My previous post concerned how to identify European languages, and you can read it here https://jackblove.medium.com/identifying-european-languages-64e17036a714.
This time I thought I’d focus on Asia. This will be a lot harder to write and will probably be quite long. Asia is very big and it contains an immense number of languages (India alone has about 400, Indonesia 700). A common ‘Asian’ culture does not exist in the same way people often think about a European one (however you could argue that ‘East Asian’ and ‘South Asian’ cultures exist). In a similar vein, languages across Asia represent a multitude of different linguistic families — contrast this with how most European languages ultimately descend from one common ancestor. The only reason I have grouped all these languages together under ‘Asia’ despite often tenuous linguistic and cultural ties is that I am structuring these articles by geographical continent. There are definitely much more culturally and historically appropriate groupings I could have used, but doing it purely geographically means I can be sure most regions are covered.
This article will include languages of the Caucasus and Turkey, for reasons explained in the European post. Russia has already been covered, despite most of its landmass lying in Asia. Because of the sheer amount of languages spoken in Asia, I will ultimately only she able to cover only a minority of them, but I hope I can hit most of the more widely-spoken ones.
Other usual disclaimers: Firstly, I don’t speak any of these languages and I can’t read most of the scripts. This is a guide designed for people in the same position to allow them to identify (but not read) the text they are seeing. The Google — or otherwise — translated sample text used is likely to be translated inaccurately, but this doesn’t affect the purpose of the article. The idea is to give a stereotyped idea of what a given language looks like at a glance. Secondly, I am not a linguist; feel free to fact-check me against someone who is.
An overview
As mentioned, the continent of Asia is extremely linguistically diverse and I will not be able to delve into the origins or proto-language of each family in this article, but I can give a broad overview. The same proto-Indo-European language discussed here, which originated sometime between 4500 and 2500BC and gave rise to most European languages, also spread south-eastwards into Asia, and there split into the Iranian and Indo-Aryan language families. As a result, there is a band of these languages running from Kurdish territories all the way through into northern India and Bangladesh.
Whereas Indo-Aryan languages are most prevalent in Northern India, Southern India is host to a variety of Dravidian languages. These include Tamil, Malayam and Telugu. These Dravidian languages may have been present throughout India before the arrival of the Indo-Aryans mentioned above pushed them further south, and indeed could have been the predominant language family spoken in the Indus Valley Civilisation. However, I don’t know enough about this topic to comment much more on it.
And yeah, the above two points do mean that English is ‘genetically’ related to Hindi, but Tamil is not.
There are many languages in the Caucasus, but there isn’t one single ‘Caucasian’ language family. Georgian is part of the Kartvelian (or South Caucasian) language family. Armenian is an Indo-European language and forms its own branch of that family tree. Azeri (spoken in Azerbaijan) is a Turkic language. What the West refers to as the Middle East is dominated by Semitic languages, especially varieties of Arabic. Semitic is a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. The Turkic languages run from Central Asia, which is where they probably originated, through Azerbaijan and into Turkey, which they reached via the Turkic migrations from the 500s-1000s AD.
The main Northeast Asian languages are the principal members of their own respective language families. Mongolian is a Mongolic language. Korean is a Koreanic language. Japanese is a Japonic language. No definitive genetic relationships between these languages have been found. There is a proposed ‘Altaic language family’, which would encompass the Turkic, Mongolic, Japonic and Koreanic languages, but most linguists no longer advocate for this.
The Sino-Tibetan language family has a Sinitic branch and a Tibeto-Burman branch. The Sinitic branch forms what we think of as the Chinese languages. Mandarin is the most widely-spoken of these languages, but others include Yue (which itself includes Cantonese), Min and Wu. The main components of the Tibeto-Burman branch are the Tibetan languages and Burmese.
Further into Southeast Asia there are again multiple different families. Thai and Lao are Kra-Dai languages. Vietnamese and Khmer (spoken in Cambodia) are Austroasiatic languages. Austronesian languages are hypothesised to have originated in what is now Taiwan, and were spread southwards in the ‘Austronesian Expansion’. Austronesian languages now include Malay, Javanese and Tagalog, as well as countless others. They are spoken across Malaysia, Indonesia, The Philippines, island nations of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, and, as a result of some particularly impressive seafaring, Madagascar.
