World Tourism Directory

A

• Afrikaans
  The language Afrikaans has its roots in seventeenth century Dutch but it has been influenced by many languages including: English, Malay, German, Portuguese, French and some African languages.
  
• Arabic
  This site will enable you to initiate yourselves with written Arabic language. It comprises several lessons which contain texts, sounds and explanations. Each Arab word is accompanied by its translation in english, its transcription and its pronunciation.
  
• Arkian
  Arkian is language of Ark Maramia. The language has been influenced by many traditions: ling history of Vitga, the native pre-Hiberan languages and the diverse cultural backgrounds in different regions.
  
• Assyrian
  Assyrian is the root language of Hebrew, Arabic, and the alphabet for Greek, Farsi (Persian), Georgian, Turkish (uighur script) which also begat the Mongolean script. So, if you master this language, then you will be speaking one of the oldest, rarest languages in the world.
  
• Asturian
  This site offers loads of news and information about this romance language spoken on the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula.
  
• Alurian

B

• Basque Language-Euskara
  Euskara appears to have always been spoken by a rather small community, never beyond 600.000 or 700.000 individuals in its known history. In the Middle Ages, the geographical area where Euskara was the main language covered all the Basque Provinces in their entirety, except for the western tip of Biscay and the southernmost tip of Navarre and Alava.
  
• Bengali
  The vast majority of the people of Bangladesh speak Bengali (Bangla). Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language and evolved from Sanskrit. The language plays an extremely important role in the hearts and minds of Bangladeshis.
  
• Berber
  There are many cross connections between the Berber people living in North Africa and the ancient stories of the Libyan Amazons! First of all, the Libyan Amazons were located in that part of Africa where the Berber peoples lived and still live. The Berbers are supposed to be aborigines.
  
• Bhojpuri
  Bhojpuri is a dialect of Hindi, the official language of India, which is spoken as mother tongue mainly in western part of the state of Bihar and eastern part of the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and some adjoining area of Nepal (the land locked country and the only Hindu Nation of the world). Bhojpuri is spoken on all the six continents.
  
• Brazilian Portugese
  Portuguese (português) is a Romance language predominantly spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and East Timor. With more than 200 million native speakers, Portuguese is one of the few languages spoken in such widely-distributed parts of the world, and is the fifth or sixth most-spoken first language in the world. Since Brazil has about 51% of South America's population, Portuguese is the most widely spoken language in South America.
  
• Buhi
  Buhi is an Austronesian language used in the Philippines particularly on the Bicol Peninsula on the island of Luzon.
  
• Bulgarian
  Bulgarian is the native tongue of some 9 million people, most of whom live in Bulgaria, where it is the official language. It is also spoken to some extent in bordering and nearby countries.

C

• Catalan
  Catalan (Català, Valencià) is a Romance language spoken by as many as approximately 12 million people in portions of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, although the majority of Catalan speakers are in Spain.
  
• Chichewa
  Chichewa/Chinyanja is a language of the Bantu family widely spoken in south-central Africa. This site provides information on this language and places where further information can be found.
  
• Chinese
  The Chinese language is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although Chinese is often regarded as a single language, regional variations in dialect, grammar and vocabulary are comparable to those of Romance languages. However, all of the spoken varieties of Chinese share a common formal written language, Vernacular Chinese, written using a nearly identical set of Chinese characters.
  
• Church Slavonic
  The Church Slavonic language is the liturgical language of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Russian Orthodox Church, Serbian Orthodox Church and other Slavic Orthodox Churches. Historically, this language is derived from the Old Church Slavonic language by adapting pronunciation and orthography and replacing some old and obscure words and expressions by their vernacular counterparts (for example from the Old Russian language).

D

• Degaspregos
  One of the more interesting, or at least more exotic aspects of Degaspregos is its system of evidentiary. Evidentiary is a system within a language which tells the hearer how the speaker came about the knowledge that he is trying to communicate.
  
• Dongxiang
  The Dongxiang language belongs to the Mongol branch of the Altaic languages. The spoken language does not make a distinction between short and long vowels.
  
• Dutch
  Dutch is not only the language of 16 million people in the Netherlands, but also of 6 million people in Flanders, Belgium.

E

• English
  The English language is a West Germanic language that originated in England. It is the third most common "first" language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002.

F

• Farsi
  Persian Language, also known as Farsi, is the most widely spoken member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is the language of Iran (formerly Persia) and is also widely spoken in Afghanistan and, in an archaic form, in Tajikistan and the Pamir Mountain region.
  
• French
  French is spoken by about 124 million people in the world. It is thus one of the most spoken languages of the world. Speakers are from France (60 million), Québec, Belgium, Switzerland, Haïti, French Guiana, Monaco, Africa, Southwest Asia and French Polynesia.

G

• German
  German (called Deutsch in German; in German the term germanisch is equivalent to English Germanic), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and is one of the world's major languages. It is the language with the most native speakers in the European Union.
  
• Greek
  The Greek language is an Indo-European language with a documented history of some 3,000 years. Ancient Greek in its various forms was the language both of classical Greek civilization and of the origins of Christianity, and was a first or second language over a large part of the Roman Empire.
  
