Dutch, the language spoken by more than 15 million people in the Netherlands and about 6 million in Belgium. Flemish is spoken in Belgium, or rather in Flanders (northern Belgium), in the provinces of Antwerp and Limburg and more than half the province of Brabant. In spite of the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between Flemish and Dutch, the written language tends to be the same.
In spite of this, the majority of Dutch-speaking Belgians continue to use the name ‘Vlaams’ for their language.
To help overcome the inconsistencies and confusion, a legislative body was created to reinforce the linguistic union between the two areas. The Nederlandse Taalunie, founded in 1980, is an intergovernmental institution tasked with implementing a common policy on Dutch language and literature for the Netherlands and Belgium's Flemish community.
FAQWhich language must documents intended for Belgium be translated into?
In spite of the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, the written language tends to be the same. Therefore, any document intended for the Flemish-speaking area of Belgium simply has to be translated into Dutch.
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Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family, which includes Hungarian and Estonian, and is spoken in Finland (except for the Åland Islands, where only Swedish is spoken), Estonia, Sweden, Russia and Norway by around 6 million people. It is the mother tongue of 93% of Finns.
Finnish uses the Roman alphabet.
Like Hungarian and Turkish, Finnish is an agglutinative language, so that it forms words from a root to which it adds prefixes and suffixes to modify the meaning of the basic word.
The spoken language is briefer than the written one.
In Finnish the nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and nominal part of verbs are inflected for number and 15 cases. There is no gender distinction or article. The verb is very similar to that of Indo-European languages, with special features in the negative forms. Finnish has recently acquired borrowings from Swedish, Russian and English. The most ancient borrowings come from German and other Germanic tongues spoken in Saxony.
Since 1 January 1995 Finland has been a member of the EU and Finnish is thus a community language. However, there are very few specialised translators for this language, partly because due to its particular vocabulary and grammar, it is considered to be one of the most difficult European languages to learn.
Vice-versa, Finland is one of the most multi-lingual EU countries, with a very high percentage of the population who speak at least one foreign language. It is followed in this by Holland, Denmark and Sweden.
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Scottish Gaelic, Gàidhlig, is an Insular Celtic dialect belonging to the Goidelic group, which also includes Irish and Manx.
It has similarities with Irish, Breton and, like other Celtic languages, is an Indo-European language.
There are two main dialects of Gaelic, the northern and southern, which are geographically distinct. The southern dialect is closer to Irish than the northern, and is more inflected.
Gaelic is now spoken in Scotland by around 70,000 people, the majority of whom live in the Hebrides (particularly the Outer Hebrides), in some areas of the West Highlands and in some urban communities, for example in Glasgow.
Surprisingly, Gaelic and not English is the language which has been spoken in Scotland for the longest uninterrupted period of time. It had its golden age in the early Middle Ages. In subsequent centuries, English pushed it back into the rural areas, until it was eventually spoken only in the Highlands. Following the depopulation of the countryside, however, significant Gaelic speaking communities settled in the cities. It was these communities that gave birth to the “Gaelic revival” at the start of this century. This has led to the foundation of university departments, publication of books and newspapers and, most recently, new media including radio, TV and websites. Gaelic must be taught to young people if it is to survive: to meet this need, there are now bi-lingual classes in elementary schools.
Scots Gaelic has four cases: nominative, genitive, dative and vocative. As in Irish, the accent is on the first syllable of the word.
FAQ Does Gaelic use any special characters which there might be problems displaying? No, the language uses the Roman alphabet and there are no problems in displaying it.
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Galician or Galego (Gallego in Spanish) is a Romance language derived from Latin and ancient Galician-Portuguese, born in the Roman province which included modern Galicia, northern Portugal and areas to the east of them.
Galician is the most ancient of the Roman languages together with Italian, and precedes Castilian by around one century.
Galician was formed in the twelfth century by the assimilation of Vulgar Latin brought to the area in the second century by Roman invaders. It flourished officially throughout the Middle Ages up to the sixteenth century, during which a series of political and military setbacks were experienced by the Galicians. This led to domination by the Castilian nobility, so that Galician lost its public, official, literary and religious status until the end of the nineteenth century. In recent times the language has experienced a renaissance, and the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the Statute of Autonomy in 1980 recognised Galician as the official language of the Autonomous Community of Galicia, together with Castilian.
Galician is currently spoken by around 3 million people in the north-eastern Spanish provinces of La Coruña, Lugo, Ourense and Pontevedra, and only partly in León, Asturie and Zamora. It is also one of the dialects of northern Portugal.
There are many efforts to promote the language internationally. Like Catalan and Basque, for example, Galician is an official language of the European Union, and Spain has agreed, since 1 January 2007, that certain secondary legislative acts will be published in Galician as well as Spanish.
FAQ Does Galician use any special characters which there might be problems displaying? No, it uses the same characters as Spanish and there are thus no problems in displaying it.
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Welsh, called Cymraeg (from Cymru, "Wales") by its speakers, is an Insular Celtic idiom of the Britannic group. It has similarities with Irish, Breton and, like other Celtic languages, is an Indo-European language.
It is the indigenous language of Wales, and is the most widely spoken of the Celtic languages.
In Great Britain, it is spoken mainly in the more rural areas in the north and west of Wales, like Denbighshire, Gwynedd Merionethshire, Carmarthenshire, Anglesey, North Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion, and in parts of West Glamorgan. It is also spoken in some communities in Argentina, Australia and USA.
Welsh has always been a minority language compared to English, and is still not recognised as an official language.
During the twentieth century a movement arose to conserve the language, promoted by the Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh language society, and nationalist organisations like Plaid Cymru. These organisations have preserved Welsh from extinction and still fight for its recognition as an official language next to English.
Many local newspapers are printed in Welsh, there are radio programmes in Welsh, and there is even a popular TV network which uses Welsh as its language.
However, today Welsh is spoken in Wales by only 600,000 people – no more than 20% of the population. The choice of language often depends on the subject of the conversation, as well as the age and social status of the speakers.
Like all modern Celtic languages, Welsh uses the Roman alphabet and has 28 letters, eight of which are double consonants, considered letters in their own right.
The script is phonetic: the individual sounds of the language are represented in an unambiguous manner. Welsh speakers thus always know how to pronounce a word even if they have never seen it before.
The language has only two genders, masculine and feminine. The words are accented on the penultimate syllable, with an unmistakable intonation.
Like Breton, Welsh has also lost many inflections of the nouns; the conjugation of verbs, however, is particularly complicated.
Wales currently has a northern and southern variety, and there are forty dialects.