Below is an extremely crude schematic of the principal linguistic groups Asian languages are divided into. Because I am not a human Wikipedia, it misses off many languages, and a lot of nuance is lost with regard to the branches of the main families (to give one example, Turkic languages can be divided into five broad sub-groupings, with even more sub-groupings within them). There is also ongoing debate, I hear, about how exactly to categorise the Semitic languages. But you get the rough idea, I hope:
Here is a map of Asia I (quite painstakingly, actually) coloured in showcasing its main language families:
There are some technical inconsistencies with this map, but again it is only designed to give a generic overview. Whereas in Europe it was usually straightforward to tie a specific language to a specific country, the situation across many Asian countries is very different. There is often not an overwhelming majority language for a given country, especially when national borders are drawn through the middle of ethnolinguistic groups. This means that when colouring in (I am six years old), approximations have to be used based on either the plurality/relative majority language, or on the most common overall language family. The only countries within which I have displayed two language families are India and Sri Lanka, because the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian areas within each country are both proportionally big and very well-demarcated. It’s worth bearing in mind you can easily find more granular maps online, which will quite rightly show for example the Iranian (Kurdish) areas in Iraq or the Turkic (Uyghur) areas in China.
I could have grouped all the Indo-European language branches (Armenian, Iranian, Indo-Aryan) together under one colour, but Indo-European is a massive, disparate family, and stylistically I wanted to highlight how this group spread down from Europe into Asia, hence the fading shades of red.
Now let’s move on to the purpose of the article, actually identifying the languages. When it comes to languages which do not use the Latin alphabet, as a lot of non-European languages don’t, identifying them is often an exercise in identifying a script, rather than the language itself. Where multiple languages use the same script, I will try and give tips on how to distinguish them (some scripts are versions of others with extra characters or diacritics added). I will also make it clear when a single language is commonly written in several different scripts.
Unfortunately, when taking these two situations into account, things can very quickly become complicated. Breaking down the less immediately distinguishable differences between every single variant of the same script in order to identify every language is a bit beyond the scope of this article, and my IQ. Because this post is quite broad and looks at a lot of different languages, I’ve had to be strategically lazy sometimes and not go into detail about things I could have done. There are very good resources elsewhere which go deeper into particular aspects. For example, this page looks much more closely at the differences between Arabic, Persian and Kurdish specifically. And there is a nice diagram here showing all the characters found in or unique to Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto and Sindhi.
Scripts are very interesting and I might do a separate article on them. They did not evolve and spread in the same way as the languages they represent, hence languages in the same family don’t necessarily use closely-related scripts, and closely-related scripts aren’t always used by languages in the same family. I’ll still organise this section by language family rather than script family, because ultimately this article is about languages.
The Indo-European languages
Hindi: भाषा मनुष्य द्वारा उपयोग की जाने वाली संचार की एक संरचित प्रणाली है, जिसमें भाषण, इशारे और लेखन शामिल हैं। अधिकांश भाषाओं में मूल ध्वनि या हावभाव और उसके अर्थ को अंकित करने के लिए ग्लिफ़ से बनी एक लेखन प्रणाली होती है।. An Indo-Aryan language, spoken mainly in Northern India, and an official language of India alongside English. Hindi is written in the Devanagari script. This script is often what comes to mind when westerners think of stereotypical ‘Indian writing’. It features a reasonably consistent line running across the top, with short vertical lines running downwards. Numerous other languages, mainly Indo-Aryan ones, use this script, but they are much less widely spoken than Hindi. Hindi is actually one register (variety/style) of the Hindustani language, the other register being Urdu, which is spoken in Pakistan.
Urdu: Urdu is the register of Hindustani spoken in Pakistan, where it is the national language. Whereas Hindi draws influence from Sanskrit, Urdu is ‘Persianised’. It is written in the Perso-Arabic script, which is a version of the Arabic script with a few added letters. Urdu tends to use the nastaliq style of this script, which appears more curved and diagonal than the naskh style that Arabic is usually written in.
