T

Tabasaran
Is a member of the Lezgian subfamily of the Northeast Caucasian languages. It is spoken in the southern parts of the Russian Caucasus republic of Dagestan. Tabasaran speakers live in the basin of Upper Rubas-chai and Upper Chirakh-chai. There are two main dialects: North (Khanag) and South Tabasaran. It has a literary language based on the Southern dialect, one of six in the Dagestan Republic.

Tashelhiyt
Is the largest Berber language of Morocco both by number of speakers (between 8 and 10 million) and by the extent of its area. Tashelhiyt is spoken in Southern Morocco an area ranging from the northern slopes of the High-Atlas to the southern slopes of the Anti-Atlas, bounded to the west by the Atlantic Ocean. The eastern limit of the Tashelhiyt area is difficult to pinpoint because of a smooth transition into Southern Middle Atlas Berber (Tamazight).

Tagalog
Is one of the major languages of the Republic of the Philippines. It is the largest of the Philippine languages in terms of the number of speakers. Being a Malayo-Polynesian language of the larger Austronesian language family, it is related to Indonesian, Malay, Fijian, Maori (of New Zealand), Hawaiian, Malagasy (of Madagascar), Samoan, Tahitian, Chamorro (of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands), Tetum (of East Timor), and Paiwan (of Taiwan).

Tahitian
A Tahitic language, is one of the two official languages of French Polynesia (along with French). It is an Eastern Polynesian language closely related to Rarotongan, New Zealand Maori, and Hawaiian.

Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL)
Is the sign language most commonly used in Taiwan. It is the native language of some 50,000 people in the nation. Serious linguistic research on TSL began in the 1970s and is continuing at present. The first International Symposium on Taiwan Sign Language Linguistics was held on March 1-2, 2003, at Chung Cheng University in Minhsiung, Chiayi Co., Taiwan.

Tajik
Is a descendant of the Persian language spoken in Central Asia. It is an Indo-European language, more specifically part of the Iranian language group. Speakers of Tajik live mostly in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and western Pakistan (the "Tajik" language spoken by approximately 30,000 people near the Tajikistan border in China is in fact a quite different Pamir language also called Sarikoli). Tajik is the official language of Tajikistan. Tajik is an offspring of the Persian language, and belongs - along with Afghanistan's Dari - to the Eastern dialects of Persian. Historically, it was considered the local dialect of Persian spoken by the Tajik ethnic group in Central Asia. The language has diverged somewhat from Persian as spoken in Afghanistan and Iran, because of political borders and the influence of Russian. The standard language is based on the north-western dialects of Tajik, which have been influenced by the neighbouring Uzbek language as a result of geographical proximity.

Talossan
Talossan is a Gallo-Romance language, inspired by French, Provençal and Occitan, and very naturalistic (with quite a few irregularities). In an effort to create a kind of "national mythology" for his micronation, Madison discovered in 1985 that one of the Berber sub-tribes of Morocco was called the Talesinnt, and decided that Talossans were inexplicably and inextricably connected somehow to Berbers. This resulted in the Talossan language being inspired by Berber languages.

Talysh
Is a language spoken in the northern regions of the Iranian provinces of Gilan and Ardabil and the southern parts of the Republic of Azerbaijan. It is classified as an Iranian language Talysh has two major mutually intelligible dialects — Northern (in Azerbaijan and Iran), and Southern (in Iran). Northern Talysh (the part in the Republic of Azerbaijan) was historically known as Talish-i Gushtasbi.

Tamil
Is a classical language and one of the major languages of the Dravidian language family. Spoken predominantly by Tamils in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Singapore, it has smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. As of 1996, it was the eighteenth most spoken language, with over 74 million speakers worldwide. It is one of the official languages of India, Singapore and Sri Lanka.

Tanacross
Is an endangered Athabaskan language spoken by fewer than 60 persons in eastern Interior Alaska.

Tangut
Also known as the Western Xia were a Qiangic-Tibetan people who moved to the highlands of western Sichuan sometime before the 10th century AD. They spoke the Tangut language, a now-extinct Qiangic language (Tibeto-Burman).

Tarifit
Is a Northern Berber language of the Zenati subgroup, spoken mainly in the Moroccan Rif by about 2 million people. Tarifit is a Berber language, belonging to the Zenati subgroup of Northern Berber, and possibly the Rif subgroup of Zenati.

Tat
Is an Iranian language spoken by the Tat ethnic group in Azerbaijan and Russia. There is also a Jewish language called Judeo-Tat that is derived from the Tat language.

Tatar
Is a Turkic language belonging to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages. It is spoken by the Tatars.

Tausug
Is a Visayan language spoken in Sulu province in the Philippines. It is also spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Telugu
Belongs to the Dravidian language family but with ample influence from the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family and is the official language of the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. It is the Dravidian language with the greatest number of speakers (including non-native speakers), the second largest spoken language in India after Hindi and one of the 22 official national languages of India.

Tetum
Is an Austronesian language, the basis of the national language of East Timor, Tetun Prasa. This is a creole with many words from Portuguese, with which it has equal status as an official language, as well as Malay or Indonesian.

Thai
Is the national and official language of Thailand and the mother tongue of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai-Kadai language family. The Tai-Kadai languages are thought to have originated in what is now southern China, and some linguists have proposed links to the Austroasiatic, Austronesian, or Sino-Tibetan language families. It is a tonal and analytic language. The combination of tonality, a complex orthography, relational markers and a distinctive phonology can make Thai difficult to learn for those who do not already speak a related language.

Tharu
Tharu are indigenious people living in the Terai plains of South Nepal and India. According to Nepal’s 2001 census, there are 1,533,879 ethnic Tharu (6.75% of Nepal's total population) of which 1,331,546 speak one of the seven Tharu dialects as a mother tongue.

Thracian
Was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times by the Thracians in South-Eastern Europe.

Tibetan
Is spoken by Tibetan people across a wide area of eastern Central Asia. Its classical written form is a major regional literary language, particulary in its use as in Buddhist writings. Tibetan is typically classified as a Tibeto-Burman language which in turn is, according to the most widespread theory, a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Spoken Tibetan includes numerous regional varieties which, in many cases, are not mutually intelligible. Moreover, the boundaries between Tibetan and certain other Himalayan languages are sometimes unclear. In general, the dialects of central Tibet (including Lhasa), Kham, Amdo, and some smaller nearby areas are considered Tibetan dialects, while other forms, particularly Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Sherpa, and Ladakhi, are considered closely-related but separate languages. By this definition, Tibetan is spoken by approximately 6 million people across the Tibetan Plateau as well as by approximately 150,000 exile speakers in India and other countries.

Tigre
Is a Semitic language of the North Ethiopic branch, descended from Ge'ez and closely related to Tigrinya. It is spoken by approximately one million people in Eritrea, with a few speakers in Sudan. Tigre is also the name for the people. The Tigre language, speakers and area should not be confused with the Tigray-Tigrinya people who live in the Tigray region of Ethiopia and in Eritrea and who speak Tigrinya.

Tigrinya
Is a Semitic language spoken by the Tigray-Tigrinya people in central Eritrea, where it is one of the main working languages (Eritrea does not have official languages), and in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia, where it also has official status, and among groups of emigrants from these regions, including some of the Beta Israel now living in Israel. Tigrinya should not be confused with the related Tigre language, which is spoken in a region in Eritrea to the west of the region where Tigrinya is spoken.

Tiv
Is spoken by over 6 million people in Nigeria, with a few speakers in Cameroon. Most of the Language's Nigerian speakers are found in Benue State of Nigeria. The language is also widely spoken in the Nigerian States of Plateau, Taraba, Nasarawa as well as the FCT Abuja. It is part of the Southern Bantoid Tivoid family, a branch of Benue-Congo and ultimately of the Niger-Congo phylum.

Tlingit
Is the language of the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada. It is considered to be a branch of the Na-Dené language family. Tlingit is very endangered, with about 500 native speakers still living, essentially all of whom are bilingual or near-bilingual in English. Extensive effort is being put into revitalization programs in Southeast Alaska to revive and preserve the Tlingit language and its culture.

Tobian
Also Tobi is, with English and the Sonsorolese language the language spoken on the Palau islands of Tobi (or Hatobohei), Pulo Anna, Merir, Fana, Helen Reef and Sonsoral (or Sonsorol). It has about 100 speakers over the world.

Tocharian
Is one of the most obscure branches of the group of Indo-European languages. It consisted of two languages, Tocharian A (Turfanian, Arsi, or East Tocharian) and Tocharian B (Kuchean or West Tocharian). These languages were spoken roughly from the 6th to 8th centuries; before they became extinct, their speakers were absorbed into the expanding Uyghur tribes. Both languages were once spoken in the Tarim Basin in Central Asia, now the Xinjiang province of China.

Toda
Is a Dravidian language well known for its many fricatives and trills. It is spoken by the Toda people, a population of about one thousand who live in the Nilgiri Hills of southern India.

Tok Pisin
Is the creole spoken in northern mainland Papua New Guinea (PNG), the National Capital District, and the New Guinea Islands. It is one of the official languages of PNG and the most widely used language in that country, spoken by about 4 million people as a second language and over a hundred thousand as a first language. Tok Pisin is also—perhaps more commonly in English—called New Guinea Pidgin and, largely in academic contexts, Melanesian Pidgin English or Neo-Melanesian.