FAQ Does Welsh use any special characters which there might be problems displaying? No, the language uses the Roman alphabet and there are no problems in displaying it.
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Russian is an eastern Slavic Indo-European language, like Ukrainian and Byelorussian. It is the mother tongue of the majority of the population of Russia and many people in other ex-Soviet Bloc countries. It is estimated that it has 170 million native speakers, and 120 million people who speak it as a second language. It is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
The language plays a leading role in Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Bulgaria. It is also one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
Russian, like almost all Slavic languages, has a limited vowel system (there are only 5). The consonant system, on the other hand, is very rich, since almost every consonant has a palatal partner. Palatization is typical of Slavic languages, although its importance varies. A palatised consonant is obtained by raising the tongue towards the palate while saying it.
The Russian Federation writes Russian in modern Cyrillic, with 33 letters. The orthography is quite phonetic, following reforms in 1918.
Morphologically, the main difference between Russian and Germanic and neo-Roman tongues is clear: Russian has six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, instrumental, accusative and prepositive). There is a seventh case, the vocative, but it is hardly used. There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral.
Another particular feature of Russian is its verbal system: a verb conjugates in only two modes, the indicative and imperative, and three tenses, past, present and future. There is a type of conditional, but it is not strictly a separate verbal form. The verbal system seems very simple and streamlined, but it also uses the aspect. There are the imperfective and perfective aspects: the former indicates an uncompleted action, the continuation of an action or its repetition, while the latter indicates a completed action, not repeated over the time expressed by the verb (past and future, while the present cannot be perfective).
Phonetically, one of the main difficulties of the language is that the accent is irregular; there are no rules to indicate its position. The position of the accent in a word depends on its declension and number.
One particular syntactical feature of Russian is the completely free order of its constituents. Although the subject-verb-object is mostly used, the order may be modified for emphasis. This happens because the use of cases is sufficient to establish the function of the words within a sentence – position has little value.
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JAPANESE (JA) Family: ASIAN Alphabet: JAPANESE
Japanese is almost the only language spoken in Japan which, with a population of more than 125 million, is one of the most linguistically uniform countries in the world: 99.2% of its citizens are mother tongue speakers of Japanese in its various forms. Japanese is the sixth most spoken language worldwide.
Official Japanese, from Tokyo, has gradually spread over the entire country due to the influence of the mass media; many local dialects are still in use, however, including the dialects of Kyoto and Osaka, which are still highly regarded. There are many theories about the origins of the language. Many academics believe that Japanese syntax is close to that of some Altaic languages like Turkish and Mongol. On the other hand, its syntactical similarity to Korean is widely accepted. In prehistoric times, the morphology and vocabulary of Japanese were influence by Malayo-Polynesian languages. The language is also spoken in areas of Japanese immigration like Brazil, Hawaii, California, Guam, the Marshall Islands and Palau.
Japanese is an agglutinative language characterised by the use of Chinese ideograms, the kanji, each of which expresses a concept. These characters were introduced to Japan in the fifth and sixth centuries and were subsequently complemented by two forms of phonetic alphabet derived from Chinese, hiragana and katakana. These were originally pictograms, which represented the forms of physical objects in a schematic manner. Over the centuries, the pictographic nature of these signs has largely been lost. It is estimated that there are almost 50,000 kanji, even though only 3,000 are in general use. To rationalise their use, a list of 2,000 basic kanji, called joyokanji, was set up in 1981. Kanji mostly have two parts, the root, which expresses the generic meaning of the character, and the phonetic part, which gives the letter of the character itself. There are 214 roots, but only fifty or so are involved in the formation of a large number of characters. In contrast, there are 858 phonetic parts.
There is no clear distinction between consonants and vowels in pronunciation. Japanese does not have an alphabet, but a syllabary (kana) formed of a set of syllabic characters which represent all the basic sounds of the language, and which cannot be broken up. There are 46 of these sounds, called seion, meaning “pure” or “fundamental sounds”.
Adding a small sign composed of two strokes (nigori) or a small circle (maru) to the top right of these characters gives the 20 “impure sounds” (dakuon) and 5 semi-pure sounds (handakuon) respectively. Then there are the 36 contracted sounds (yoon) derived by combining some of the above characters.
The two forms of syllabic script are called hiragana and katakana. Hiragana, mainly used by women in ancient times, is composed of 48 characters and is used above all for words of Japanese origin, particles, inflections of verbs and often Chinese origin words which cannot be written in the characters officially approved for general use. Katakana also uses 48 characters. It is mainly used for foreign words derived from other languages than Chinese, to give emphasis, for onomatopoeias, scientific names of flora and fauna, proper names, modern technological words, or for special stylistic purposes.
Along with hiragana and katakana, there are two other ways to write Japanese: • roomaji, a transliterations into the Roman alphabet. This transliteration is owed to the publication of religious texts by the Jesuits in 1549. It was then used above all to facilitate relations with Westerners.
• nipponshiki (or kunreishiki) is a method derived from roomaji, modified in 1954, and little used except for official documents.
In Japanese the order of the words does not indicate the grammatical function of nouns within a sentence. This is indicated by the particles following the noun. The most important of these are ga, wa, wo, ni and no. Wa is particularly important, since it indicates the subject matter of the sentence. As for verbs, neither person nor number is indicated.
FAQ Can you write in Japanese using a PC running a western language operating system? Yes, you can use IME (Input Method Editor), which enables you to write complex characters (like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.), using a western language OS and keyboard. IME is generally used in reference to Microsoft Windows. Other operating systems may use different acronyms, like Input Method for Mac OS, FEP for MS-DOS, or XIM for X Window System.
When translating into Japanese, must proper nouns and abbreviations be transliterated? In many cases it is best to transliterate proper nouns (e.g. personal names), i.e. reproduce the original sound of the name using the characters of the most appropriate alphabet. As for abbreviations and tradenames, it is best not to change them. It is best to check the suitability of a transliteration in each case.
Does Japanese have upper and lower case characters? No, the ideograms are not affected by this distinction.
Does Japanese use italic and bold typefaces, etc.? Yes. Bold and italic are both used in Japanese and now, thanks to continuous improvements in Japanese text editors, there is no need to change font.
Is Japanese only written from left to right, or are other options available? Japanese may be written horizontally (left to right) or vertically, but in the latter case it also reads from right to left. Books, magazines and newspapers are usually written vertically. If this is not the case, and they are written horizontally, the direction of impagination is usually maintained (right to left), so that most books and comics (manga) open and are read in the opposite direction from Western texts.
Are there rules in Japanese for splitting words into syllables? No, there are no rules for this. When laying out a text, a sentence can be split as desired at line breaks.