In Iran and Afghanistan, Persian also uses the Perso-Arabic script, and like Urdu it may use the nastaliq hand. Your best bet to quickly distinguish Urdu from Persian is to look for the presence of the diacritic ط above certain words. You can see this in the text above, but it might not always be there. And unfortunately, several other languages written in the Perso-Arabic script also use this diacritic, including Punjabi.
In digital media, Urdu will likely be written in the naskh hand, because its straight lines and angularity makes it better suited for screens. In which case, it looks like this: زبان مواصلات کا ایک منظم نظام ہے جسے انسان استعمال کرتے ہیں، بشمول تقریر، اشاروں اور تحریر۔ زیادہ تر زبانوں میں اصل آواز یا اشارہ اور اس کے معنی لکھنے کے لیے ایک تحریری نظام ہوتا ہے جو کہ گلائف پر مشتمل ہوتا ہے۔. If it is written like this, it becomes harder to distinguish from Arabic, but again you can look for the ط diacritic.
So for Urdu, we have an Indo-Aryan language using a script (in multiple styles of calligraphy) derived from one used by Arabic, a Semitic language, and that same script is also used by several other languages, including Iranian ones. I did tell you it got complicated.
Punjabi: ਭਾਸ਼ਾ ਮਨੁੱਖ ਦੁਆਰਾ ਵਰਤੀ ਜਾਂਦੀ ਸੰਚਾਰ ਦੀ ਇੱਕ ਢਾਂਚਾਗਤ ਪ੍ਰਣਾਲੀ ਹੈ, ਜਿਸ ਵਿੱਚ ਬੋਲਣ, ਇਸ਼ਾਰੇ ਅਤੇ ਲਿਖਤ ਸ਼ਾਮਲ ਹਨ। ਜ਼ਿਆਦਾਤਰ ਭਾਸ਼ਾਵਾਂ ਵਿੱਚ ਮੂਲ ਧੁਨੀ ਜਾਂ ਸੰਕੇਤ ਅਤੇ ਇਸਦੇ ਅਰਥਾਂ ਨੂੰ ਲਿਖਣ ਲਈ ਗਲਾਈਫਸ ਦੀ ਬਣੀ ਇੱਕ ਲਿਖਤ ਪ੍ਰਣਾਲੀ ਹੁੰਦੀ ਹੈ।. Punjabi is another Indo-Aryan language shared by both India and Pakistan. It is spoken in Punjab, a region spanning Northwestern India and Eastern Pakistan. In India, it is written in the Gurmukhi script seen above. Like Devanagari it has a horizontal line. It looks different in a way which is hard to articulate, but I think the most obvious distinguishing factor is the presence of separate curved shapes above and below the main text body. For example, ਉ and ਕੂ are both characters in their own right. Diacritics used above characters include ੱ and ੰ . These shapes are not seen in Devanagari, thus allowing you to distinguish Punjabi from Hindi.
In Pakistan, Punjabi is written in a version of the Perso-Arabic script, in the nastaliq style, and uses the ط diacritic, so it will be difficult to distinguish from Urdu.
Gujurati: ભાષા એ વાણી, હાવભાવ અને લેખન સહિત મનુષ્યો દ્વારા ઉપયોગમાં લેવાતી સંચારની સંરચિત પ્રણાલી છે. મોટાભાગની ભાષાઓમાં મૂળ ધ્વનિ અથવા હાવભાવ અને તેનો અર્થ લખવા માટે ગ્લિફથી બનેલી લેખન પ્રણાલી હોય છે. Indo-Aryan language spoken in Gujarat, a state in Western India. It is written in Gujarati script, which has vertical stick-like characters with no line running across the top.
Nepali: भाषा भनेको बोली, इशारा र लेखन सहित मानव द्वारा प्रयोग गरिने संचार को एक संरचित प्रणाली हो। धेरैजसो भाषाहरूमा मूल ध्वनि वा इशारा र यसको अर्थ लेख्नको लागि ग्लिफहरूबाट बनेको लेखन प्रणाली हुन्छ।. An Indo-Aryan language which is the official language of Nepal, and like Hindi is written in the Devanagari script. The way to tell it apart from Hindi is that Nepali does not make use of the nuqta diactric, which is a dot below a character. Nepali will only have dots on top of its text, while Hindi will have dots above and below.
