Since ancient times, the various primitive tribes residing in the Lingnan region were collectively referred to as the “Southern Barbarians” by the Huaxia tribes (ancient Chinese / Han) living in the Central Plains. Before the Qin dynasty expanded southward, the languages in Lingnan exhibited characteristics of both ancient Chor and indigenous “Hundred Yuet” languages. During […]
Hindi – World’s second most spoken language
Hindi language is one of the two official language of India and is spoken by the Hindustan.
Nepali – Indian language spoken in Nepal
Nepali is an Indian language spoken in Nepal, Bhutan, India and Myanmar. Being the official language of Nepal, Nepali is spoken by around half of the Nepalese as their native language while the rest learn it as their second language.
Sino-Tibetan languages – Burmese
Burmese is a phonetic language with a total of 33 consonants, which form a syllable with a vowel. Burmese has four tones and is the official language of Brunei spoken by 28 million people. Yangon is the modern Burmese which uses Yangon pronunciation as the standard pronunciation. The written form is characterized by its round shape.
First invented in 1283 by King Ramkhamhaeng, Thai
Thai, formerly called Siamese, is the official language of Thailand. It is currently used by about 50 million people.
Residents living on riverside – Tagalog
Filipino (Tagalog) is mainly used in the Philippines and is also widely used in Sabah of Malaysia, the Northern region of Indonesia and Singapore.
Originated from Ancient Chinese – Cantonese
Cantonese is a tone language in the Sinitic languages under the family of Sino-Tibetan languages. It is distributed in the regions of Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong and Macau.
Official language of Vietnam – Vietnamese
Although languages in most of the Southeast Asian countries have been under great impact from Indian culture, Vietnamese, like Korean and Japanese, have been influenced hugely by the culture of Chinese characters.
Hierarchical Language – Japanese
Japanese is a language spoken mainly by the Yamato people in Japanese archipelago, and is also the official and the most common language in Japan.
Birth of Old Malay – Bahasa Melayu
The 7th century saw the birth of Old Malay in South Sumatra. Old Malay had a lot of loanwords from Sanskrit and was widely used as a trade language. After the 14th century, there were dialects emerging in Malaya, Jakarta and Ambon. During then, the language spoken on the islands of South Pacific was simplified Malay. The Standard Malay spoken in Malaysia is also called Malaysian, which is different from Indonesian in some basic vocabularies, pronunciation, certain tense and sentence structure.