Tokelauan
Is an Austronesian language spoken by about 1,700 people on the atolls of Tokelau. It is a member of the Samoic family of Polynesian languages. It is, alongside English, the official language of Tokelau. In addition to the population of Tokelau, it is spoken by approximately 2,900 Tokelauan expatriates in New Zealand.

Tonga
Is a Bantu Language primarily spoken by the Tonga tribe of the South, Southern and Western provinces of Zambia and Northern Zimbabwe (although also spoken by the Toka and Leya, as well as many bilingual Zambians and Zimbabweans.) It is one of the major lingua francas in Zambia, after Bemba and Nyanja.

Tongan
Is an Austronesian language spoken in Tonga. It has 100,000 speakers and is a national language of Tonga. It is a VSO (Verb-Subject-Object) language.

Tongva
(Also known as the Gabrielino language) is an Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Tongva, a Native American people who live in and around Los Angeles, California. Tongva is closely related to several other indigenous languages of the area, including the Cahuilla language and the Serrano language. Modern Southern Californian place-names from Tongva include: Pacoima, Tujunga, Topanga, Azusa, the Cahuenga in Cahuenga Pass and the Cucamonga in Rancho Cucamonga.

Trasianka
Is a Belarusian–Russian patois or a kind of interlanguage (from the linguistic point of view). It is often labeled "pidgin" or even "creole", which is not correct by any widespread definition of pidgin or creole language. The motivation for labelling trasianka as "pidgin" or a "creolized (language form)" (cf. Cychun, 2000) relies probably in the fact that the words "pidgin" and "creole" have pejorative, derogatory connotations (among non-experts, but also among a part of linguists in Belarus) as well as the word "trasianka" itself.

Tregami
Or Trigami is a language spoken in the villages of Gambir and Katar in the Nurestan Province of Afghanistan. Tregami belongs to the Indo-European language family, and is on the Nuristani group of the Indo-Iranian branch. Ethnologue estimates its speakers at 1,000 (1994). It's speakers are overwhelmingly Muslim, and literacy rates are low: below 1% for people who have it as a first language, and between 5% to 15% for people who have it as a second language. It has a lexical similarity of approximately 76% to 80% with the Waigali language.

Tsat
(Also known as Utsat, Utset, Huihui, Hui, or Hainan Cham) is a language spoken on Hainan Island in China by the Utsuls. Tsat is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian group within the Austronesian language family, and is related to the Cham languages, originally from the coast of present-day Vietnam. Unusually for a Malayo-Polynesian language, Tsat has developed into a solidly tonal language, probably as a result of areal linguistic effects and contact with Chinese, Hlai/Li, and the other tonal languages of Hainan.

Tsez
Is a Northeast Caucasian language with about 7000 speakers spoken by the Tsez, a muslimic people in the mountainous Tsunta district of southern and western Dagestan, Russia. The name derives from the Tsez word for eagle.

Tshiluba
(Also called Luba-Kasai and Luba-Lulua) is a Bantu language spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it is a national language.

Tshivenda
Is a Bantu language. The majority of Venda speakers live in South Africa (where Venda is an official language), but there are also speakers in Zimbabwe. Before South Africa became a democratic country, the bantustan of Venda was set up to cover the Venda speakers of South Africa.

Tsimshian
(Pronounced Sim-SHE-an), translated as "People Inside the Skeena River," are a Native American and First Nation people who live around Terrace, Prince Rupert, and Kitimat, on the north coast of British Columbia and the southernmost corner of Alaska on Annette Island. Currently there are about 10,000 Tsimshians, of which about 1,300 live in Alaska. Canadian Tsimshian live along the Skeena and Nass rivers, as well as the many inlets and islands on the coast. The Tsimshian obtained food through fishing (halibut and salmon) and hunting (seals, sea lions and sea otters).

Tsonga
Or Xitsonga language is spoken in southern Africa by the Tsonga people, also known as the Shangaan. Tsonga belongs to the Bantu branch of the Niger-Congo languages. Tsonga is spoken by about 1,646,000 people in South Africa's Limpopo province, as well as 1.5 million people in Mozambique, and 19,000 people in Swaziland. There are also 5 000 speakers in Zimbabwe.

Tswana
Also known as Setswana, is a Bantu language. Tswana is the national and majority language of Botswana, whose people are the Batswana (singular Motswana). The majority of Tswana speakers are in South Africa (where it is an official language), but there are also speakers in Zimbabwe and Namibia. Internationally there are about 4 million speakers. Before South Africa became a multi-racial democracy, the bantustan of Bophuthatswana was set up to cover the Tswana speakers of South Africa. Setswana is a Bantu language, belonging to the Niger-Congo language family. It is most closely related to two other languages in the Sotho language group, Sesotho (Southern Sotho) and Northern Sotho (Sesotho sa Leboa). It has also been known as Beetjuans, Chuana (hence Bechuanaland), Coana, Cuana, and Sechuana.

Tu
The Tu language (also known as Mongour, Monguor, and Mongor) is closely related to Mongolian. It is not a written language. It is spoken by the Tu people.

Tuareg
Or Tamasheq/Tamajaq/Tamahaq is a Berber language or family of closely related languages spoken by the Tuareg, in parts of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya and Burkina Faso (with a few speakers, the Kinnin, even in Chad.) They are quite mutually comprehensible, and are commonly regarded as a single language (as for instance by Karl Prasse); they are distinguished mainly by a few sound shifts (notably affecting the pronunciation of original z and h.) They are unusually conservative in some respects; they retain two short vowels where northern Berber languages have one or none, and have a much lower proportion of Arabic loanwords than most Berber languages. They are traditionally written in the indigenous Tifinagh alphabet; however, the Arabic alphabet is commonly used in some areas (and has been since medieval times), while the Latin alphabet is official in Mali and Niger.

Tulu
Is an Dravidian language of India with fewer than two million speakers. Most of its speakers are in the districts of Dakshina Kannada and Udupi in the west of the state of Karnataka. Its also spoken in most part of Kasargod district of Kerala. The original written script of the language, similar to Malayalam script, is rarely used today. It is normally written in the Kannada script.

Tumbuka
Is a Bantu language which is spoken in parts of Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania. The language of the Tumbuka is called chiTumbuka - the 'chi' in front of Tumbuka meaning 'the language of', similar to 'ki' in kiSwahili or 'se' in seTswana. The World Almanac (1998) estimates approximately 2,000,000 Tumbuka speakers exist in the aforementioned three countries.

Old Tupi
Is an extinct Tupian language which was spoken by the native people from Brazil, mostly those who lived close to the sea. The language belongs to the Tupi-Guarani language subfamily. It enjoyed a brief period of literacy, in the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries but was later suppressed to extinction, leaving only one modern descendant: Nheengatu.

Tupinikin
Is a language which is spoken by 800 Indian tribesmen in Espirito Santo and Bahia, Brazil. The language belongs to Tupi-Guarani language subfamily.

Turkish
Is a Turkic language spoken natively in Turkey, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Greece and other countries of the former Ottoman Empire, as well as by several million emigrants in the European Union. The number of native speakers is uncertain, primarily due to a lack of minority language data from Turkey. The figure of 60 million used here assumes that Turkish is the mother tongue of 80% of the Turkish population, with Kurdish making up most of the remainder. However, the vast majority of the linguistic minorities in Turkey are bilingual, speaking Turkish as a second language.

Turkmen
Is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 3,000,000 people in other countries, including Iran (2,000,000), Afghanistan (500,000), and Turkey (1,000). Up to 50% of speakers in Turkmenistan also claim a good knowledge of Russian.

Turoyo
Is a Modern West Syriac language, a dialect of Aramaic. It is traditionally spoken in eastern Turkey and north-eastern Syria by members of the Syriac Orthodox Church. From the word turo, meaning 'mountain', turoyo is the mountain tongue of the Tur Abdin in southeastern Turkey. A far older name for the language is Surayt, and it is used by a number of speakers of the language in preference to Turoyo. The etymology of this name is difficult, but is probably linked to the word 'Syriac'.

Tuvaluan
Is a Nuclear Polynesian language of the Ellicean group spoken in Tuvalu. It is more or less distantly related to all other Polynesian languages, such as Hawai'ian, Maori, Tahitian, Samoan, and Tongan, and most closely related to the languages spoken on the Polynesian Outliers in Northern and Central Melanesia. Tuvaluan has borrowed considerably from Samoan, the language of Christian missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are about 11000 Tuvaluan speakers worldwide.

Tuvan
Also known as Tuvinian, Tyvan, or Tuvin, is one of the Turkic languages. It is spoken by around 200,000 people in the Republic of Tuva in south-central Siberia. The language borrows a great number of roots from the Mongolian language and more recently from the Russian language. There are small diaspora groups of Tuvans that speak distinct dialects of Tuvan in the People's Republic of China and in Mongolia.

S

Sabaean
Was an Old South Arabic language spoken in Yemen, and then in Ethiopia, up until the 8th Century AD. It was written in the South Arabian alphabet. The Sabaean language was thought to have been replaced by the Ge'ez language and the South Arabic alphabet evolved into the Ge'ez alphabet; new archaelogical evidence, however, points to the Sabaean and Ge'ez alphabets sharing a common ancestor, rather than Ge'ez being an offshoot of Sabaean.

Salar
Is a Turkic language spoken by the Salar people, who mainly live in the provinces of Qinghai and Gansu in China. The Salar number about 90,000 people, of whom about 70,000 speak the Salar language; the remaining 20,000 speak Chinese. The Salar arrived at their current location in the 14th century, having migrated there from the west, according to a Salar legend from Samarkand. Linguistic evidence points to a possible western Turkic, Oghuz origin of the Salar. Contemporary Salar is heavily influenced by contact with Tibetan and Chinese.