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Greek is probably the most ancient European language: it boasts an oral tradition of 4000 years and three thousand years of written documents.
Its alphabet is derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and has provided the model, directly or indirectly, for all Western scripts.
Today, Classical Greek is an important part of the vocabulary of all Indo-European languages and the scientific disciplines. Modern Greek is the culmination of a common language derived from Mycenaean, whose subdivisions were more historical than linguistic, and is profoundly different from katharevousa, the purist Greek inspired by the ancient Greek, which was imposed in the twentieth century by rightist regimes.
The official language since 1976 has been called NEK, “koinè”, the common tongue, Modern Greek, and is based on the popular language used widely in literature since the nineteenth century, with borrowings from the academic language. Greek is the spoken language of 12 million people. It is the official language of the Greece and one of the two official languages, alongside Turkish, of the Republic of Cyprus. Modern Greek is also spoken by 2-3 million Greeks living abroad, above all in the USA, Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom. In each of these countries, it maintains its own peculiarities, although it has everywhere lost the dative, the pluperfect, optative, absolute genitive, the development of periphrastic forms, and has been infiltrated by foreign words.
Greek has taken on many foreign words: first from Latin and Hebrew, and later from Turkish and Italian. In the nineteenth century, due to close links with western European countries, the language took on a new layer of foreign words regarding material and intellectual culture. At the same time, many Greek words have entered the other western languages - one need only think of medical and scientific terminology.
The Modern Greek alphabet has 24 letters (7 vowels and 17 consonants) which are identical to those of Classical Greek.
Modern Greek has adopted the iotacistica pronunciation, named after the pronunciation of I (called “iota” and read i), while the majority of Greek specialists believe that the correct Classical Greek pronunciation – or at least, as close as possible to being correct – is the etacistica version, in which H is called "eta" and is read e.
Another characteristic of Greek script is that all nouns and adjectives are declined, and all lowercase words (except for monosyllabic words) are accented; they lose their accents in uppercase, except for the conjunction ?.
FAQ Must all proper nouns be transliterated in Greek? No, proper nouns (e.g. city and company names) may be left in the Roman alphabet. They may be transliterated at times for greater legibility.
Must units of measurement be translated into Greek? No, the SI units (kg, kW, m, etc.) remain as they are.
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Hindi is one of the languages of the Indian subcontinent, above all North India, where it is the official language used by the government, media, schools and in literature.
It is also spoken in Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Canada, Germany, Guyana, Kenya, Nepal, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Trinidad, Uganda, the United Kingdom, the USA and Yemen.
There are more than 480 million Hindi speakers worldwide, which makes Hindi the third most widely spoken language, after Chinese and English.
Hindi is an Indo-European language, a member of the Indo-Aryan group. It has many dialectal variants.
Hindi is an ancient language: the first surviving written documents go back to the fourth century BC. Over the centuries the alphabet has evolved, and since the eleventh century the devanagari alphabet (literally: sacred script) has been in use. In its continuous revisions, Hindi has taken on ever more elements from Sanskrit. It also has many points of contact with Urdu, the majority language of Pakistan, which however uses a Perso-Arabic script.
Like the other Indian tongues, Hindi letters are divided by pronunciation. Each group of consonants contains seven to nine letters.
Sentences follow the subject-object-verb scheme.
FAQ Which direction is Hindi written in? Hindi is written from left to right.
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INDONESIAN (ID) Family: OCEANIC / INDONESIAN Alphabet: ROMAN
Indonesian, which has been the official language of Indonesia since 1945, is spoken only by 7% of its population. It is also used by 45% of the population of Malaya. On the other hand, 200 million people speak it as a second language.
It is thus an indispensable lingua franca in a region with around 300 local languages: it is used in administration and business, in schools and the media.
Indonesian is an Austronesian language, in rapid development, open to linguistic borrowings, especially from Hindi, Portuguese (it is also spoken in East Timor, the Portuguese colony which obtained independence in 2002), Chinese, Arabic and Sanskrit. The Dutch presence has left a significant mark on the language: modern Indonesian has 1000 borrowings from Arabic, 125 Portuguese, 750 from Sanskrit – and around 10,000 from Dutch.
It also has numerous similarities with Malay, since Indonesian is a dialect of Malay.
Since 1972, the Indonesian language has 5 vowels, 2 semi-vowels, 3 diphthongs, 16 simple consonants and 4 double consonants. It uses the Roman alphabet, which was introduced during the Dutch colonial period.
Its grammar and phonology are simple: for example, neither nouns nor verbs are inflected.
Sentences follow the subject-verb-object scheme.
Verbally, there are many prefixes and suffixes which modify the meaning of a root.
FAQ Does Indonesian use any special characters which there might be problems displaying? No, the language uses the Roman alphabet and there are no problems in displaying it.
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Irish is one of the three Goidelic or Gaelic languages, together with Scots Gaelic and Manx, the language of the Isle of Man. It is a member of the Insular Celtic language group of the Celtic language family, and is similar to Welsh and Breton.
As established by Article 8 of the Constitution, Irish is the first official language in Ireland, followed by English. Since 13 June 2005 it has also been an official language of the EU. However, the EU only publishes treaties and other primary legal documents in Irish, but neither secondary legislation nor the Official Gazette. However, since 1 January 2007 certain secondary legislative acts will be published also in Irish Gaelic.
Over the centuries, Irish has gradually supplanted other languages spoken in Ireland, which have left no direct traces of their presence except as a linguistic substrate of Irish, which was thus the only language spoken on the island up to the arrival of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries.
Subsequently, with the domination of English at the start of the twentieth century, the language was confined to some western coastal areas, today known as the Gaeltacht, with a majority of Irish speakers. The state has always demonstrated a strong interest in safeguarding the original language, and it is an obligatory subject in public schools. Today Irish is to be found everywhere in Ireland. All street signs are in both English and Irish. Only in the Gaeltacht are they only written in Irish. This also applies to public documents and commemorative plaques.
One rarely hears Irish spoken outside the Gaeltacht, however. It can sometimes be heard spoken by persons of a certain age in areas like Galway or, more rarely, in Dublin. The Universities generally have Irish speaking faculties, especially in the humanities and Celtic culture and language.
It is difficult to estimate how many of the educated urban middle class speak Irish. Familiarity with Irish is widespread in this social class, although it is mainly passive or spoken only in the family. All laws must be published in Irish. In practice, however, this is not always done. In general, legal sentences only consider the English text, and the Irish version is often only published later.