Bengali: একটি ভাষা মানুষের দ্বারা ব্যবহৃত যোগাযোগের একটি কাঠামোগত ব্যবস্থা, যার মধ্যে বক্তৃতা, অঙ্গভঙ্গি এবং লেখা রয়েছে। বেশিরভাগ ভাষায় মূল শব্দ বা অঙ্গভঙ্গি এবং এর অর্থ খোদাই করার জন্য গ্লিফের সমন্বয়ে একটি লেখার ব্যবস্থা রয়েছে।. Indo-Aryan and spoken in Bangladesh. Triangles pointing left.
Sinhala: භාෂාවක් යනු කථනය, අභිනයන් සහ ලිවීම ඇතුළුව මිනිසුන් විසින් භාවිතා කරන ව්යුහගත සන්නිවේදන පද්ධතියකි. බොහෝ භාෂා වල මුල් ශබ්දය හෝ අභිනය සහ එහි අර්ථය සටහන් කිරීම සඳහා ග්ලයිෆ් වලින් සමන්විත ලේඛන පද්ධතියක් ඇත. Sinhala is one of the official languages of Sri Lanka, the other one being Tamil (a Dravidian language). Generally, Sinhala is spoken in the south and centre of the island, and Tamil is spoken in the north. While the Sinhala language is genetically related to Northern Indian ones as it is Indo-Aryan, its script is more closely related to the ones used by Southern Indian or Dravidian languages. As a result, it appears more loopy and less angular. Sinhala looks very spiral-y to me. There are also a few characters with what looks like the letter ‘p’ attached, like ක්, ෆ්, and ල්.
Persian: Persian, also known natively as Farsi, is an Iranian language and is the official language of Iran. It is also the lingua franca of Afghanistan (where it is known as Dari), and an official language of Tajikistan (where it is known as Tajik). As discussed, Persian (in Iran and Afghanistan) uses the Perso-Arabic script and may be written in the nastaliq hand. Again, to distinguish this from Urdu you’d look for a lack of ‘ط’ diacritics in Persian. Below is a picture:
If written in the naskh hand then Persian will look like this: زبان یک سیستم ارتباطی ساختاریافته است که توسط انسان استفاده می شود، شامل گفتار، حرکات و نوشتار. بیشتر زبانها دارای سیستم نوشتاری هستند که از حروفی برای حک کردن صدا یا اشاره اصلی و معنای آن تشکیل شده است. When written like this, it looks very similar to Arabic, but there are four additional letters in Persian not present in Arabic. These are پ ,چ ,ژ and گ.
In Tajikistan, it is written in Cyrillic script and appears as Забон як системаи сохтории муоширатест, ки аз ҷониби одамон истифода мешавад, аз ҷумла сухан, имову ишора ва навиштан. Аксари забонҳо системаи навиштро доранд, ки аз глифҳо иборатанд, то садо ё имову ишораи аслӣ ва маънои онро сабт кунанд. There are a few Tajik letters that do not appear in the Cyrillic Slavic languages (e.g. Russian, Serbian), namely қ, ҳ and ҷ. Basically, Tajik tends to contain more letters with descenders (the bit pointing downwards at the bottom right) than the Slavic languages do. However, descenders are also more common in Cyrillic Turkic languages. To distinguish Tajik from these, look for the suffix -ҳо which is often used to denote plurals in Tajik.
Pashto: ژبه د اړیکو یو منظم سیسټم دی چې د انسانانو لخوا کارول کیږي، په شمول د وینا، اشارو او لیکلو. ډیری ژبې د لیکلو سیسټم لري چې د ګلیفونو څخه جوړ شوی ترڅو اصلي غږ یا اشاره او د هغې معنی لیکي. Pashto is an Iranian language and an official language of Afghanistan, the other being Dari. It is also spoken in Pakistan, especially along the western border region with Afghanistan. It’s written in the Perso-Arabic script, and is usually written in the naskh hand. It has no ‘ط’ diacritics which sets it apart from Urdu, but will be quite hard for an English speaker to distinguish it visually from Arabic or naskh Persian, unless you memorise the thirteen characters that are unique to Pashto.