Salishan
(Also Salish) languages are a group of languages of western Canada and the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The terms Salish and Salishan are used interchangeably by Salishan linguists and anthropologists. The name Salish is actually the name of the language of Salish tribe in Montana. The name was later extended by linguists to refer to other related languages. Many languages do not have self-designations and instead have specific names for local dialects as the local group was more important culturally than larger tribal relations.

Samaritan Hebrew
Is a descendant of Biblical Hebrew as pronounced and written by the Samaritans. It is written in the Samaritan alphabet, a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet (itself a variation on the Phoenician alphabet), whereas all other varieties of Hebrew are written in the later Hebrew alphabet, a variation on the Aramaic alphabet.

Sami
Is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken in parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. Sami is frequently (and erroneously) believed to be a single language. It is the native tongue of the Sami people. There are several terms used for the Sami languages: Saami, Sámi, Samic, Saamic, Lappish and Lappic. The last two are, along with the term Lapp, considered derogatory by some.

Sâmoan
Or Samoan language is the traditional language of Samoa and American Samoa and is an official language in both territories. It is a member of the Austronesian family, and more specifically the Samoic branch of the Polynesian subphylum. There are 370,337 Samoan-speakers worldwide, nearly half of them in Samoa.

Sandawe
Is a tonal language spoken by about 40,000 people in the Dodoma region of Tanzania. Language use is vigorous among both adults and children, with people in some areas monolingual. Sandawe has generally been classified as a Khoisan language since Albert Drexel in the 1920s, due at first just to the presence of clicks in the language, though later several morphological similarities with the Khoisan languages of southern Africa were proposed. A recent discussion of Sandawe's linguistic classification can be found in Sands (1998).

Sango
(Also spelt Sangho) is the primary language spoken in the Central African Republic: it has 5 million second-language speakers, but only 400,000 native speakers, mainly in the towns. It is a vehicular language based on the language of the Sango tribe, belonging to the Ngbandi language cluster (including Ngbandi and Yakoma), with many French words.

Sanskrit
Is an Indo-European classical language of India and a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It has a position in India and Southeast Asia similar to that of Latin and Greek in Europe, and is a central part of Hindu tradition. It is one of the oldest Indo-European languages in the world with a documented history of 3,500 years and boasts a rich tradition of poetry, literature; as well as scientific, technical, philosophical and religious texts. Sanskrit is one of the 22 official languages of India. It is being revived as a vernacular in the village of Mattur near Shimoga in Karnataka. Today Sanskrit is mostly used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals in the forms of hymns and mantras. Its pre-Classical form of Vedic Sanskrit, the liturgical language of the Vedic religion, is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family, its most ancient text being the Rigveda. It is also the language of Yoga.

Santali
Is a language in the Munda subfamily of Austro-Asiatic, related to Ho and Mundari. It is spoken by about six million people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. Most of its speakers live in India, in the states of Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Orissa, Tripura, and West Bengal. It has its own alphabet, known as Ol Cemet', but literacy is very low, between 10 and 30%. Santali is spoken by the Santhals.

Sara
There are several language called Sara.
* The Sara languages of Southern Chad
* Sara language (Indonesia), an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia.

Saramaccan
Is a creole language spoken by about 24,000 people near the Saramaccan and upper Suriname Rivers in Suriname (formerly also known as Dutch Guyana), and 2,000 in French Guiana. The speakers are mostly descendants of fugitive slaves; they form a group called Saramacca, also spelled Saramaka.

Sardinian
(Sardu, Saldu) is the main language spoken in the island of Sardinia, Italy, remarkable for being the most conservative Neolatine language and for its Paleosardinian substratum.

Sawai
(Also Weda) is a South Halmahera-Western New Guinea language of Austronesian stock spoken in Weda and Gane Timor districts of southern Halmahera, northern Maluku Providence, Indonesia. There are approximately 12,000 speakers.

Scanian
Is a closely related group of dialects spoken in Skåne (Scania). It is considered by some Scandinavian linguists to be a dialect of Swedish, by other Scandinavian linguists to be a dialect of Danish. It is however classified as a separate language by SIL International and is assumed to include not only the dialect of Skåne but also those of Halland (halländska), Blekinge (blekingska), and the Danish island of Bornholm (bornholmsk). This larger definition coincides with the extent of Skåneland (Terra Scaniae), a medieval term which has regionalist overtones but also historical substance. The medieval Skånske Lov (Codex Runicus) applied to all four provinces and in the Landsting (Thing), the governing assembly, the four provinces chose and paid homage to the king as a unity.

Scots
Sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from the Gaelic language of the Highlands, is a West Germanic language used in Scotland, parts of Northern Ireland, and border areas of the Republic of Ireland, where it is known in official circles as Ulster Scots or Ullans but by speakers simply as Scotch or Scots. Native speakers refer to the language as Scots, Braid Scots (Eng: Broad Scots), or simply Oor ain leid, Wir ain leid, or Wir ain tung (different renderings for Our own language). Some literary forms are often referred to as Lallans.

Scottish Gaelic
Is a member of the Goidelic branch of Celtic languages. This branch includes also the Irish and Manx languages. It is distinct from the Brythonic branch, which includes Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Scottish, Manx and Irish Gaelic are all descended from Old Irish. The language is often described as Scottish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, or Gàidhlig to avoid confusion with the other two Goidelic languages. Outside of Scotland, it is sometimes also called Scottish or Scots. This usage is uncommon in Scotland, because in recent centuries the word Scots has by-and-large been transferred to the Scots language, which developed from the northern form of early Middle English.

Selangor Sign Language (SSL)
Also known as Kuala Lumpur Sign Language (KLSL), is a sign language used in Malaysia. It was originally based on American Sign Language (ASL) but has diverged significantly enough to now be considered a language in its own right. It is used mainly in the state of Selangor, rather than Kuala Lumpur, so the deaf themselves call it Selangor Sign Language. Like Penang Sign Language (PSL), it now mainly used by older people, although many younger people can understand it.

Selkup
Is a language of the Selkups. It is spoken by some 1,570 people (1994 est.) in the region between the Ob and Yenisei Rivers. The Selkup language belongs to the Samoyedic group of the Uralic language family. There are three main dialects in the Selkup language, including the Taz dialect, which became the basis of the Selkup written language in the 1930s, Tym dialect , and Ket dialect. There are 25 vowel and 16 consonant phonemes in the Taz dialect.

Selonian
Was a language appertaining to the Baltic languages group of the Indo-European languages family. This language was spoken by the Selonians, who lived until the 15th century in Middle Eastern Latvia and Northern Lithuania. During the 13th-15th centuries the Selonians lost their language beeng assimilated by Latvians and partly by Lithuanians. The traces of the Selonian language can be still found in the territories Selonians inhabited, especially in the accent and phonetics of the so called Selonian dialect of the Latvian language.

Senaya
Is a modern Eastern Aramaic or Syriac language. It is the language of Assyrians originally from Sanandaj in Iranian Kurdistan. Most Senaya speakers now live in Tehran and are members of the Chaldean Catholic Church.

Sened
Is an extinct Berber language that was spoken in the nearby towns of Sened and Tmagourt in Southern Tunisia until the mid-twentieth century. In 1911, the whole town of Sened spoke Berber; by 1968, only the elderly did.

Senhaja de Srair
Is a Northern Berber language spoken in the southern part of the Moroccan Rif. It is most closely related to the Atlas languages, but heavily influenced by the neighboring Tarifit language (also Berber.)

Sepedi
Or "Sesotho sa Leboa", is one of the official languages of South Africa, and is spoken by 4,208,980 people (2001 Census Data), mostly in the provinces of Gauteng, Limpopo Province and Mpumalanga. Northern Sotho is one of the so-called Bantu languages, belonging to the Niger-Congo language family. It is most closely related to Setswana and Sesotho (Southern Sotho).

Sephardi Hebrew
Is an offshoot of Biblical Hebrew favored for liturgical use by Sephardi Jewish practice. Its phonology was influenced by contact languages such as Ladino, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish and Arabic.

Serbian
Is one of the standard versions of the Štokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and by Serbs everywhere. The former standard was known as Serbo-Croatian language, now split into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standards. The Serbian alphabet is very consistent: one letter per sound with an insignificant number of exceptions. This phonetic principle is represented in the saying: "Write as you speak and read as it is written", the principle used by Vuk Stefanovic Karadžic when reforming the Cyrillic spelling of Serbian in the 19th century.

Serbo-Croatian
Or Croato-Serbian (also Croatian or Serbian, Serbian or Croatian), was an official language of Yugoslavia (along with Slovenian, Macedonian). With the breakup of Yugoslavia, its languages followed suit and Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian came to be described as separate languages (Ausbausprachen). Conversely, the term "Serbo-Croatian" went out of use, first from official documents and gradually from linguistic literature. Today, the name Serbo-Croatian is a controversial issue due to history, politics, and the variable meaning of the word language. Many native speakers nowadays find the term politically incorrect or even offensive. Mutually intelligible forms of it continue to be used under different names and standards in today’s Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and are still reasonably well understood in Macedonia and Slovenia.

Sesotho
Is a language spoken in southern Africa. Sesotho is generally classified as a Bantu language, belonging to the Niger-Congo language family. It is most closely related to four other languages in the Sotho language group, Setswana, Northern Sotho (Sesotho sa Leboa), and Serotse.