Irish is presently written in the Roman alphabet. This has replaced an older form of writing based on Roman uppercase characters (Cló Gaelach). Up to the first half of the twentieth century, Irish books and other texts were often printed in this older script. It is still used, but only for decorative purposes.
Irish script has four short vowels, and five long vowels. It also uses 13 consonants; the remaining consonants of the Roman alphabet (j, k, q, v, w, x, y, z) are only used in transcribing foreign words and borrowings.
Irish is a highly inflected language, but over the years many synthetic forms have been replaced by analytical constructions. The word order is verb-subject-object, as for all Insular Celtic languages (except for Breton). However, all the semantically autonomous elements of a sentence may be placed at the beginning, with a change in the sentence structure, for emphasis.
Irish has five tenses: present, simple past, imperfect, future and conditional. The latter uses the paradigm of the tenses and is thus also considered a tense. There are also the conjunctive, imperative and participles. On the other hand, there is no infinitive.
Nouns only have two genders, masculine and feminine.
The nominal inflection is disappearing. While the genitive and vocative are still quite healthy, the dative has almost completely vanished, and the accusative is distinguished from the nominative in only one case.
FAQ If I am exporting a product to Ireland, must the technical documentation be translated into Irish? No; since English is the second official language, and the two languages are legally equivalent, it need only be translated into English.
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Icelandic is a Germanic language of the Indo-European family. It is the official language of Iceland, and is spoken by 280,000 people.
The alphabet is based on the Roman one, and contains 32 letters, including a number of special letters, the so-called “runes”, derived from the ancient runic alphabet, which are similar to our own but are read differently. For the highly educated Icelanders, the use of the ancient language of the Vikings is a matter of pride, a sign of their close bond with the past, and foreign language books are translated into Icelandic to keep the mother tongue alive.
The isolation of Iceland and its strong written culture have preserved the ancient language in excellent condition, so that it has hardly changed over the last 1000 years, in particular in its written form, but also in the oral form, which makes it Nordic language closest to the ancient tongues. An Icelander today can easily read a saga written by his ancestors in the thirteenth century, somethihng which an Italian cannot do with texts written in Roman.
The Danish occupation of Iceland from 1380 to 1918 had almost no effect on the Icelandic language, which continued to be used for everyday affairs. Danish was only used for official communications, as was English during the American occupation from 1940 to the Fifties.
In 1944 the Constitution established Icelandic as the official language of the country and since then it is the only one to be used in official documents and public debates.
A number of grammatical features, which have been diluted in other languages, have remained almost unchanged in Icelandic. Care is also taken not to introduce foreign words beyond what is strictly necessary. New terms are formed from existing words, which makes the language particularly rich.
The phonology of Icelandic is quite unusual for a European language.
Iceland is not part of the EU, but, like Norway, is a signatory of the Schengen Agreement establishing the free circulation of persons, goods and services within the EU.
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Latvian is the national language of the Republic of Latvia and is spoken by two million people. Together with Lithuanian, it forms the Baltic group of Indo-European languages. There are three distinct dialects: eastern (high Latvian), central (middle Latvian) and western (tahnii); the central dialect is the basis of the literary language.
The morphology is more simple than that of Lithuanian: there is no neutral or dual, so that there are only five inflections; there is still a rich system of conjugation, but many tenses are represented by a single unchanged form. The vocabulary is similar, but not identical, to that of Lithuanian and the roots are not always the same.
Latvian had no precise orthography throughout the nineteenth century, since German and Polish spellings were used to represent the sounds of the Baltic language. The modern alphabet replaced the black letter used for centuries only when Latvia achieved independence in 1921. A second, definitive orthographical reform was imposed in the mid thirties.
The modern Latvian alphabet is particularly precise. It has a rich variety of palatal consonants, followed by a comma (or cedilla) below the letter. There are five vowels: a, e, i, o and u, and long and short vowels are distinguished by the macron. The pronunciation of the vowels is very similar to that of Italian, except for the o.
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Lithuanian is among the most ancient European languages, and together with Latvian, forms the Baltic group of Indo-European languages.
It is the official language of the Republic of Lithuania, and is spoken by more than 3,500,000 people. Some Lithuanian dialects are also spoken in the north east of Belarus and Poland, and it has been an official language of the EU since 1 May 2004.
Among modern Indo-European languages, it is the one which has best preserved its ancient phonetic system and the greater part of its morphological features; like the other Baltic languages, it is closest to the Indian branch of the Indo-European languages. Lithuanian is very close to Latvian, but its morphology is close to that of Slavic languages: it inflects seven cases and three numbers, and has a rich system of conjugations with special modes and numerous participles and gerunds.
The vocabulary is very archaic and it is not difficult to find words, which can be compared with Sanskrit, Greek and Latin.
Despite its small geographical coverage, various dialects exist, which are divided into two large groups: high Lithuanian and low Lithuanian.
The official alphabet was established in 1918, following the first independence of Lithuania, and replaced the old, disorderly systems of the pre-war period, based on German and Polish, which were little suited to the language’s phonetics. The alphabet has 32 letters.
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Macedonian is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and is also spoken in some areas of Albania.
For historical/political reasons, it is closely linked to Serbian and above all Bulgarian, since it only recently developed to distinguish itself from Bulgarian. The Macedonian alphabet and orthography were only approved in 1945, and the first schoolbooks in the new language were published in 1946, while 1953 saw the foundation of the Macedonian Language Institute, "Krste P. Misirkov". In the years following the Second World War, the new republic made great efforts to make Macedonian a widely-spoken language; even today older people speak a misture of dialects including elements of Serbian and Bulgarian, while young people speak a more pure Macedonian.
The phonetic system includes 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and 26 consonants. The modern spelling system is phonetic: there is a separate letter for each spoken sound. Thus there are 31 letters in the alphabet, just as there are 31 sounds in the spoken language.
Macedonian nouns take three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral. The nouns have singular and plural forms, but are not inflected; on the other hand, they take different forms with the definite article, which refer to familiar or specific objects. As in Bulgarian, the articles come after the noun.
Verbs have three persons (first, second and third) and two numbers (singular and plural). Macedonian has the following tenses: present, aorist, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, future, future perfect, reported future, and three modes: indicative, imperative and conditional. The imperative has morphological forms only for the second person singular and plural, but there are also a number of analytical (compound) forms for the second and third persons.
Sentences follow the subject-verb-object scheme.
FAQ Is the Macedonian alphabet exactly the same as Russian? No, some Russian letters are missing. Some letters are also pronounced differently.
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Maltese is spoken by around 350,000 people on the islands of Malta and Gozo.