• Gujarati
  Gujarati is the official language of Gujarat state, on the west coast of India, with an area of 196,024 square kilometers. Within the Republic of India, Gujarat borders with Rajasthan, Madhyapradesh, and Maharashtra; it also borders with Pakistan to the northwest. The languages spoken in the areas contiguous to the Gujarat within India are Marwari, Hindi, and Marathi.

H

• Hausa
  Hausa is spoken by an estimated 22 million native speakers, plus an additional 17 million second language speakers (information from Ethnologue). The largest native speaking population is in northern Nigeria, where Hausa is the native language of the majority of the population and a universal lingua franca regardless of a speaker's first language.
  
• Hawaiian
  Hawaiian is the ancestral language of the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands, the Hawaiians, a Polynesian people. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the State of Hawai'i. It is notable for having a small phoneme inventory like many of its Polynesian cousins.
  
• Hindi
  Hindi is a direct descendant of Sanskrit through Prakrit and Apabhramsha. It has been influenced and enriched by Dravidian, Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Portugese and English. It is a very expressive language. In poetry and songs, it can convey emotions using simple and gentle words. It can also be used for exact and rational reasoning.
  
• Hmong
  The Hmong language branches into two dialects: White Hmong and Blue (or Green) Hmong. The colors in these names represent the colors used in the traditional women's costumes of the different groups, reflecting somewhat different cultural heritages and residential distributions in distinct regions of China.

I

• Irish
  Irish (Gaeilge) is a Goidelic language spoken in Ireland and in small communities in Canada and Argentina. Irish is constitutionally recognised as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, and has recently received a degree of formal recognition in Northern Ireland, under the Good Friday Agreement alongside the varieties of Lowland Scots spoken in Northern Ireland.
  
• Italian
  Italian is a Romance language spoken by about 70 million people, most of who live in Italy. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan dialects and is somewhat intermediate between the languages of Southern Italy and the Gallo-Romance languages of the North.

J

• Jameld
  Jameld is a constructed language, a language which has been designed - in this case for personal amusement and enlightenment, and to explore the possibilities and workings of language within a familiar environment (viz. as an imaginary member of the Germanic language family, related to Dutch, Frisian and German).
  
• Japanese
  Japanese is believed to be linked to the Altaic language family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian and other languages, but also shows similarities to Austronesian languages like Polynesian.

K

• Kankonian
  Kankonian offers one of the larger lexicons on the Web, with a dictionary of over 5,500 words. This extraterrestrial language is vaguely reminescent of the tongues of the Middle East, but it is based directly on no human language, with the vocabulary designed according to the author's sense of the most natural set of sounds for each idea.
  
• Konkani
  Due to the tumultuous events, the Konkani community (called the Konkanis) has fragmented and spread throughout the west coast of India. Their language, Konkani had to suffer the same indignation. The Marathi community called it a dialect of Marathi and did not recognize it. The Konkani language did not receive the respect or status it deserved and it resulted in lack of literature or patronage of the language.

L

• Lakhota
  This is a Native American owned and operated site for Natives and Non-Natives interested in the Lakhota Language and Culture. Lakota is a language spoken by the Native American Lakota people. It is part of the Siouan language family.
  
• Loglan
  Loglan was originally developed in the 1950s, and an early version was described in the Scientific American for June 1960. Since then, Loglan (a logical language) has continued to develop and expand. One aim in its development was to make the grammar free from ambiguity, and that aim has been achieved.

M

• Malat (now Minyeva)
  Minyeva is a systematic conlang (constructed language). Some of Minyeva's design is based on the philosophies of Rick Morneau's monograph. Other ideas are taken from logical languages like Lojban. Bits and pieces are inspired from other conlangs and even natlangs (natural languages). A good chunk of it is just inspiration
  
• Marathi
  Marathi is one of the widely spoken languages of India, and has a long literary history. It is spoken in Maharashtra state by about 70 million people. Like many other Indian languages, Marathi is derived from Sanskrit and is believed to have separated from the other languages in its group about a thousand years ago. Other names for the language are Maharashtri, Maharathi, Malhatee and Marthi.

N

• Nepali
  The national language of Nepal is known as "Nepali". According to the most recent official census, conducted by His Majesty's Government of Nepal (HMG) in 2001, Nepal is home to around 20 million speakers of Nepali. Nepali is the mother tongue for 11 million people, and a lingua franca for many more.

O

• Occitan
  Occitan, or langue d'oc is characterized by its richness, variability, and by the intelligibility of its dialects is spoken by 2 to 10 million people in France, Italy, and Spain 8. An estimated 7 million people in France understand the language.

P

• Portugues
  Portuguese is predominantly spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and East Timor. With more than 200 million native speakers, Portuguese is one of the few languages spoken in such widely-distributed parts of the world, and is the fifth or sixth most-spoken first language in the world. Since Brazil has about 51% of South America's population, Portuguese is the most widely spoken language in South America.
  
• Punjabi
  Punjabi is the language of the Punjab regions of India and Pakistan. It is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian subfamily. Also, as an adjective, the word Punjabi qualifies anything or anyone that is related to either Punjab or the Punjabi language, such as the speakers of Punjabi, inhabitants of Punjab or the Punjabi cuisine of the region.