Seychellois Creole
Also known as Kreol, is the lingua franca of the Seychelles. It shares official language status with English and French, in contrast to Mauritian Creole, which has no official status in Mauritius.

Shimaore
Is one of the two indigeneous languages spoken on the island of Mayotte; Shimaore being a dialect of Comorian, while Shibushi is descended from languages spoken on Madagascar.

Shina
Is a Dardic Language and is spoken by majority of people in Northern Areas of Pakistan. The Valleys include Astore, Chillas, Dareil,Tangier, Gilgit, Puniyal, Ishkoman, Yasin, Gupis, Hunza, Baltistan, and Kohistan. It is also spoken in Kargil and Ladakh valleys of India.

Shona
Is a native language of Zimbabwe; the term is also used to identify those Kintu speaking peoples in Southern Africa who speak one of the Shona languages. Shona proper is an official language of Zimbabwe, along with Ndebele and English. Numbering about 6,225,000, Shona speakers comprise more than 80% of Zimbabwe's population. Shona is also spoken by a substantial number of residents of Mozambique. Other countries that host Shona language speakers are Zambia and Botswana. The total number of Shona speakers is at least 7,000,000.

Shor
Is one of the Turkic languages. It is spoken by around 10,000 people in the Kemerovo Oblast in south-central Siberia. Not all ethnic Shors speak Shor, and the language witnessed a decline from the late thirties to the early nineties. However, the dissolution of the Soviet Union saw signs of Shor lingual revival. The language is now being taught at the Novokuznetsk branch of the Kemerovo State University.

Sicilian
is the Romance language spoken in Sicily and southern Italy. Sicilian dialects (or dialects comprising the Italiano meridionale-estremo language group) are spoken on the island of Sicily (and all of its satellite islands); as well as in the southern and central sections of Calabria ("southern Calabro"); and in the southern parts of Puglia, the Salento (the language is "Salentino") and Campania ("Cilentano"), on the Italian mainland.

Sidamo
Is an Afro-Asiatic language, belonging to the Cushitic sub-phylum. It is spoken in parts of southern Ethiopia. The term Sidamo has also been used by some authors to refer to larger groupings of East Cushitic and even Omotic languages.

Sika
Is a member of the Central Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family, and is spoken by around 180,000 people of the Sika ethnic group on Flores island in East Nusa Tenggara province, Indonesia.

Silesian
Can refer to the Silesian — a dialect of Polish (sometimes considered a separate Western Slavonic language related to Czech and Polish), or the Lower Silesian (a dialect of German). Both are spoken in the region of Silesia.

Sindhi
Is the language of the Sindh region of South Asia, which is now a province of Pakistan. It is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 35 million people in Pakistan, and 2.8 million in India; it is also a recognised official language in both of these countries. ?Although the language is predominantly Aryan, it also shows up signs of Dravidan influence, making it unique in its importance and identity. Most Sindhi speakers in Pakistan are concentrated in Sindh. The remaining speakers are found spread throughout the many areas of the world (mainly other parts of India) to which members of an ethnic group migrated when Sindh became a part of Pakistan during the partition of British India in 1947. The language is written using the modified Arabic script. In 1948, the Government of India implemented Devanagari script for the Sindhi language that did not get wide acceptance.

Sindarin
Is an artificial language (or conlang) developed by J. R. R. Tolkien. In Tolkien's mythos, it was the Elvish language most commonly spoken in Middle-earth in the Third Age. It was the language of the Sindar, those Teleri which had been left behind on the Great Journey of the Elves. It was derived from an earlier language called Common Telerin. When the Ñoldor returned to Middle-earth, they adopted the Sindarin language, although they believed their native Quenya more beautiful. Sindarin shared common roots with Quenya, and the two languages had many similar words. Sindarin was said to be more changeful than the older tongue, however, and there were a number of regional 'dialects' of the tongue. The Sindarin spoken in Doriath was said to be the highest and most noble form of the language.

Sinhala
Is the language spoken by the Sinhalese, the largest ethnic group of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon). It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The language of the Maldives, Dhivehi, is closely related to Sinhala. There are about 13 million native speakers of Sinhala.

Sioux
Is a Siouan language. Sioux has 3 major regional varieties, with various sub-lects:
- Santee: Santee, Sisseton
- Yankton: Yankton, Yanktonai
- Lakota: Northern Lakota, Southern Lakota


Siraiki
(Also known as Seraiki, Multani and Southern Punjabi) is a language mostly spoken in central Pakistan by approximately 14 million people. It is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian subfamily. Siraiki shows resemblance to both Sindhi and Punjabi languages. The geographic area where it is spoken is primarily located between the provinces of Sindh and the Punjab in Pakistan. It is widely spoken and understood as a second language in northern and western Sindh down to the suburbs of Karachi and in the Kachhi plain of Balochistan. It is also known as Derawali in Derajat area.

Skolt Sami
Is a Finno-Ugric, Sami language spoken in Finland and nearby parts of Russia. It has about 400 remaining speakers in Finland. It is written using an official Roman orthography.

Slavey
Is an Athabaskan language spoken among the Slavey First Nations people of Canada. The language can be written using Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics or the Roman alphabet. Slavey was the native language spoken by the fictional band in the Canadian television series, North of 60. Nick Sibbeston, a former Premier of the Northwest Territories, was a Slavey language and cultural consultant for the show.

Slovak
Is an Indo-European language belonging to the West Slavic languages (together with Czech, Polish and Sorbian). Slovak is especially close to Czech.

Slovenian
Belongs to the family of South Slavic languages. It is spoken by approximately 2 million speakers worldwide, the majority of whom live in Slovenia. Slovenian is one of the few languages to have preserved the dual grammatical number from Proto-Indo-European. Also, Slovenian and Slovak are the two modern Slavic languages whose names for themselves literally mean "Slavic" (slovenskii in old Slavonic).

Soddo
Is a Gurage language spoken by about 300,000 people in southeastern Ethiopia. It is a South Ethiopian Semitic language of the Northern Gurage subfamily.

Somali
Is a member of the East Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. It is spoken mostly in Somalia and adjacent parts of Djibouti (majority), Ethiopia, and Kenya. Its speakers are known as Somalis. Because of the civil war and diaspora, speakers are found all over the world. The exact number of speakers is unknown but is estimated to be between 15 and 25 million.

Sonjo
Is a Bantu language spoken in northern Tanzania, 30-40 miles west of Lake Natron. Ethnolinguistically, it is a displaced member of Guthrie’s E50 group, most other members of which are found in Central Kenya. Within that group, it is most closely related to Gikuyu. The Sonjo people number about 30,000; many of them are bilingual in Swahili, the local language of education. Sonjo is largely undescribed.

Sonsorolese
Is a language spoken in Palau and the Northern Mariana Islands, by 600 people. It is an Austronesian language.

Soqotri
Is the native language of the island of Socotra off the southern coast of Yemen. It is a south Semitic language. Since women are forbidden to leave the island, Soqotri speakers are only rarely found in the Yemeni mainland. This makes the language isolated from the rest of Yemen. The Arabic language is also spoken there as well as the Soqotri.

Sorbian languages
Are classified under the West Slavic branch of the Indo-European languages. They are the native languages of the Sorbian people, a Slavic minority in eastern Germany. The language has also historically been known as Wendish or Lusatian. There are two literary languages: Upper Sorbian (hornjoserbsce), spoken by about 55,000 people in Saxony, and Lower Sorbian (dolnoserbski) spoken by about 14,000 people in Brandenburg. The area where the two languages are spoken is known as Lusatia (Lužica in Upper Sorbian, Lužyca in Lower Sorbian, or Lausitz in German).

Southern Sami
Is divided into two main dialects: Southern Sami sensu stricto and Ume Sami. The latter is spoken in the Ume River Valley and has some characteristics in common with Lule and Northern Sami. Southern Sami is a seriously endangered language. The last strongholds of this language are the municipalities of Snåsa and Hattfjelldal in Norway where there still are a few hundred speakers.

South Estonian
Is a language or a language group which belongs to the Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. Contemporary South Estonian languages are Võro, Seto, Mulgi and Tartu. Nowadays South Estonian is used most often as an umbrella notion for these four languages. In Estonian traditional dialectology South Estonian languages are considered dialects of South Estonian dialect group.

Spanish
(Español) or Castilian (castellano) is an Iberian Romance language. It is the most widely spoken Romance language and is listed by different sources as the fourth, third or second most spoken language in the world. Spanish is spoken by 360 million people in countries where it is an official language (2005 data), by almost 32 million as first language where it is an unofficial language (28 million in the US [1], 2000 data) and by over 100 million people as second language. Currently (2006), almost 500 million people speak Spanish.

Sranan
Is a creole language spoken as a native language by approximatly 120,000 people in Suriname. Sranan was previously referred to as the less politically correct taki-taki, nengre or negerengels (Dutch, "negro-English"). Since this language is shared between the English-, Dutch-, Javanese- and Hindustani-speaking communities, many Surinamese speak it as a second language.

Sucite
Is a Senufo language spoken in southwestern Burkina Faso by approximately 35 000 people. Sucite is a close neighbour of Supyire, spoken in southeastern Mali. Sucite is sometimes regarded as the northern extension of Supyire. The two dialects are, according to Garber (1987), ‘quite mutually intelligible’. Sometimes speakers of Sucite will even refer to themselves as speaking Supyire. Another closely related lect is Mamara (also known as Minyanka).