It is believed to go back to the Phoenician occupation of the islands; it resisted the influence of Romance languages for centuries, although it has taken on many words from Italian and French, which are now completely integrated into it. Maltese has also taken on many elements of English, after this language replaced Italian as the official language of Malta in the Colonial Constitution of 1934.
Maltese has a recent history as a cultural language: the elites have always preferred to speak Italian.
Maltese is the only variety of Neo-Arabic to be written in the Roman alphabet. This Semitic language is a modern Arabic vernacular closely connected with the western dialects of Arabic. Its phonetics, morphology, syntax and vocabulary are strongly influenced by Sicilian.
Maltese is written from left to right.
The alphabet has thirty letters; it has special diacritical marks such as the barred h, which represents the guttural aspirated h of Arabic, and a dot over the consonants z, c and g.
Maltese is the official language of Malta together with English and is an official and working language of the EU, but due to the lack of qualified translators, not all acts were required to be translated into the language at least up to 2007.
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DUTCH (NL) Language family: GERMANIC Alphabet: ROMAN
Dutch is a Germanic Indo-European language.
It is the official language of the Netherlands and Suriname and one of the three official languages of Belgium (spoken in the north of the country, including in the bilingual city of Brussels, where it is better known as Flemish, Vlaams).
Dutch is also spoken at Aruba and in the Dutch Antilles (officially part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), in French Flanders (the northern part of France) and in some small areas of Germany (near the western border). In addition, in 17th Century in South Africa, the Dutch dialects spoken by the colonists provided the basis for the development of the officially recognised Afrikaans language). In spite of the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between Dutch and Flemish, the written language tends to be the same.
The linguistic union is protected by the intergovernmental Nederlandse Taalunie (Linguistic Union of the Netherlands and Belgium) institution, founded in 1980. The mission of the Nederlandse Taalunie is to implement a common policy on Dutch language and literature for the Netherlands and Belgium's Flemish community.
FAQ Which language must documents intended for Belgium be translated into? In spite of the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, the written language tends to be the same. Therefore, any document intended for the Flemish-speaking area of Belgium simply has to be translated into Dutch.
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NORWEGIAN (NO) Famiglia di appartenenza: GERMANIC Alfabeto di appartenenza: ROMAN
Norwegian is a Germanic Scandinavian language; it was originally one of the western Scandinavian languages (together with Icelandic), but has gradually come closet to the eastern Scandinavian languages (Danish and Swedish), above all following 400 years of Danish occupation, during which Danish was the official and only written language. Only after 1814, when Norway broke away from Denmark, did the written language start to develop and take on its own form.
Norwegian is today spoken by more than 4 million people, essentially only in Norway itself.
The alphabet is Roman, with a few diacritical marks.
Norway has two written forms, both of which are used officially: Bokmål and Nynorsk.
Bokmål (language of the book) is used by 85% of the population and is based on written Danish. Nynorsk (new Norwegian), used by the remaining 15%, was created by Ivar Aasen, the great Norwegian poet, linguist and intellectual, from a number of rural dialects. The Ivar Aasen Centre, named after him, is the major Norwegian institute for the protection and diffusion of the new language.
Officially, Bokmål and Nynorsk are equals, and schools use one or the other according to the area; Nynorsk is generally associated with the country’s interior, especially the western Vestlandet; Bokmål rules supreme in Oslo and the Østlandet. Students must have at least a passive knowledge of the other form of writing.
In many towns and counties, the official written form is neutral, inasmuch as both Bokmål and Nynorsk are used.
The differences between the two forms are essentially morphological and lexical. While Bokmål uses a vocabulary with many borrowings from Danish, from which it is derived, Nynorsk uses purer forms. There is also a considerable difference in pronunciation, but this is more a matter of dialectal differences: Norway has numerous dialects, and there is no standard spoken Norwegian. However, apart from some particularly difficult rare dialects, all can Norwegians understand each other well.
The grammar is very similar to that of the other Scandinavian languages and is also quite similar to German, with the verb at the second logical place in the sentence. However, in contrast with German, the verb in subordinate phrases is not placed at the end, but rather the logical order changes: in principle and coordinated phrases, the order is subject-verb-adverb, while in subordinate phrases it is subject-adverb-verb. This rule is not always respected by Norwegians themselves.
The spelling is quite regular. Foreign words are often adapted to local spelling in a similar way to the Italian practice during the Fascist period: French chance thus becomes sjanse in Norwegian. X is expanded into ks, as in straks, and k or s is used in place of c wherever possible; this has the collateral effect that, as in Italy, k is considered an exotic and "positive" letter by young people. The same happens with c and x in Norway.
Together with other Northern European countries like Finland, Holland and Denmark, Norway is one of the most multilingual countries in Europe: a very high percentage of the population can speak at least one foreign language.
Norway is not part of the EU, but, like Iceland, is a signatory of the Schengen Agreement establishing the free circulation of persons, goods and services within the EU.
FAQ When commissioning a translation into Norwegian must I specify the variant to be used? If not otherwise specified, the translation will be into Bokmål. If Nynorsk is preferable, it must be expressly requested when commissioning the project.
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DUTCH (NL) Language family: GERMANIC Alphabet: ROMAN
Dutch is a Germanic Indo-European language.
It is the official language of the Netherlands and Suriname and one of the three official languages of Belgium (spoken in the north of the country, including in the bilingual city of Brussels, where it is better known as Flemish, Vlaams).
Dutch is also spoken at Aruba and in the Dutch Antilles (officially part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), in French Flanders (the northern part of France) and in some small areas of Germany (near the western border). In addition, in 17th Century in South Africa, the Dutch dialects spoken by the colonists provided the basis for the development of the officially recognised Afrikaans language). In spite of the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between Dutch and Flemish, the written language tends to be the same.
The linguistic union is protected by the intergovernmental Nederlandse Taalunie (Linguistic Union of the Netherlands and Belgium) institution, founded in 1980. The mission of the Nederlandse Taalunie is to implement a common policy on Dutch language and literature for the Netherlands and Belgium's Flemish community.
FAQ Which language must documents intended for Belgium be translated into? In spite of the differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, the written language tends to be the same. Therefore, any document intended for the Flemish-speaking area of Belgium simply has to be translated into Dutch .
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Polish is a western Slavic language, like Czech, Slovakian and Serbian. It is the official language of Poland, and is spoken 45 million people.
It is also spoken in Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine and the USA.
Polish has always been strongly influenced by foreign languages, especially Latin, German, Czech, Italian, French, Russian and English. Its base is Slavic, but many Polish words and phrases are Latin or Greek in origin. There are also numerous borrowings from Italian.