Kurdish: Kurdish is spoken in Kurdistan, which is a region sitting around the junction of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. ‘Kurdish’ is actually more of a dialect continuum of Iranian languages, containing several distinct languages which are not necessarily mutually intelligible. However, they are closely related. The principal variants are Kurmanji (Northern), Sorani (Central) and Xwarîn (Southern). The Kurdish languages make use of two scripts. Kurmanji uses a Latin script, and Sorani and Xwarîn use a variant of the Perso-Arabic script (written in the naskh hand).
Kurmanji looks like this: Ziman sîstemeke birêkûpêk a danûstendinê ye ku ji aliyê mirovan ve tê bikaranîn, di nav de axaftin, tevger û nivîsandin. Di piraniya zimanan de pergalek nivîsandinê heye ku ji glyphan pêk tê ku deng an jest û wateya wê ya orîjînal binivîsîne.
And Sorani looks like this: زمان بریتییە لە سیستەمێکی ستراکتۆری پەیوەندیکردن کە مرۆڤ بەکاری دەهێنێت، لەوانە قسەکردن، ئاماژە و نووسین. زۆربەی زمانەکان سیستەمێکی نووسینیان هەیە کە لە گلیف پێکهاتووە بۆ نووسینەوەی دەنگی ڕەسەن یان ئاماژە و ماناکەی.
Kurmanji has a lot of ◌̂. Sorani can be distinguished from other Perso-Arabic scripts because it uses ◌̌. Basically if you see arrows, think Kurdish.
Armenian: Լեզուն մարդկանց կողմից օգտագործվող հաղորդակցման կառուցվածքային համակարգ է, ներառյալ խոսքը, ժեստերը և գրությունը: Լեզուների մեծամասնությունն ունի գրային համակարգ, որը կազմված է հոլովներից՝ բնօրինակ ձայնը կամ ժեստը և դրա նշանակությունը գրելու համար:. Armenian is Indo-European but from the ‘European’ side of the family, i.e. not Indo-Aryan or Iranian. Uses the Armenian script. Armenian has a lot of characters that look like ‘m’, upside down ‘m’, ’n’ or ‘u’.
The Dravidian languages
Telugu: భాష అనేది ప్రసంగం, సంజ్ఞలు మరియు రచనలతో సహా మానవులు ఉపయోగించే నిర్మాణాత్మక కమ్యూనికేషన్ వ్యవస్థ. చాలా భాషలు అసలు ధ్వని లేదా సంజ్ఞ మరియు దాని అర్థాన్ని వ్రాయడానికి గ్లిఫ్లతో కూడిన వ్రాత వ్యవస్థను కలిగి ఉంటాయి. Telugu is spoken in the Southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. It is written in the Telugu script. It looks like it has a lot of ticks/checkmarks above its characters.
Kannada: ಭಾಷೆಯು ಮಾತು, ಸನ್ನೆಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಬರವಣಿಗೆ ಸೇರಿದಂತೆ ಮಾನವರು ಬಳಸುವ ಸಂವಹನದ ರಚನಾತ್ಮಕ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯಾಗಿದೆ. ಹೆಚ್ಚಿನ ಭಾಷೆಗಳು ಮೂಲ ಧ್ವನಿ ಅಥವಾ ಗೆಸ್ಚರ್ ಮತ್ತು ಅದರ ಅರ್ಥವನ್ನು ಕೆತ್ತಲು ಗ್ಲಿಫ್ಗಳಿಂದ ಸಂಯೋಜಿಸಲ್ಪಟ್ಟ ಬರವಣಿಗೆ ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಯನ್ನು ಹೊಂದಿವೆ. Kannada is the official language of the Southern Indian state of Karnataka, and is written in the Kannada script. Instead of ticks, its letters have Elvis hair.
