According to the theory of the six degrees of separation, proposed in 1930 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, any person is connected to another person on the planet by means of a chain of up to five intermediaries (a total of six links). In the year 2011, a very well known social network conducted […]
To provide but the briefest of accounts of this language, the first thing we could say is that you may find material on the language by looking up either of two words in Spanish: hindostánico or indostaní (In English, see Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu). Like all the languages of India, it belongs to the Indo-European family […]
Dzongkha, or Ngalopkha as it is occasionally known, is the official language of Bhutan. Bhutan is a small landlocked country on the continent of Asia. A mountainous country due to its proximity to the Himalayas, it is located between India and China. Given this geographical location, Dzongkha is also spoken in Nepal and India. Dzongkha belongs […]
We have already written brief posts on some of the many languages of India, and today I will add another: Telugu This is another language belonging to the group South Central Dravidian languages. Within India: Telugu is spoken mainly in India, in the state of Andhra Pradesh,where it is the official language. It is also […]
Its origins Gujarati belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family, which is a branch of the greater Indo-European family. It receives its name from the Indian state where it is the official language: the state of Gujarat, and it uses the Gujarati script, though it originally was written with the Devanagari alphabet. The first manuscripts in […]
Did you know that in India there are over 400 languages and an estimated 2,000 dialects? What must it be like to live in a country where in a 2 mile bus ride, you can hear 10 or even 20 different languages, and where the money has to be written in 15 languages? India is […]
We have written a few posts on introducing, slowly, the world of Indo-Aryan or Indic languages (a subset of languages belonging to the group of Indo-European languages, more specifically those that are spoken for the most part in India). The main languages of this linguistic group are Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Bahari and Assamese. The […]
Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language, and it emerged in India, during the first millennium. Its alphabet comes from the Brahmi alphabet, which is used for the transliteration of Sanskrit. The Bengali writing system used today first appeared in 1778 with Charles Wilkins. The Bengali language has two literary styles: one is the Sadhubhasa, a refined […]
More than a billion people speak Hindi in the world, as it is one of the official languages of India, one of the most populated countries in the world. India formally recognizes 18 languages. In turn, most of these 18 languages include a subset dialects and variants. And it is no wonder that Hindi is […]
It belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of languages of the Indo-European family, which we spoke of HERE. It is mainly spoken in the Punjab region (between India and Pakistan) and, globally, there are some 100 million speakers of this language. It derives from dialects such as Hindi and it basically employs the Gurmukhi alphabet for […]