Polish is written with 32 letters of the Roman alphabet, with a number of diacritical marks like the ogonek and the acute accent. It also uses 7 double double consonants.
It has a very complicated phonetic system. It has retained a number of nasal vowels, which are written with the ogonek. Some palatal consonants use the acute accent to indicate that the letter over which it is placed is palatal. The accent in speaking falls on the penultimate syllable.
Dialectal differences in Polish are relatively small; there are two main dialects, Silesian and Highlander.
There are no articles. There are two numbers, singular and plural. The singular has three genders (masculine, feminine and neutral). The plural adds another distinction: virile (masculine persons) and non-virile (other persons, animals and objects).
There are 7 cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative.
There are three tenses (present, future and past) and three modes (indicative, conditional and imperative). As with most other Slavic languages, Polish has conserved the verbal aspect which groups verbs into perfective (which indicate a completed action) and imperfective (which indicate an action which is uncompleted, in progress, habitual or repeated).
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There are no translations available.RUSSO (RU) Famiglia di appartenenza: SLAVE Alfabeto di appartenenza: CIRILLICO
Il russo è una lingua indoeuropea appartenente al ceppo slavo orientale, come l'ucraino e il bielorusso. Si tratta della lingua madre per la maggior parte della popolazione in Russia e di parte della popolazione in molti paesi ex-sovietici. Si stima che il russo sia parlato da 170 milioni di persone come lingua madre, e da altri 120 milioni come seconda lingua. Si tratta di una delle lingue più parlate nel mondo.
Questa lingua ha un ruolo di primo piano per esempio in Lettonia, Estonia, Polonia e Bulgaria. È inoltre una delle sei lingue ufficiali delle Nazioni Unite.
Il russo, come la quasi totalità delle lingue slave, possiede un limitato sistema di vocali (solo 5). Il sistema consonantico è invece molto ricco, poiché quasi ogni consonante esiste in coppia con una compagna “palatalizzata”. La palatalizzazione è un fenomeno tipico delle lingue slave, pur essendo presente in misura diversa in tutte le lingue. Si ottiene una consonante palatalizzata alzando la lingua verso il palato mentre la si pronuncia.
L’alfabeto oggi in uso nella Federazione Russa è l’alfabeto cirillico moderno, formato da 33 lettere. L’ortografia segue abbastanza fedelmente la produzione fonetica, in base alla riforma del 1918.
Dal punto di vista morfologico, la differenza maggiore tra il russo e le lingue germaniche e neolatine è piuttosto evidente: il russo possiede sei casi (nominativo, genitivo, dativo, strumentale, accusativo e prepositivo). Esiste un settimo caso, il vocativo, usato però in modo estremamente occasionale. Il nome possiede inoltre tre generi: maschile, femminile e neutro.
Un’altra peculiarità del russo riguarda il sistema verbale: un verbo si coniuga solo in due modi, l’indicativo e l’imperativo, e solo in tre tempi, passato, presente e futuro. Una forma di condizionale esiste, ma non costituisce una forma verbale strettamente a sé. Il sistema verbale appare così molto scarno e semplice, ma per differenziarsi ricorre all’aspetto. Esiste l’aspetto imperfettivo e perfettivo: il primo qualifica un’azione non conclusa, il perdurare dell’azione, o il ripetersi dell’azione stessa, il secondo invece indica un’azione conclusa, terminata, non ripetuta nel tempo in cui il verbo si esprime (passato e futuro, mentre il presente non può essere percettivo).
Dal punto di vista fonetico, una delle principali difficoltà di questa lingua dipende dal fatto che l’accento è libero, non ci sono regole che stabiliscono la sua posizione. L’accento cade all’interno di una parola in posizioni diverse quando quest’ultima viene declinata nei suoi diversi casi o al variare del numero.
Una caratteristica sintattica peculiare del russo è l’ordine completamente libero dei suoi costituenti. Nonostante la forma a cui si attiene maggiormente sia quella Soggetto–Verbo–Oggetto, spesso l’ordine è modificato a seconda dell’enfasi che si vuol dare alle diverse parti della frase. Ciò avviene perché la presenza dei casi rende quasi totalmente inutile l’ordine delle parole per stabilire la loro funzione all’interno della proposizione.
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SERBIAN (SR) Family: SLAVIC Alphabet: CYRILLIC/ROMAN
Serbian is spoken mainly in Serbia and Montenegro by 9 million people.
Compared to Croatian, Serbian is a variant of a substantially unitary linguistic tradition: Serbian and Croatian have a common foundation, although religious differences (Croatians are Catholics while Serbs are Orthodox) and different political histories, along with local peculiarities, have resulted in the formation of two different written languages. Up to the early Nineties, Serbo-Croat (or Croato-Serbian) was considered to be a single language with two variants, and this vision was stated in various official agreements, the last of which was the Novi Sad accord of 1954, with the intention of underlining the bonds between Slavic peoples.
However, both Croats and Serbs have long been insistent on their autonomy and separate identities, including linguistically, so that the war in ex-Yugoslavia in the Nineties put an end to the concept of linguistic identity and the two nations took an increasingly greater distance from each other.
Serbian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, but the Roman alphabet is also used.
Serbian has a quite rare characteristic inasmuch as words are written almost as they are pronounced, each letter representing a different sound.
Phonetically and morphologically, Serbian has many Balkanisms, constructions similar to those of Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian, which indicate a common Balkan substrate. It also has many terms taken from Greek and Turkish.
Serbian is said to be a musical language, with a variety of intonations. It has only five vowels, corresponding to those of Neo-Greek.
The verbal system tends to eliminate the infinitive in favour of a secondary proposition introduced by the pronoun. It has a well-preserved system of inflections with 7 cases. On the other hand, there is no article.
The genders are masculine, feminine and neutral.
Serbian also uses the momentary and durative verbs, such as "dati" and "davati": dati – to give at a particular time, davati – to give repeatedly.
FAQ When translating into Serbian, must I use the Roman or Cyrillic alphabet? Both are acceptable, it also depends on the geographical area for which the text is intended. It is best to ask a local contact (importer, distributor, agent, etc.); however, Cyrillic is generally preferred.
Is the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet the same as Russian? No, some letters are missing. Furthermore, the pronunciation of certain letters is different in Serbian.
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Slovakian is spoken by over five million people and is the official language of the Slovak Republic which, together with the Czech Republic, is the youngest European state: both were born on 1 January 1993 out of the peaceful break up of Czechoslovakia.
In 2004 Slovakia achieved both its foreign policy objectives by entering NATO and the EU, and Slovakian is thus now an official language.