Suba
Is the language of Kenya's Suba people. As the Suba number very few to begin with (under 30,000), and the majority have begun speaking Dholuo (the language of the neighbouring Luo people) as their main language, Suba is on the verge of extinction. The remaining speakers are mostly elderly residents on the island of Mfangano. However, efforts have been made to renew teaching of the language (as of 2004), with a goal of having half the Suba population speaking the language within ten years.

Sudovian
(Otherwise known as Jatvingian or Yotvingian) is an extinct western Baltic language in Northeastern Europe. Closely related to the Old Prussian language, it was formerly spoken southwest of the Nemunas river, in Galindia and Sudovia in East Prussia and southwest Lithuania. Sudovia and Galindia were two of the twelve original Prussian lands. Although not actually a separate language, Sudovian/Jatvingian diverged as a dialect in the 10th century, and has been documented in writing. It was at once more archaic, and more closely influenced by Germanic languages, than other Baltic dialects, as exemplified by the loanword from Germanic, virdan, "word" -- that preserves the neutral case ending -an, absent from Latvian and Lithuanian.

Sumerian
The Sumerian language of ancient Sumer was spoken in Southern Mesopotamia from at least the 4th millennium BCE. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian as a spoken language around 2000 BCE, but continued to be used as a sacred, ceremonial and scientific language in Mesopotamia until about 1 AD. Then, it was forgotten until the 19th century. Sumerian is distinguished from other languages of the area such as Hebrew, Akkadian, which also comprises Babylonian and Assyrian, and Aramaic, which are Semitic languages, and Elamite, which may be an Elamo-Dravidian language.

Sundanese
(Basa Sunda, literally "language of Sunda") is the language of about 27,000,000 people from the western third of Java or about 15% of Indonesian population. It is classified in Austronesian - Malayo-Polynesian - Western Malayo-Polynesian - Sundic language family and has several dialects based on the locations of the people: Banten, Bogor, Priangan and Cirebon.

Supyire
Is a Senufo language spoken in southeastern Mali in the Sikasso Region. Its speakers, the Supyire people, number 364 000 according to SIL/Ethnologue. Supyire belongs to the Northern Senufo group and is classified under the Suppire-Mamara languages along with Sucite and Mamara (Minyanka).

Surigaonon
Is a local Philippine language spoken in the province of Surigao del Norte, and some portion of Agusan del Norte especially those towns near the Mainit Lake. It is related to Butuanon and Tausug languages.

Svan
Is a language spoken in Northwest Georgia. The Svan language is divided into the following dialects and sub-dialects:
- Upper Bal (about 15,000 speakers): Ushgul, Kala, Ipar, Mulakh, Mestia, Lenzer, Latal.
- Lower Bal (about 12,000 speakers): Becho, Tskhumar, Etser, Par, Chubekh, Lakham.
- Lashkh.
- Lentekh: Kheled, Khopur, Rtskhmelur, Cholur


Swabian
Is one of the Alemannic dialects of High German, spoken in the region of Swabia. Swabia covers much of Germany's southwestern Bundesland (state) of Baden-Württemberg (including the capital Stuttgart and the rural area known as the Swabian Alb) and the southwest of the Bundesland Bavaria. The dialect ranges from a 'standard' Swabian, spoken in Stuttgart, to slightly differing and 'thicker' forms found in smaller towns in the countryside. Older people can often tell the exact village a person comes from merely by hearing his or her accent.

Swahili
Is a Bantu language widely spoken in East Africa. Swahili is the mother tongue of the Swahili people who inhabit a 1500 km stretch of the East African coast from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique. It is spoken by over 50 million people , of whom there are approximately five million first-language speakers and thirty to fifty million second-language speakers. Swahili has become a lingua franca for East Africa and surrounding areas.

Swati
(Also known as siSwati, Swazi and Seswati) is a Bantu language of the Nguni Group spoken in Swaziland and South Africa. It has 1.5 million speakers and is taught in schools. It is an official language of Swaziland (along with English) and one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. Although often referred to as Swazi, that is the name of the language and people in Zulu. There are four dialects being Shiselweni, Hhoho, Nandzini, and Shiselweni. It is most commonly related to Xhosa, Zulu, and Ndebele in the near by regions.

Swedish
Is a North Germanic language (also called Scandinavian languages) spoken predominantly in Sweden and in parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the Åland islands, by more than nine million people. It is mutually intelligible with two of the other Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian. Swedish is distinguished by its prosody, which differs considerably between varieties. It includes both lexical stress and tonal qualities. The language has a comparatively large vowel inventory, with nine separate vowels that are distinguished by quantity and to some degree quality, making up a total of 17 vowel phonemes. Swedish is also notable for the voiceless dorso-palatal velar fricative, a sound found in many dialects, including the more prestigious forms of the standard language. Though similar to other sounds with distinct labial qualities, it has so far not been found in any other language.

Swiss German
Is any of the Alemannic dialects spoken in Switzerland. Occasionally, the Alemannic dialects spoken in other countries are called Swiss German as well, especially the dialects of Liechtenstein which are closely associated to Switzerland's.

Syriac
Is an Eastern Aramaic language that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. It was a major literary language throughout the Middle East from the second to the eighth century AD. At its broadest definition, Syriac is often used to refer to all Eastern Aramaic languages spoken by various Christian groups; at its most specific, it refers to the classical language of Edessa, which became the liturgical language of Syriac Christianity.

R

Rajasthani
Is one of the prominent languages of Indo-Aryan language family. It is spoken by around eighty million persons (total number of speakers 36 million as of Census of India, 2001) in Rajasthan and other states of India, and has eight major dialects: Bagri, Shekhawati, Mewati, Dhundhari, Harauti, Marwari, Mewari, and Wagri. Most of these dialects of Rajasthani are chiefly spoken in the state of Rajasthan and adjacent parts of Gujarat, in the Malwa and Nimar regions of western Madhya Pradesh, and the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sind. Rajasthani language is classified in the Central Zone of the Indo-Aryan languages, which also includes Hindi and Urdu. Some of the Rajasthani dialects are considered by some to be dialects of Hindi; however, many linguists agree that Rajasthani is a different language from Hindi at Phonological, Morphological, Syntactical and lexical level.
Some Rajasthani dialects are given below: Dhatki, Goaria, Loarki, Marwari, Mewari, Bagri, Gade Lohar, Gujari, Harauti, Malvi, Nimadi.

Ratagnon
(Also transliterated as Latagnon or Datagnon) is a language spoken by the Ratagnon people, an indigenous group from Occidental Mindoro. Its speakers are shifting to Tagalog, and it is nearly extinct.

Réunion Creole
Reunionese Creole, or bourbonnais is a creole language spoken on Réunion Island. It is derived mainly from French and a few terms from other languages (Indian, Chinese...).

Romanian
Is the fifth of the Romance languages in terms of number of speakers. It is spoken as a first language by somewhere around 24 to 26 million people, and enjoys official status in Romania, Moldova and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (Serbia). The official form of the Moldovan language in the Republic of Moldova is identical to the official form of Romanian save for a minor rule in spelling. Romanian is also an official or administrative language in various communities and organisations (such as the Latin Union and the European Union – the latter as of 2007).

Romansh
(Also spelled Rumantsch, Romansch or Romanche) is one of the four national languages of Switzerland, along with German, Italian and French. It is a Romance language, believed to have descended from the vulgar Latin spoken by Roman era occupiers of the region, and, as such, somewhat resembles Italian and French. It is spoken by about 50,000-70,000 people in the canton of Graubünden (Grisons), of which about 35,000 speak it as their first language. Spoken by fewer than 1% of Switzerland's 7.4 million inhabitants, it is the smallest of Switzerland's national languages in terms of number of speakers, about half the size of Switzerland's largest community of speakers of a non-official language, Serbo-Croatian with some 111,000 speakers.

Romani
(Or Romany) is the language of the Roma and Sinti, peoples often referred to in English as "Gypsies". The Indo-Aryan Romani language should not be confused with either Romanian (spoken by Romanians), or Romansh (spoken in parts of southeastern Switzerland), both of which are Romance languages.

Romblomanon
Is the language in Romblon. It includes the dialects Sibuyanon, Inunhan or Onhan, and Bantoanon or Asi.

Rotokas
Is a language (part of the East Papuan language family) spoken by some 4000 people in Bougainville, an island to the east of New Guinea, part of Papua New Guinea. There are at least three dialects of the language: Central Rotokas ("Rotokas Proper"), Aita Rotokas, and Pipipaia. Central Rotokas is most notable for its extremely small phonemic inventories and for having perhaps the smallest modern alphabet.

Runyankole
(Also Runyankore) is a Bantu language spoken by the Ankole tribe of Southwestern Uganda. There are approximately 1 million native speakers, mainly found in the Mbarara District.

Russenorsk
Or Russonorsk (Norwegian for "Russo-Norwegian") was a pidgin language combining elements of Russian and Norwegian, created by traders and whalers from northern Norway and the Russian Kola peninsula. As is common in the development of pidgins and trade languages, the interaction of seamen, fishermen, and traders with no common language necessitated the creation of some minimal form of communication. Like all pidgins, Russenorsk was not a complex system of communication. It had a rudimentary grammar and a restricted vocabulary mostly composed of words essential to Arctic fishing and trade (fish, weather, etc.) and did not particularly deal with unrelated issues (music, politics, etc.).