Malayalam: സംസാരം, ആംഗ്യങ്ങൾ, എഴുത്ത് എന്നിവ ഉൾപ്പെടെ മനുഷ്യർ ഉപയോഗിക്കുന്ന ഒരു ഘടനാപരമായ ആശയവിനിമയ സംവിധാനമാണ് ഭാഷ. ഒറിജിനൽ ശബ്ദമോ ആംഗ്യമോ അതിന്റെ അർത്ഥമോ ആലേഖനം ചെയ്യുന്നതിനായി മിക്ക ഭാഷകളിലും ഗ്ലിഫുകൾ അടങ്ങിയ ഒരു എഴുത്ത് സംവിധാനമുണ്ട്. Malayalam is the official language of Kerala, a state in the south of India. The Malayalam script has a lot of curvy ‘m’- and ‘w’-like shapes.
Tamil: ஒரு மொழி என்பது பேச்சு, சைகைகள் மற்றும் எழுத்து உள்ளிட்ட மனிதர்களால் பயன்படுத்தப்படும் ஒரு கட்டமைக்கப்பட்ட தகவல்தொடர்பு அமைப்பு. பெரும்பாலான மொழிகளில் அசல் ஒலி அல்லது சைகை மற்றும் அதன் அர்த்தத்தை பொறிக்க கிளிஃப்கள் கொண்ட எழுத்து முறை உள்ளது. Tamil is the Dravidian language spoken in Sri Lanka, alongside its Indo-Aryan counterpart Sinhala. It’s also spoken in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It does have the characteristic curves of other Dravidian languages, but combines them with angular ‘L’, ‘T’ and ‘U’ shapes.
The Kartvelian languages
Georgian: ენა არის კომუნიკაციის სტრუქტურირებული სისტემა, რომელსაც იყენებენ ადამიანები, მათ შორის მეტყველება, ჟესტები და წერა. ენების უმეტესობას აქვს წერილობითი სისტემა, რომელიც შედგება გლიფებისგან ორიგინალური ბგერის ან ჟესტის და მისი მნიშვნელობის აღწერისთვის. Written in the Mkhedruli script nowadays, which is the most modern of the various Georgian scripts. I think Georgian looks like a curvy version of Armenian, which might make sense because the original Georgian and Armenian scripts were developed around the same time, both inspired by the Greek script, and both possibly invented by the same guy.
The Semitic languages
Arabic: اللغة هي نظام اتصال منظم يستخدمه البشر بما في ذلك إيماءات الكلام والكتابة ، وتحتوي معظم اللغات على نظام كتابة يتكون من الحروف الرسومية لتدوين الصوت الأصلي أو الإيماءة ومعناها. The official language of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman and Yemen. Written in the Arabic script, and most often in the angular naskh hand.
Hebrew: שפה היא מערכת מובנית של תקשורת המשמשת בני אדם, כולל דיבור, מחוות וכתיבה. לרוב השפות יש מערכת כתיבה המורכבת מגליפים כדי לרשום את הצליל או המחווה המקוריים ומשמעותם. The official language of Israel, and written in the Hebrew script. Characteristically blocky, so much so that it is actually known as the ‘square’ or ‘block’ script.
The Turkic languages
Turkish: Dil, konuşma, jestler ve yazı dahil olmak üzere insanlar tarafından kullanılan yapılandırılmış bir iletişim sistemidir. Çoğu dil, orijinal sesi veya hareketi ve anlamını yazmak için gliflerden oluşan bir yazı sistemine sahiptir. Written in the Latin script. Turkish has an interesting mix of umlauts (ö, ü), cedillas (ç, ş), breves (ğ) and an ‘i’ without a dot (ı).