Slovakian is a western Slavic Indo-European language, along with Polish, Serbian and Czech, and has very close links to the latter in particular.
Slovakian uses the Roman alphabet with four diacritical marks on some letters. The accent, in the standard language, always falls on the first syllable.
Prepositions are pronounced together with the following word, unless the word is composed of four or more syllables or the preposition is at the beginning of the sentence.
Slovakian inflects 7 cases, although the vocative is used only very rarely.
Lexically, the similarities with Czech are numerous and the languages differ mainly orthographically and phonetically. Grammatically, on the other hand, Slovakian is simpler, since its literary traditional is more recent.
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Slovenian is a southern Slavic language. It is the official language of Slovenia and is spoken worldwide by 2 million people in Slovenia, Italy, Austria, Croatia, Hungary, USA.
Despite its classification, Slovenian has some characteristics of the northern Slavic languages, and is a point of transition between the two groups. The languages closest to Slovenian are Serbian, Croatian and Slovakian. German has also strongly influenced its vocabulary and phraseology.
The alphabet has 25 letters, with 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and 19 consonants. "R" is considered to be semi-vocalic, and this can be seen from Slovenian words which have no vowels. These are mostly monosyllabic words in which "r" plays the role of vowel. The division into syllables also applies to words without vowels if "r" is used in their place.
The accent is not bound to specific syllables and can fall on different syllables as the word is inflected or conjugated. The accent is dynamic, but there is also a musical accent in some Slovenian dialects. No graphic signs are used to indicate the tonic syllable.
Slovenian distinguishes five inflected and four non-inflected parts of the discourse. The inflected parts are: noun, adjective, verb, pronoun and number. The non-inflected forms are: adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection.
The noun declines by case and number. There are three genders (masculine, feminine and neutral) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). The dual number is used when speaking of two objects of persons. There are six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental and locative. As with Latin, the cases are formed with suffixes. They vary not only for each case of each number, but also different for each of the four declensions. The first declension includes nouns ending in –a, which are mostly feminine. The second declines uninflected feminine nouns which end in consonants. The third includes all masculine nouns, which usually end in consonants. The fourth declension is for neutral nouns which end in –o or –e.
There are no articles.
Verbs conjugate as follows: person, number, gender, mode, tense, aspect and diathesis. There are three persons (first, second and third). The number is singular, plural or dual, and there are masculine, feminine and neutral genders. The modes are indicative, conditional and imperative. There are three basic tenses (present, past and future), and while the past perfect and future perfect tenses do exist, they are hardly used. By diathesis the verb may be transitive or intransitive in the active, passive or reflexive forms. As in all Slavic languages, the verb has the basic characteristic of aspect which does not exist in Italian.
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Swedish is a Scandinavian Indo-European language, as are Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic.
It is spoken by 9 million people in Sweden, Finland (where it is the second official language after Finnish), Norway and Estonia.
Documents in Swedish only date back as far as the thirteenth century, when the first regional laws were written down. Another important step in the development of the language was the translation into Swedish of the Bible in the sixteenth century.
Together with other Scandinavian languages, Swedish is one of the few Indo-European languages which does not conjugate verbs by person and number. Nouns and adjectives are declined by the two genders, cases (nominative and genitive) and number.
As in other Germanic languages, there are definite and indefinite articles; but if there is no adjective, the definite article takes the form of a suffix to the noun, and varies with the gender. If adjectives are present, the suffix remains, but there is also a real article: den for the common singular, det for the neutral singular and de for all plurals. The adjectives have two declinations: strong and weak. This depends on whether there is a definite article or not. The lack of cases is compensated for by the presence of a large number of prepositions.
The written language has nine vowels, each of which can be pronounced long or short.
The syntax shares certain features with English and German. The order of words is similar to that of English (subject-verb-object), and the adjective always precedes the noun, but apart from this Swedish has a very conservative morphology.
Since 1 January 1995 Sweden has been a member of the EU and Swedish is thus an official language of the community.
Together with other Northern European countries like Finland, Holland and Denmark, Sweden is one of the most multilingual countries in Europe: a very high percentage of the population can speak at least one foreign language.
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Turkish is the official language of Turkey, and is spoken by 90-95% of its population. The remainder have a different ethnic origin and speak not only the official language Turkish, but also their own mother tongue in everyday life.
The total number of Turkish speakers is around 250 million in Turkey, Cyprus (where it is an official language along with Greek) and in another 35 other countries worldwide, including Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Romania and Uzbekistan.
Turkish is one of the closely linked group of southern Turkic languages, which includes Balkan Turkish, Gagauz and Khorasani Turkish.
Like Finnish and Hungarian, Turkish is an agglutinative language, so that it forms words from a root to which it adds prefixes and suffixes to modify the meaning of the basic word. The sentence structure is subject+object+verb, as in Japanese and Latin.
The very logical, rational structure of Turkish made it the model for Esperanto.
Up to 1928, Turkish was written in a modified Arabic alphabet. In 1928, as part of his westernisation project, Kemal Atatürk forbade the use of the Arabic script and imposed the use of the Roman alphabet. Three new characters were added, which exist in no other language. Many Persian and Arab words which had influenced the literary language of the Ottoman Empire, were eliminated from the language and replaced with new words. This linguistic revolution had the aim of promoting literacy among the people, and the imposition of a phonetic alphabet, in which each letter corresponds to just one spoken sound, certainly facilitated this task.
This revolution required many years before modern Turkish took root, since the literacy rate at that time was only about 20%. Even today, there are difficulties in communication between the older and younger generations.
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The Ukrainian language belongs to the eastern Slavic language group, which includes Russian and Byelorussian.
Since 1990 it has been the official language of the Ukraine, where it is spoken by 41 million people, although Russian is understood by almost everyone. Ukrainian is also spoken in Poland, Slovakia, Russia, Belarus, Canada, USA, Brazil, Romania, Moldavia, Portugal, Australia and Argentina.
Ukrainian uses a special form of Cyrillic, which differs phonetically from that used in Russia. It shares the majority of its vocabulary with other Slavic languages, particularly Russian, Byelorussian, Polish and Slovakian; Russian has a greater cultural and linguistic influence in the east of the country, while the western areas are more influenced by Polish.
Ukrainian has six vowels and two semi-vowels. Most consonants have three forms: hard, weak and long. The consonants are weakened or hardened by the vowels that follow them in a complex manner.
Ukrainian has seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative). The vocative is used when addressing someone, or calling them, and is not considered a complement of the sentence.
The nouns, adjectives and pronouns are inflected by the seven cases. Nouns have three genders: masculine, feminine and neutral, and two numbers: singular and plural. Depending on the gender and inflection, nouns are divided into declinations, just as in Latin.