Russian
Is the most widely spoken language of Eurasia and the most widespread of the Slavic languages. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages. Within the Slavic family, Russian is one of three living members of the East Slavic group, the other two being Belarusian and Ukrainian.

Russian Sign Language
Is the sign language of the deaf community in Russia. It has a grammar unlike the (spoken or written) Russian language, although there is a "signed Russian" which has been used on television in interpreted news programs. The Moscow Bilingual School for the Deaf, which uses Russian Sign Language in classrooms, was opened in 1992.

Ruthenian
Was a historic East Slavic language, spoken after 1569 in the East Slavic territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Having evolved from the Old East Slavic language, Ruthenian was the ancestor of modern Belarusian. It is sometimes also called "Old Belarusian" (Belarusian starabjelaruskaja mova) or even "West Russian" (Russian zapadnorusskij jazyk).

Q

Qashqai
(Also spelled Ghashghai, Qashqa'i, Qashqay, and Kashkai) is a Turkic language. It is spoken by the Qashqai, an ethnic group living mainly in the Fars region of Iran. Estimates of the number of Qashqai speakers varies, but Ethnologue gives a figure of one and a half million. The Qashqai language is closely related to Azerbaijani, and some linguists consider it to be a dialect of that language. Unlike Azerbaijani, Qashqai still uses the Arabic alphabet (or, more specifically, the Persian modification of it). Many Qashqai also speak Persian.

Quebec Sign Language
Known in French as Langue des signes québécoise and typically abbreviated LSQ, is a sign language used in Canada. Most LSQ users are located in Quebec, but a few are scattered in major cities in the rest of the country. LSQ is closely related to both American Sign Language and French Sign Language. Due to segregation by gender in deaf education, males and females use slightly different forms of LSQ. The female form was influenced more by ASL while the male form was more influenced by LSF. Although ASL is used in Anglophone parts of Quebec, it is unusual for a deaf child to learn both ASL and LSQ.

Quechua
(Runa Simi) is a Native American language of South America. It was the language of the Inca Empire, and is today spoken in various dialects by some 10 million people throughout South America, including Peru and Bolivia, southern Colombia and Ecuador, north-western Argentina and northern Chile. It is the most widely spoken of all American Indian languages. Quechua is a very regular agglutinative language, with a normal sentence order of SOV (subject-object-verb). Its large number of infixes and suffixes change both the overall significance of words and their subtle shades of meaning, allowing great expressiveness. Notable grammatical features include bipersonal conjugation (verbs agree with both subject and object), evidentiality (indication of the source and veracity of knowledge), a topic particle, and suffixes indicating who benefits from an action and the speaker's attitude toward it.
There are two main dialect groups.
Quechua I or Waywash is spoken in Peru's central highlands. It is the most archaic and diverse branch of Quechua, such that its dialects have been often considered a different tongue.
Quechua II or Wanp'una (Traveler) is divided into three branches: Yunkay Quechua is spoken sporadically in Peru's occidental highlands; Northern Quechua (also known as Quichua or Runashimi) is mainly spoken in Colombia and Ecuador; Southern Quechua, spoken in Peru's southern highlands, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, is today's most important branch because it has the largest number of speakers and because of its cultural and literary legacy.

P

Pahari
(Also known as Pahaari), is a general term for various dialects spoken in the Indian part of the central Himalayan range. The word is derived from 'pahar' or 'pahad' meaning 'mountain'. The term 'Pahaari/Pahari' in Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi means "language of the mountain people". Pahari dialects are found in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttaranchal (traditionally called Uttarakhand). Western Pahari (Himachali) dialects include: Pothohari/Potwari, Kangri, Kullu, Mandyali, etc. The dialects spoken in Uttaranchal/Uttarakhand include Garhwali, Kumaoni and others. Garhwali itself has many dialects spoken in different parts of the state, like Jaunsari, Jadhi, etc. In the UK the language is referred to colloquially as "mawri twaree" (mine and yours).

Pahlavi
The Pahlavi script was used broadly in the Sassanid Empire to write down Middle Persian for secular, as well as religious purposes. The word Pahlavi, referring to the script of Middle Persian, itself is a borrowing from Parthian (parthau "Parthian" ? pahlaw; the semivowel glide r changes to l, a common occurrence in language evolution). The word originally referred to the language spoken by the Parthians, and later came to be applied to the script used to write Middle Persian, which was derived from the Aramaic alphabet. Middle Persian Pahlavi script was derived from Aramaic independently, although Inscriptional MP Pahlavi is quite similar to Inscriptional Parthian Pahlavi.

Palauan
(Also spelled Belauan) is the language spoken on Palau. It is a member of the Austronesian family of languages, and is considered to be one of two languages in Micronesia (the other being Chamorro) belonging to the Western Malayo-Polynesian group, all others considered to be members of the Micronesian subgroup of Eastern Malayo-Polynesian.

Pali
Is a Middle Indo-Aryan dialect or prakrit. It is most famous as the Liturgical language in which the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism (also known as the Pali Canon or in Pali the Tipitaka) were written down in Sri Lanka in the 1st century BCE. Pali has been written in a variety of scripts, from Brahmi, Devanagari and other Indic scripts through to a romanised (western) form devised by T. W. Rhys Davids of the Pali Text Society.

Pangasinan
Belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian languages branch of the Austronesian languages family. Pangasinan is spoken by more than two million people in the province of Pangasinan, in other Pangasinan communities in the Philippines, and by a significant number of Pangasinan immigrants in the United States. Pangasinan is the primary language in the province of Pangasinan, located on the west central area of the island of Luzon along the Lingayen Gulf. It is the dominant language in central Pangasinan.

Papiamento
Or Papiamentu is the primary language spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao (the so-called ABC islands). It is also well known by people in Saba, St Eustatius, and the Sint Maarten islands. Papiamento is a creole language whose lexicon is drawn firstly from Portuguese (about 60%) and some Spanish language and from Dutch (about 25%). The remainder (15%) comes from West African languages, Arawak, and other languages.

Pashto
Is the language spoken by the Pashtun people who inhabit Afghanistan and the western provinces of Pakistan.

Pecheneg
Is the extinct Oghuz Turkic language spoken by the Pechenegs in Eastern Europe. It went extinct by the 12th century.

Pemon
Or Pemong (in Spanish: Pemón) is a Cariban language spoken mainly in Venezuela, specifically in the regions Bolivar State, Gran Sabana, an estimated 4,800 people in Venezuela speak Pemon. To some extent Pemon is also spoken in Brazil and Guyana (1000+ people).

Pennsylvania German
Or more commonly (but less accurately) Pennsylvania Dutch, and increasingly Deitsch (Deitsch, Pennsilfaanisch-Deitsch, Pennsilfaani-Deitsch, Pennsilweni-Deitsch, Pennsilfaanisch), is a High German variety spoken by 150,000 to 250,000 people in North America. Speakers of the language can be found today mainly in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana in the United States, and Ontario, Canada. The majority of speakers are either Amish or Old Order Mennonite, although this was not the case a few generations ago.

Persian
Is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere.

Palula
Also known as Phalura and as Ashretiwar, is spoken by 7,000 to 15,000 people in Ashret and Biori Valleys, in the Chitral District of the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. A variety of this language is spoken in Village Sau in Afghanistan. The Phalura Language has had some documentation by George Morgenstierne (1926), Kendall Decker (1992), and Henrik Liljegrin (2005). It is classified as a Dardic Language but this is more of a geographical classification than a linguistic one. In some villages, Palula is believed to be a dying language, as most speakers are converting to the more widelty spoken Khowar language. However, in other areas Palula is a strong, vibrant and growing language, as the population in those areas increases.

Phoenician
Was a language originally spoken in the coastal region then called Put in Phoenician, Canaan in Phoenician, Hebrew and Aramaic, and Phoenicia in Greek and Latin. Phoenician is a Semitic language of the Canaanite subgroup, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. This area includes modern-day Lebanon, coastal Syria and northern Israel.

Phrygian
Was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, a people who probably migrated from Thrace to Asia Minor in the Bronze Age, possibly during the Sea Peoples migrations of ca 1200 BC. Phrygian is attested by two corpora, one from around 800 BC and later (Paleo-Phrygian), and then after a period of several centuries from around the beginning of the Common Era (Neo-Phrygian). The Palaeo-Phrygian corpus is further divided (geographically) into inscriptions of Midas-city (M, W), Gordion, Central (C), Bithynia (B), Pteria (P), Tyana (T), Daskyleion (Dask), Bayindir (Bay), and "various" (Dd, documents divers). The Mysian inscriptions seem to be in a separate dialect (in an alphabet with an additional letter, "Mysian s").

Phuthi
Is a Bantu Nguni language variety with Sotho influence spoken in scattered communities in the Eastern Cape / Lesotho borderland. It is part of the Swati dialect continuum. The origins of this language can be traced back for about 300 years. Their most notable leader was Chief Morisi (born in 1775) that died on Morisi mountain after a skirmish with the British, Boers and Basotho forces because of alleged stolen livestock. This event caused the people to disperse all over the mountainous region in order to escape capture by the colonial powers of the time. It is estimated that around 20 000 people in South Africa and Lesotho use Phuthi as their home language.

