Tuesday, March 16, 2010

O

Occitan
Or languedoc, is a Romance language (or group of languages), spoken mainly in the Languedoc or Occitania region in southern France. All of its subdivisions are generally mutually intelligible. The area where it is historically spoken has roughly 14 million inhabitants. It is spoken as a first language by about two million people in France, Italy, and Spain (Ethnologue, 2005). It is estimated that up to seven million people in France understand the language. In France Occitan is the customary name given to dialects of Occitan spoken in the South-West while the dialects spoken in the South-East are called Provençal.

Oirat
(Kalmuck, Calmouk, Kalmyk) is the language of the Kalmyks, spoken in Kalmykia (Russian Federation), Western China and Western Mongolia. There are about 160,000 Kalmyk speakers in each country.

Ojibwe
Ojibwa, Chippewa or Anishinaabemowin is the third most commonly spoken Native language in Canada (after Cree and Inuktitut), and the fourth most spoken in North America (behind Navajo, Cree, and Inuktitut). It is spoken by the Ojibwe people (Anishinaabeg). As their fur trading with the French increased the Ojibwes’ power, the language became the trade language of the Great Lakes region, and was for hundreds of years an extremely significant presence in the northern US. In the Ojibwe language, the proper term for itself is Anishinaabemowin or Nishnaabemwin, which includes the Algonquin language and Mississauga language, though they are not considered Ojibwa due to not being part of the Council of Three Fires.

Old Church Slavonic
(Also called Old Church Slavic, Old Bulgarian, Old Macedonian, and Old Slavonic) is the first literary Slavic language, developed from the Slavonic dialect of Thessaloniki by 9th century Byzantine Greek missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius. It was used by them for translation of the Bible and other texts from Greek and for some of their own writings. It played a great role in the history of Slavic languages and evolved into Church Slavonic, which is still used as a liturgical language by some Orthodox and Greek Catholic Churches of the Slavic peoples.

Old English
(Also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. It is a West Germanic language and therefore is similar to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. It is also related to Old Norse (and by extension, to modern Icelandic).

Old French
Is a term sometimes used to refer to the langue d'oïl, the continuum of varieties of Romance language spoken in territories corresponding roughly to the northern half of modern France and parts of Belgium and Switzerland during the period roughly from 1000 to 1300 A.D. It was known at the time as the langue d'oïl to distinguish it from the langue d'oc, (also then called Provençal) which bordered these areas to the south.

Old French Sign Language
Is a term that loosely describes the language of the deaf community in 18th century Paris at the time of the establishment of the first deaf schools. The earliest records of the language are in the work of the Abbé de l'Epée, who stumbled across two sisters communicating in signs, and through them became aware of a signing community of 200 deaf Parisians.

Old Norse
Is the Germanic language once spoken by the inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300. It evolved from the older Proto-Norse, in the 8th century. Due to the fact that most of the surviving texts are from Medieval Icelandic, the de facto standard version of the language is its dialect Old West Norse, that is Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. Sometimes, Old Norse is even defined as Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian.

Old Nubian
Is the name given to the written language used in medieval Nubia from the 8th to the 15th century AD. It is an ancient variety of the Nubian languages, which is still spoken in the area; in particular, it is probably ancestral to the modern-day Nobiin variety. It is preserved in at least a hundred pages of documents, mostly of a Christian religious nature, written using a modified form of the Coptic (Greek) script; the best known is The Martyrdom of Saint Menas. It is the oldest written sub-Saharan African language apart from Meroitic, Geez and Sabaean.

Old Persian
Is the oldest attested Persid language. It is classified in the group of Western Iranian languages, subgroup of Indo-Iranian languages (and thus the Indo-European languages). This language was used in the inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings. Old Persian texts (including inscriptions, tablets and seals) have been found in Iran, Turkey and Egypt. It evolved into the Middle Persian language (Pahlavi) of Sassanid Iran, and eventually into the modern Persian language.