Ukrainian only has three tenses (past, present and future), but the aspect is very important, as in other Slavic tongues. Each verb has two aspects, the imperfective and perfective. Lexically, these paired aspects are identical. The imperfective form expresses an action in the past, present or future, which is completed in an indefinite period of time, is related to the duration itself of the action or is not concluded. The perfective form presents only the past or present of the verb (although the latter can express the future). This characteristic of the verb enables it to express various functions, despite the small amount of temporal information.
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HUNGARIAN (HU) Family: FINNO-UGRIC Alphabet: ROMAN
Hungarian (historically: Magyar) is a Uralic or Finno-Ugric language, like Estonian and Finnish, and is thus different from the majority of European languages.
It is spoken in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Austria and Slovenia by around 14.5 million people, of whom 10 million live in Hungary.
Hungary is one of the few countries in Europe (next to Sweden, for instance) with a simple and homogeneous linguistic situation: more than 95% of the population speak the same, practically identical language as their mother tongue, which is also the national language.
Like Finnish and Turkish, Hungarian is an agglutinative language, so that it forms words from a root to which it adds prefixes and suffixes to modify the meaning of the basic word. It is written in the Roman alphabet. It is considered by many linguists to be a musical language for many reasons, including the proportion between vowels and consonants, the large variety of consonants (29, among the richest in Europe), the alternation of long and short vowels independently of the accent on the first syllable, and the so-called law of vocalic harmony.
Lexically, it is fundamentally Finno-Ugric, but it has always been open to words from other languages.
There are no genders, and only a small number of tenses.
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Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and the official language of Indian national administration.
It is spoken in India, Pakistan, Bahrain, UAE, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia; 61 million people speak it as their mother tongue, and 104 million people speak it overall.
Urdu is an Indo-Iranian Indo-European language, a member of the Indo-Aryan group. It developed in South Asia under the influence of Persian, Turkish and Arabic, in the period from 1200 to 1800. The Turkish word urdu means encampment, and referred to the language spoken by the mogul troops camped at the gates of Delhi. Furthermore, due to frequent commercial contacts over the years 1500 to 1700, it has also been influenced by Portuguese, and even French and Dutch.
Its grammatical structure is similar to that of Hindi. The main difference is one of script: Hindi uses the devanagari alphabet, while Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script.
Lexically, in contrast with Hindi, of which 80% is composed of Sanskrit words, Urdu uses terms of Arabic and Persian origin, especially in the areas of religion, terminologies and literature.
Urdu is considered to be one of the most beautiful languages, with its extraordinary elegance and musicality. It is also widely spoken in north India, where it was once the official language; but its status declined after Partition, when it was abolished from schools in favour of Hindi. Urdu literature is particularly rich in poetry, although since the mid-nineteenth century there has been a strong development of theatrical, historical and narrative texts, and it has been used extensively in journalism since the twentieth century.
Urdu is promoted as a national language by the Society for the Promotion of Urdu, founded in 1903, which publishes Urdu dictionaries and also contributes to its development in information technology.
FAQ In what direction is Urdu written? Urdu is written from left to right.
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UZBEK (UZ) Family: TURKIC / ALTAIC Alphabet: ROMAN
Uzbek is spoken in Uzbekistan by 14 million people, and by over 1 million in Tajikistan, but it is also spoken in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and in Xinjiang, China.
Uzbek has been influenced by Arabic and Russian, from the period of Tsarist and then Soviet domination. Lexically it has many affinities with the languages of neighbouring peoples, especially Urdu and Hindi.
Since 1927, Uzbek has used various alphabets, from the Arabic to the Roman, with the Cyrillic alphabet being imposed in 1940; with the fall of the Soviet Union, the Roman alphabet was re-introduced in 1992. In China, Uzbek speakers use an alphabet based on the Perso-Arabic script.
The language is characterised by the accent, which generally falls on the last syllable, except for the case of a few suffixes which are never accented.
Sentences follow the subject-verb-object scheme.
Adjectives generally come before their noun, and adverbs before the verb.
Uzbek has numerous dialects from region to region. Some linguists also consider the variant spoken by Uzbeks living in northern Afghanistan as a separate dialect.
FAQ Does Uzbek use any special characters which there might be problems displaying? No, the language uses the Roman alphabet and there are no problems in displaying it.
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Yiddish is spoken by 3 million Jews in eastern Europe and their descendants in other countries around the world. It can be found in USA, Israel, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Canada, Argentina and elsewhere.
It is based on medieval German and is thus a Germanic language, strongly influenced by Hebrew and the languages of other countries with an Ashkenazi Jewish minority (including Polish and Russian).
Between 1500 and 1700, the language spread to other parts of Europe (northern Italy, Holland, Alsace, the Baltic states and northern Germany) and started to divide into western and eastern dialects, due to the influence of Slavic languages and German. The western variety slowly declined, while the eastern variety became a literary language with its own literary production covering all genres. In the nineteenth century many Yiddish speakers migrated to the USA, Palestine and South America, bringing their language with them. Yiddish today is the result of a selection of foreign words according to their meaning, of phonological innovations, semantic slippages and morphological and syntactical mutations.
The main component of Yiddish is German, which makes up around 80% of its vocabulary and syntax, especially in the areas of daily life and business. It also has a Hebrew-Aramaic component, which makes up for almost all the remaining 20%, and concerns itself with religious though and customs. The Slavic component is almost exclusively concerned with domestic life. This area is covered mainly by borrowings from Byelorussian, Ukrainian and Polish.
On the other hand, many Hebrew words have been transformed by Yiddish, for example in American English and cockney (the East End dialect of English).
Like all Judaic languages, Yiddish is written in a modified Hebrew script called Quadratschrift (“square script”, since Hebrew characters have the proportions of a notional square, from which only one line may protrude). The Hebrew-Yiddish alphabet, in contrast to that of Classical Hebrew, notes all vowels and diphthongs, but only in its non-Hebrew component; Hebrew borrowings are written as in Hebrew, without vowels.
FAQ In what direction is Yiddish written? Yiddish is written from right to left.
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Japanese is almost the only language spoken in Japan which, with a population of more than 125 million, is one of the most linguistically uniform countries in the world: 99.2% of its citizens are mother tongue speakers of Japanese in its various forms. Japanese is the sixth most spoken language worldwide.
Official Japanese, from Tokyo, has gradually spread over the entire country due to the influence of the mass media; many local dialects are still in use, however, including the dialects of Kyoto and Osaka, which are still highly regarded.