Picard
Is a language closely related to French, and as such is one of the larger group of Romance languages. It is spoken in two regions in the far north of France – Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardie – and in parts of the Belgian region Wallonia (but is clearly distinct from the Walloon language). Picard is known by several different names. Residents of Picardie call it picard; but in Nord-Pas-de-Calais and it is more commonly known as chti or chtimi, or in and around the town Valenciennes as rouchi; or simply as patois by Northerners in general. Linguists group all of these under the name Picard. Indeed, whether it is called patois, picard, or chti, it is the same language, and in general the variety spoken in Picardie is understood by speakers in Nord-Pas-de-Calais and vice versa.

Pictish
Is the extinct language of the Picts. Evidence of the language is limited to place names and to the names of people found on monuments and the contemporary records. At its height, it may have been spoken from Shetland down to Fife.

Pirahã
Is a language spoken by the Pirahã — an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, who live along the Maici river, a tributary of the Amazon. The Pirahã language has a number of unusual linguistic features. One of them, a seeming lack of number words, makes Pirahã a fascinating test case of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and more generally of the link between language and cognition.

Plautdietsch
Or Mennonite Low German, is a language spoken by the Mennonites who trace their roots to the Low Countries and north Germany, but who adopted an East Low German dialect while they were refugees in the Vistula delta area of Royal Prussia (later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), beginning in the early-to-mid 1500s. Beginning in the late 1700s, when the region became part of the Kingdom of Prussia, many Mennonites left and created new colonies north of the Black Sea (present-day Ukraine), in an area that Russia had recently acquired in one of the Russo-Turkish Wars (see Russian Mennonites). Many Mennonites migrated to North America — especially Canada and the United States — and Latin America — especially Paraguay and Mexico, — most of them live as rural settlers and added some Spanish and Portuguese words to their own language.

Polabian
Which became extinct in the 18th century, was a group of Slavic dialects spoken in present-day northern Germany: Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, eastern parts of Lower Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein. It was one of the Lechitic languages. The name derives from the name of Polabian tribes, which in turn derives from the name of the Elbe river in Slavic languages: Laba in Polish and Labe in Czech.

Polish
Is the official language of Poland. Polish is the main representative of the Lechitic branch of the West Slavic languages. It originated in the areas of present-day Poland from several local Western Slavic dialects, most notably those spoken in Greater Poland and Lesser Poland.

Portuguese
Is an Indo-European language of the Romance branch. It originated in what is today Galicia (in Spain) and northern Portugal. It is the official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe, co-official with Chinese in the Chinese S.A.R. of Macau, and co-official with Tetum in East Timor.

Potiguara
Is a language which is spoken by 6000 Indian tribesmen in Paraíba, Pôsto Nísia Brasileira on the Baía da Traição, in the municipality of Mamanguape, Brazil. The language belongs to Tupi-Guarani language subfamily.

Proto-Indo-European
Is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, believed to have been spoken around 4000 BC in Central Asia (according to the Kurgan hypothesis) or millennia before that in Anatolia (according to the Anatolian hypothesis). The existence of such a language is generally accepted by linguists, though there has been debate about many specific details. All Indo-European languages are inflected languages (although many modern Indo-European languages, including Modern English, have lost much of their inflection). By comparative reconstruction, it is quite likely that at least the latest stage of the common PIE mother languages (Late PIE) was an inflectional language, which was more suffixing than prefixing.

Provençal
Is one of several dialects of the Occitan language, which is spoken by a minority of people in southern France and other areas of France. In the English-speaking world, "Provençal" is often used to refer to all dialects of Occitan, but actually refers specifically to the dialect spoken in the former province of Provence as well as south of Dauphiné and the Nîmes region in Languedoc and the upper valleys of Piedmont, Italy (Val Maira, Val Varacha, Val d'Estura, Entraigas, Limon, Vinai, Pignerol, Sestriera). "Provençal" is also the customary name given to the older version of the langue d'oc used by the troubadours of medieval literature, corresponding to Old French or langue d'oil of the northern areas of France.

Pucikwar
Is an extinct language of the Andaman Islands, India, spoken by the A-Pucikwar people.

Punjabi
Is the language of the Punjabi people and the Punjab regions of India and Pakistan. It is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian subfamily. Uniquely for an Indo-European language, Punjabi is a tonal language where the tones arose as a reinterpretation of different consonant series in terms of pitch. In terms of morphological complexity, it is an agglutinative language and words are usually ordered 'Subject Object Verb'.

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.

N

Nafaanra
Is a Senufo language spoken in northwest Ghana, along the border with Côte d'Ivoire, east of Bondouko. It is spoken by approximately 61,000 people (GILLBT 2003). Its speakers call themselves Nafana; others call them Banda or Mfantera. Like other Senufo languages, Nafaanra is a tonal language. It is somewhat of an outlier in the Senufo language group, with the geographically closest relatives, the Southern Senufo Tagwana-Djimini languages, approximately 200 kilometres to the west, on the other side of Comoé National Park.

Nahuatl
Is a term applied to some members of the Aztecan or Nahuan sub-branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, indigenous to central Mexico. Under the "Law of Linguistic Rights" it is recognized as a "national language" along with 62 other indigenous languages and Spanish which have the same "validity" in Mexico.
Often the term Nahuatl is used specifically with reference to the language called Classical Nahuatl, which was the administrative language of the Aztec empire but it was preceded by other Nahuatl-speaking cultures, like the Tepanceca, Acolcuah, Tlaxcalteca, Xochimilc, etc. and possibly was one of the languages spoken in Teotihuacan. As the Nahua groups became predominant, It was used as a lingua franca in much of Mesoamerica from the 12th century AD until the late 16th century, at which time its prominence and influence were interrupted by the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

Nàmá
Previously called Hottentot, is the most populous and widespread of the Khoisan languages. It belongs to the Khoe language family, and is spoken in Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa by the Namaqua, Damara, and Hai?om, as well as smaller ethnic groups such as the ?Khomani. The name for Nama speakers, Khoekhoen, is from the Nama word khoe "person", with reduplication and the suffix -n to indicate the plural. According to Ethnologue, there were 250,000 speakers as of 1998.

Nauruan
(Dorerin Naoero) is an Austronesian language spoken in Nauru. It is estimated that it has 7,000 speakers, approximately 50% of the population. Almost all speakers are bilingual in English. It is a member of the Micronesian family of Austronesian languages.

Navajo
(Also Navaho) (in Navajo: Diné bizaad) is an Athabaskan language (of Na-Dené stock) spoken in the southwest United States by the Navajo people (Diné). It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages (the majority of Athabaskan languages are spoken in northwest Canada and Alaska). Navajo claims more speakers than any other Native American or First Nation language north of the US-Mexico border, with more than 100,000 native speakers, and this number is actually increasing with time. During World War II, a code based on Navajo was used by code talkers to send secure military messages over radio.

Ndau
Is one of the Shona dialects. It is spoken by people from the region of "Chipinge". Some of its words are very similar to that of Ndebele and often this dialect can sound very different from that of basic Shona.

Southern Ndebele language
Is an African language belonging to the Nguni group of Bantu languages, and spoken by the amaNdebele (the Ndebele people of South Africa). There are two dialects of Southern Ndebele in South Africa:
* the Northern Transvaal Ndebele or Nrebele,
* and the Southern Transvaal Ndebele.


Ndonga
Is one of the languages spoken in Africa. This is one of the Bantu languages, and is mainly spoken in Namibia and some parts of Angola. Total number of Ndonga speakers are estimated to be roughly 690,000. Grouped with the closely related Kuanyama, it is also called 'Otjiwambo', 'Oshiwambo' or 'Owambo'.

Neapolitan
Is a Romance language spoken in the city and region of Naples, Campania (Neapolitan: Nàpule, Italian: Napoli), as well as throughout most of southern Italy including the Gaeta and Sora districts of southern Lazio, the southern part of Ascoli province in Marche, most of Abruzzo, Molise, Basilicata, northern Calabria, and northern and central Apulia.

Nenets
Is a language spoken by the Nenets people in northern Russia. It belongs to the Samoyedic languages which form the Uralic language family with the Finno-Ugric languages. There are two major dialects - Tundra Nenets and Forest Nenets - with low mutual intelligibility between the two. Most Nenetses speak Tundra Nenets.

Nepal Bhasa
Is one of the major languages of Nepal. It is one of the roughly five hundred Sino-Tibetan languages in the world, and belongs to the Tibeto-Burman branch of this family. It is the only Tibeto-Burman language to be written in the Devanagari script.

Nepali
Is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Nepal, Bhutan, and some parts of India and Burma. It is the official language of Nepal. Roughly half the population of Nepal speaks Nepali as a mother tongue, and many other Nepalese speak it as a second language. Nepali goes by various names. English speakers generally call it Nepali or Nepalese.

New Zealand Sign Language
Or NZSL is the main language of the deaf community in New Zealand. It became an official language of New Zealand in April 2006, alongside Maori and English. It is the first official sign language in the world. New Zealand Sign Language has its roots in British Sign Language (BSL), and may be technically considered a dialect of British, Australian and New Zealand Sign Language (BANZSL). Like other natural sign languages, it was devised by and for Deaf people, with no linguistic connection to a spoken or written language, and it is fully capable of expressing anything a fluent signer wants to say. It is linguistically unrelated to American Sign Language. It uses the same two-handed manual alphabet as British Sign Language and Auslan, Australian Sign Language.

Nganasan
Is a language of the Nganasan people. It is spoken by some 1063 (1989 est.) or 750 people (1970 est.) in the southwestern and central parts of the Taymyr Peninsula. The Nganasan language belongs to the northern Samoyedic group of the Uralic language family. There are two main dialects in the Nganasan language: Avam dialect and Vadeyev dialect. There is no Nganasan written language. Phonetic features of the Nganasan language include 18 vowel and 20 consonant phonemes and an abundance of diphthongs.

