Language List

"At present the languages of the world number in the thousands [but]fewer than 100 are spoken by over 95 percent of the earth's population." (The Languages of the World by Kenneth Katzner)

The majority of our translations are produced in the most widely spoken languages — Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, German, Japanese, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, French and Italian. But we also translate into and out of many less common languages as well.

Asia	Chinese Japanese Korean Khmer Vietnamese Hmong Lao Thai Mongolian	•	Although Chinese has many different dialects, the written language is the same for all. Traditional Chinese is used on Taiwan, in Hong Kong, and among immigrant groups. Simplified Chinese, the result of the Communist government's attempt to reduce the complications inherent in Chinese, is used on the mainland and in Singapore.
		•	Unlike Chinese, Japanese is not tonal. It uses some of the Chinese characters, and the two languages are, therefore, partially understood by both speaker groups.
		•	Korean is not related to Chinese but shares certain grammatical characteristics with Japanese. Whereas both Chinese and Japanese use ideographs that represent ideas, Korean uses a phonetic alphabet with letters arranged in clusters to form words.
		•	Relatively new languages such as Hmong lack vocabulary and require that concepts be explained within translations, creating lengthy texts.
		•	Lao and Thai do not always use spaces between words. Woe to the typesetter who adjusts a margin and inserts a line break without knowing the language!
		•	A different Vietnamese is produced for those people who came to the United States after the fall of Saigon than for those who remained.

Africa	Swahili Somali Oromo Amharic Yoruba Ewe Bassa Arabic	•	There are 137 languages spoken in Tanzania. The government requires that, in addition to their tribal language, all children learn both Swahili to unite the nation and English to equip them to function in the business world.
		•	In Ethiopia, Tigrinya, Gurage, Arabic and Italian are spoken in addition to Oromo and Amharic.


Western Europe	French German Italian Spanish Portuguese Dutch Flemish Swedish Danish Norwegian Finnish	•	British English differs from American and Australian English, and translations should be tailored for each continent.
		•	German is also spoken in northern Italy, Austria and Switzerland, though there are differences in vocabulary and pronunciation.
		•	Finnish is most closely related to Hungarian (Magyar), not its Scandinavian neighbors, and has 15 grammatical cases!

Eastern Europe	Magyar Serbian Croatian Polish Czech Slovak Bulgarian Romanian	•	Contrary to political practice, Serbian and Croatian have significant differences. Serbian uses a type of Cyrillic alphabet (like Russian) and Croatian is written in the Roman alphabet.

Former Soviet Union	Russian Latvian Lithuanian Estonian Armenian Georgian Kazakh Uzbek Ukrainian Tajik Azerbaijani	•	One of the accomplishments of the Communist government was to unite many diverse linguistic groups. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the new countries began issuing identity documents under their own flags. Inconsistent transliteration of names from one alphabet to another can create havoc for citizens who may have, for instance, a birth certificate in Russian and a driver's license in Estonian

Middle East	Hebrew Arabic Turkish Pashto Kurdish Persian	•	Hebrew is a revived language whose rebirth stems from the Zionist movement that resulted in the establishment of Israel as a nation.
		•	Although there are many different forms of Arabic, classical Arabic, the language of the Koran, is spoken by nearly all educated Arabs.
		•	Both Hebrew and Arabic are written right to left, but numbers within a text read from left to right.
		•	Persian is called Farsi in Iran, and Dari in Afghanistan.

Indian subcontinent	Hindi Hindi Sanskrit Kannada Sinhalese Bengali Gujarati Urdu Maranthi Punjabi Sindhi	•	Urdu grew out of Hindi because of the Muslim domination of India during the 1700s. It uses a Perso-Arabic script while Hindi uses Sanskrit characters. The term Hindustani, which once comprised both languages, is no longer used.

North America	French Spanish Dakota Cree Chippewa Eskimo	•	The French spoken in Canada differs from the French spoken in France or in Somalia.
		•	North American Spanish is different from Castilian (European) Spanish. Translations should be tailored for Europe, Mexico, the Southern Hemisphere, or immigrant populations of the United States.
		•	Although minor languages are not often used for translations of large manuals, hospitals and government facilities located near speaker groups of these languages may have informational brochures translated.

Central and South America	Spanish Portuguese Miskito Tacana Guarani	•	The Portuguese of Brazil differs from that spoken in Portugal or in Angola.
Central and South America	Spanish Portuguese Miskito Tacana Guarani	•	The isolation imposed by geographic features contributed to the number of tribal languages spoken both in Africa and South America.

The Pacific	Indonesian Malay Tagalog	•	Tagalog is only one of the languages of the Philippines, where English is also spoken, largely due to the U.S. military presence

Source for some of the information on this page is The Languages of the World by Kenneth Katzner

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Language List

Asia

Africa

Western Europe

Eastern Europe

Former Soviet Union

Middle East

Indian subcontinent

North America

Central and South America

The Pacific

Precision Language Services