Old Prussian
Is an extinct Baltic language spoken by the inhabitants of the area that later became East Prussia (now in north-eastern Poland and the Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia) prior to German colonization of the area beginning in the 13th century. In Old Prussian itself, the language was called "Prusiskan" or "Prusiskai Bila". A few experimental communities involved in reviving a reconstructed form of the language now exists in Lithuania, Poland and other countries. Old Prussian is closely related to the other extinct western Baltic languages, the Curonian and Sudovian. It is more distantly related to the surviving eastern Baltic languages, Lithuanian and particularly Latvian.

Old South Arabic
Is the term used for four closely related languages spoken in the southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. These languages are distinct from Classical Arabic. The four languages are Sabaean, Minaean, Qatabanian, and Hadramautic. Together with the Ethiopic language, they form the western branch of the South Semitic languages. Old South Arabic had its own writing system, the South Arabian alphabet, ultimately sharing a common origin with the other Semitic abjads, the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet.

Omagua
Is a language which is spoken by less than 100 South American natives (the Omaguas) who live near Iquitos, Peru. It was also at one time spoken in most of western Brazil, but the tribe may have since diminished. The language belongs to the Tupi-Guarani language subfamily.

Ongota
(Also known as Birale/Birayle) is a moribund language of southwest Ethiopia. In 2000, it was said to be in a state of decline with only 8 elderly native speakers, the rest of their small village on the west bank of the Weyt'o River having adopted the Ts'amakko language instead. The grammar follows a Subject Object Verb word order. It is probably Afro-Asiatic, but has not been definitively classified. As of 2004, it is being studied by Aklilu Yilma of Addis Ababa University.

Oriya
Is one of the Indian languages mainly spoken in the Indian state of Orissa, though there are also significant Oriya-speaking populations in other linguistic regions, such as the Medinpur district of West Bengal and the Saraikela Kharsawan district of Jharkhand. Due to the increasing migration of labour, the west Indian state of Gujarat also has a significant Oriya speaking population with Surat being the second largest Oriya speaking city in India. The language is also an official language of India. Oriya is an Indo-Aryan language and is thought to be directly descended from the Prakrit known as Purva Magadhi that was spoken in eastern India over 1,500 years ago. It bears a very strong resemblance to the modern languages Bangla (Bengali) and Ôxômiya (Assamese). Of all the languages spoken in northern India, Oriya appears to be the least influenced by Persian and Arabic.

Oromo
Known in Oromo as Afaan Oromoo or Oromiffa(a) and sometimes in other languages as variant spellings of these names (Oromigna, Afan Oromo, etc.), is an Afro-Asiatic language, and the most widely spoken of the Cushitic sub-phylum. As with Arabic, some (including SIL) view it as a set of closely related languages, but, at least within Ethiopia, its speakers consider it to be a single language. It is spoken by approximately 24-5 million Oromos and other neighboring nationalities in Ethiopia and in Kenya. Formerly the language and people were often referred to by non-Oromos within Ethiopia as well as by Europeans as Galla, but this term is considered pejorative by the Oromos and is no longer used.

Oropom
Is an almost certainly extinct African language, once spoken in northeastern Uganda and northwestern Kenya between the Turkwel River, Chemorongit Mountains, and Mount Elgon, by the Oropom ethnic group

Ossetic
Or Ossetian is an Iranian language spoken in Ossetia, a region on the slopes of the Caucasus mountains on the borders of Russia and Georgia. The area in Russia is known as North Ossetia-Alania, while the area in Georgia is called South Ossetia. Ossetian speakers number about 500,000, 60 percent of whom live in Alania, and 15 percent in South Ossetia.

Ottoman Turkish
Is the variant of the Turkish language that was used as the administrative and literary language of the Ottoman Empire. It contains extensive borrowings from Persian, which itself has been permeated with Arabic borrowings; as a result of this process, Ottoman Turkish was largely unintelligible to the less educated members of society. Ultimately, however, spoken Turkish would come to be greatly influenced by Ottoman Turkish.

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