Ngumba
Is a language of Cameroon, spoken in the south along the coast and at the border with Equatorial Guinea by some 70 000 members of the Ngumba ethnic group. Ngumba is a tonal language. As a Narrow Bantu language, it has noun class system. The Ngumba noun class system is somewhat reduced, having retained only 6 genders (a gender being a pairing of a singular and a plural noun class).

Língua Geral
Is the name of two distinct linguae francae spoken in Brazil, the língua geral paulista, now extinct; and the língua geral amazônica whose modern descendant is Nheengatu. Both were simplified versions of languages spoken by Tupi Indians. Portuguese colonizers arrived in Brazil in the 16th century and, faced with an indigenous population which spoke many languages, sought a means to establish effective communication among the many groups. The two languages were used in the Jesuit missions and by early colonists; and came to be used by black slaves and other Indian groups.

Nicaraguan Sign Language
(Or ISN, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua or Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense) is a signed language spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. It is of particular interest to linguists because it offers a unique opportunity to study the "birth" of a new language.

Nicobarese languages
Form an isolated group of six closely-related Mon-Khmer languages from the Austro-Asiatic language family, which are spoken by the indigenous inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands of India. They have a total of about 30,000 speakers (22,100 native). The majority of Nicobarese speakers use the Car language. The morphological similarities between Nicobarese languages and Austronesian languages have been used to help support the Austric hypothesis.

Niellim
Is a Bua language spoken by some 5,000 people (as of 1993) along the Chari River in southern Chad. It is mainly spoken in two areas: one around the city of Sarh (to which many - perhaps most - speakers have migrated) and one, its traditional home, further north, between about 9°30' and 9°50 N, corresponding to the former chiefdoms of Pra, Niellim, and Niou. Niellim borders on several languages of diverse families - in particular Sara, Ndam, and Laal - and is influenced by the local lingua franca, Baguirmi; it has itself strongly influenced Laal. It is notably homogeneous. As a small minority in Chad, its speakers usually have to learn other languages, mostly (as of 1974) Baguirmi, Sara, Arabic, and Bua.

Nigerian Pidgin
Is a dialect of English spoken as a kind of lingua franca across Nigeria that is referred to simply as "Pidgin", "Broken English" or "Brokan". It is not considered a creole language since there are no "native" speakers, although children do learn it early. Its superstrate is English with Hausa, Yorùbá and Igbo as the main substrate languages. Nigerian Pidgin is also spoken across West Africa, in countries such as Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cameroon.

Niuean
Is a Polynesian language, belonging to the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian languages. It is most closely related to Tongan and slightly more distantly to other Polynesian languages such as Maori, Samoan, and Hawai'ian. Together, Tongan and Niuean form the Tongic subgroup of the Polynesian languages. Niuean also has a number of influences from Samoan and Eastern Polynesian languages.

Nivkh
Or Gilyak (ethnonym: Nivxi) is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun, a tributary of the Amur, along the lower reaches of the Amur and on the northern half of Sakhalin. 'Gilyak' is the Manchu appellation. Its speakers are known as the Nivkhs. Gilyak is a language isolate, i.e., it does not appear to be related to any other language. For classification convenience, it is included in the group of Paleosiberian languages. Recently it was included in the controversial Eurasiatic languages hypothesis by Joseph Greenberg.

Nogai
Is a language spoken in southwestern Russia. Three distinct dialects are recognized: Qara-Nogay (Black or Northern Nogay), spoken in Dagestan; Nogai Proper, in Stavropol; and Aqnogay (White or Western Nogay), by the Kuban River, its tributaries in Karachay-Cherkessia, and in the Mineralnye Vody District. Qara-Nogay and Nogai Proper are very close linguistically, while Aqnogay shows more differences.

Norfuk
Is the language spoken on Norfolk Island by the local residents. It is a blend of English of the 1700s and Tahitian originally introduced by settlers from the Pitcairn Islands who spoke Pitkern. The language itself does not have words to express some concepts; some therefore describe it as a Cant, similar to a Pidgin, or as a Creole language. Some Islanders believe that the only solution is to create a committee charged with creating new words in Norfuk rather than simply adopting English words for new technological advances. For example, Norfuk recently adopted the word Kompyuuta, a Norfuk-ised version of Computer. Processes similar to this exist in relation to other regional or minority languages around the world, such as the Maori language in New Zealand and the Icelandic language. Some minority languages already have official bodies (such as New Zealand's Maori Language Commission) creating new words.

Norman
Is a Romance language, one of the Oïl languages. The name Norman-French is sometimes used to describe not only the modern Norman language, but also the administrative languages of Anglo-Norman and Law French used in England.

Norn
Is an extinct North Germanic language that was spoken on the Shetland Islands and Orkney Islands, off the north coast of mainland Scotland. After the islands were returned to Scotland by Norway in the 15th century, its use was discouraged by the Scottish government and the Church of Scotland (the national church), and it was gradually replaced by Scots over time.

Northern
Or North Sami (also written Sámi or Saami; formerly Lappish or Lapp) is the most widely spoken of all Sami languages. It can be divided into a three major dialect groups: Torne, Finnmark and Sea Sami. All together, North Sami spreads out across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland. Depending on the survey, this estimate can bring the population of North Sami speakers to be somewhere between 15,000 speakers and 25,000 speakers.

Northern Sotho
Sepedi, or "Sesotho sa Leboa", is one of the official languages of South Africa, and is spoken by 4,208,980 people (2001 Census Data), mostly in the provinces of Gauteng, Limpopo Province and Mpumalanga. Northern Sotho is one of the so-called Bantu languages, belonging to the Niger-Congo language family. It is most closely related to Setswana and Sesotho (Southern Sotho).

Norwegian
Is a Germanic language spoken in Norway. Norwegian is closely related to and generally mutually intelligible with Swedish and Danish. Together with these two languages as well as Faroese and Icelandic, Norwegian belongs to the North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages). Native speakers of Norwegian are, for the most part, quite proficient in understanding Danish and Swedish in spoken as well as written form. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, Danish was the standard written language of Norway. As a result, the development of modern written Norwegian has been subject to strong controversy related to nationalism, rural versus urban discourse, and Norway's literary history.

N/u
Or N/uu is a Khoisan language spoken by the ‡Khomani people in South Africa. N/u belongs to the Ta’a-Kwi language family, with /Xam being its closest relative. The slash symbol in these names represents a click like the English interjection tsk! tsk! used to express pity or shame; "N/u" is pronounced like noo, with a tsk pronounced in the middle of the en.

Nuer
Is a Nilo-Saharan language of the Western Nilotic group. It is spoken by the Nuer tribe in southern Sudan.

Nuristani languages
Are said to represent the third and by far the smallest branch of the Indo-Iranian languages. The recognition of its independent status came much later than that of the other two branches. As the term "Indo-Iranian" is well established, there is resistance to any change in the nomenclature. They were not described in the literature until the 19th century. The older name for the region was Kafiristan and the languages were termed Kafiiri or Kafiristani, but the terms have been replaced by the present ones as being less pejorative, for kafir means "infidel".

Nuxálk
(Also Bella Coola) is a Salishan language spoken in the vicinity of the Canadian town Bella Coola, British Columbia by approximately 20-30 elders. Until recently, the language was also called Bella Coola, but the native designation Nuxálk is now preferred. Though the number of truly fluent speakers has not increased, the language is now taught in both the Provincial (British Columbia – B.C.) school system and the Nuxálk Nation's own school – Acwsalcta. Nuxálk language classes, if taken to at least the Grade 11 level, are considered adequate second language qualifications for entry to the major B.C. universities.

Nyabwa
(Or Nyaboa) language is a Kru language spoken in Côte d'Ivoire.

Nyah Kur
Is an Austroasiatic language spoken by a remnant of the Mon people of Dvaravati, the Nyah Kur people, who live in present-day Thailand. Known as Chao-bon in Thai, it is spoken by a few thousand people in the central and northeastern provinces. Being the only languages of the Monic branch of the Mon-Khmer language family, Mon and Nyah Kur are very closely related. The speakers of Nyah Kur are the descendants of those Mon who did not flee west when the Khmer overran their empire in the 9th and 11th centuries. Consequently, modern Mon and Nyah Kur have both developed directly from Old Mon independently for almost a millennium.

Nyagnumarta
Is spoken by Indigenous Australians in the region of Western Australia to the south and east of Lake Waukarlykarly, including Eighty Mile Beach, and part of the Great Sandy Desert inland to near Telfer.

Nynorsk
(Literally New Norwegian) is one of the two officially sanctioned written standards of the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål. It's used as the primary written language by just over 10% of Norwegian speakers in Norway. Nynorsk is also the Norwegian linguistic term for Modern Norwegian, which is the language spoken in Norway since the mid 1500s. In this sense Nynorsk covers all modern Norwegian dialects and all modern Norwegian orthographies, including Nynorsk, Høgnorsk, Bokmål and Riksmål. This sense of the word is described further in the article Modern Norwegian and is not used below.

Nyoro
Is a local language of Nyoro in Uganda. It belongs to the Niger-Congo family, Benue-Congo subgroup, Bantu branch (Nyoro-Ganda group). Has probably two dialects: Orunyoro and Rutagwenda. A standardized orthography was established in 1947.