Tuesday, March 16, 2010

U

Ubykh
Or Ubyx is a language of the Northwestern Caucasian group, spoken by the Ubykh people up until the early 1990s.

Udmurt
Is a Finno-Ugric language spoken by the Udmurts, native of the Russian constituent republic of Udmurtia, where it is co-official with the Russian language. It is written with a Cyrillic script. It is linguistically closest to Komi and Komi-Permyak.

Ugaritic
Is only known in the form of writings found in the lost city of Ugarit in Syria since its discovery by French archaeologists in 1928. It has been extremely important for scholars of the Old Testament in clarifying Hebrew texts and has revealed more of how Judaism used common phrases, literary idioms, and expressions employed by surrounding pagan cultures.

Ukrainian
Is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Ukrainian uses a Cyrillic alphabet. It shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring Slavic nations, most notably with Belarusian, Polish, Russian and Slovak. Ukrainian traces its origins to the Old East Slavic language of the ancient state of Kievan Rus'. The language has persisted despite the two bans by Imperial Russia and political persecution during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ukrainian has survived mainly due to its broad base among the people of Ukraine, its folklore songs, kobzars, prominent poets like Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka.

Unserdeutsch
("Our German"), or Rabaul Creol German, is a German-based creole language spoken primarily in Papua New Guinea and the northeast of Australia. It was formed among the New Guinean children residing in a German-run orphanage. Fewer than 100 native speakers exist today; 15 in New Britain.

Upper Sorbian
Is a minority language of Germany spoken in the historical province of Upper Lusatia, today part of Saxony.

Urdu
Is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, Hindi, and Arabic influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800). Taken by itself, Urdu is approximately the twentieth most populous natively spoken language in the world, and is the national language of Pakistan as well as one of the 24 national languages of India.

Uripiv
Is a language spoken on Vanuatu. Uripiv is spoken today by about 6,000 people. Literacy rate of Uripiv speakers in their own language is about 10-30%. The language forms a dialect chain with other nearby languages, namely Wala-Rano and Atchin. Uripiv is the most northerly of these languages. Despite the dialect chain, Uripiv still has 85% of its words in common with Atchin, at the opposite (southern) end. Uripiv is classified as an Austronesian language, part of the Malayo-Polynesian bulk of this language group. It falls into the Central Eastern branch of the Malayo-Polynesian languages and the Eastern Malayo-Polynesian subbranch of Central Eastern, which includes Uripiv and other Oceanic languages. It is one of the few well-documented languages that uses the rare bilabial trill.

Urum
Is a Turkic language spoken by several thousand people who inhabit a few villages in the Southeastern Ukraine and in Georgia. The name Urum is derived from the medieval Greek word for Rome designating Constantinople and Greece in general. The Ottoman empire used it to describe non-Muslims within the empire. The initial vowel in Urum is prosthetic: originally Turkic languages did not have r- in word-initial position, and in borrowed words used to add a vowel before it.

Uyghur
Is a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang (also called East Turkestan or Uyghuristan), formerly also “Sinkiang” and “Chinese Turkestan,” a Central Asian region administered by China. In English, the name of the ethnicity and its language is spelled variously as Uyghur, Uighur, Uygur and Uigur.

Uzbek
Is an Eastern Turkic language and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has about 21.5 million native speakers, and it is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. Uzbek belongs to the Qarluq family of Turkic languages, and consequently its lexicon and grammar are most closely linked to the Uighur language, while other influences rose from Persian, Arabic and Russian.

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