Azerbaijani: Dil nitq, jest və yazı da daxil olmaqla insanlar tərəfindən istifadə edilən strukturlaşdırılmış ünsiyyət sistemidir. Əksər dillərdə orijinal səs və ya jesti və onun mənasını yazmaq üçün qliflərdən ibarət yazı sistemi var. Azerbaijani is from the same Turkic subgroup as Turkish, so the languages are very similar. It technically uses three scripts — Latin in Azerbaijan, Cyrillic in Dagestan, and Perso-Arabic in Iran (fun fact: there are more ethnic Azeris in Iran than there are in Azerbaijan itself). Here we’ll just look at the Azerbaijani Latin script because you’re probably bored of Perso-Arabic by now. Azerbaijani is the one of the very few languages, and the only Turkic language, to use Ә, so I’d look for that.
Turkmen: Dil, adamlar tarapyndan ulanylýan, söz, yşarat we ýazuw ýaly gurluşly aragatnaşyk ulgamydyr. Dilleriň köpüsinde asyl sesi ýa-da jesti we manysyny ýazmak üçin gliflerden düzülen ýazuw ulgamy bar. Turkmen is spoken in Turkmenistan and is from the same Turkic subgroup as Turkish and Azerbaijani. Turkmen is written in the Latin script in Turkmenistan but again may use Cyrillic or Perso-Arabic in other regions. Where Turkish and Azerbaijani use a ‘y’, Turkmen may use a ý instead. When taken together with the Turkic umlauts, this gives the text a vaguely Hungarian look. Turkmen is also unusual in that it uses ň and ž like some European alphabets.
Kazakh: Тіл — бұл адамдар қолданатын құрылымдық қарым-қатынас жүйесі, оның ішінде сөйлеу, ым-ишара және жазу. Көптеген тілдерде бастапқы дыбысты немесе қимылды және оның мағынасын жазу үшін глифтерден тұратын жазу жүйесі бар. In Kazakhstan, Kazakh is written in Cyrillic. There are a few Cyrillic characters used mainly in Turkic languages (as opposed to Slavic ones); these include ғ, қ, ң, ө (generally the equivalent of ö), ү (generally the equivalent of ü), and һ. To be honest though, a more efficient technique for discerning the language family of Cyrillic texts is simply to learn to read Cyrillic — which genuinely isn’t that hard with a bit of practice — and then see if your mentally transliterated words sound Turkic or not.
However after a bit of digging, I’ve realised the one unique letter you should look out for in Kazakh Cyrillic is ұ (also known as the Kazakh Short U).
Kyrgyz: Тил — бул адамдар колдонгон коммуникациянын структураланган системасы, анын ичинде сүйлөө, ишараттар жана жазуу. Көпчүлүк тилдерде түпнуска үн же жаңсоо жана анын маанисин жазуу үчүн глифтерден турган жазуу системасы бар. Written in Cyrillic in Kyrgyzstan. The Kyrgyz language is one of the relatively few languages where vowel length can alter word meaning (other examples include Finnish and Estonian). Just like in Finnish and Estonian, long vowels are just shown by vowels written twice, e.g. уу, оо, өө, үү, аа. You can see some of these in text above. Unfortunately, Mongolian, which may also be written in Cyrillic, has the same phenomenon. The Kyrgyz and Mongolian Cyrillic alphabets are almost identical as well, with the exception of ң, which is only used in Kyrgyz. Therefore ң + double vowels = Kyrgyz.
Uzbek: Til — bu odamlar tomonidan ishlatiladigan, nutq, imo-ishora va yozishni oʻz ichiga olgan tuzilgan aloqa tizimi. Koʻpgina tillarda asl tovush yoki imo-ishora va uning ma’nosini yozish uchun gliflardan tashkil topgan yozuv tizimi mavjud. Uzbekistan has mostly transitioned from Cyrillic to the Latin script now. It is distinct from the other Latin Turkic languages because it doesn’t make use of umlauts, breves or cedillas. It uses the characters oʻ and gʻ, as well as the occasional apostrophe (to represent sounds), so if you see something a bit Turkish-looking with ’ or ʻ throughout then it’s probably Uzbek.
The Mongolic languages
Mongolian: Mongolian is usually written in Cyrillic in Mongolia, but in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, it’s written in the traditional Mongolian script.
In Cyrillic it looks like this: Хэл гэдэг нь яриа, дохио зангаа, бичих зэрэг хүмүүсийн ашигладаг харилцааны бүтэцтэй систем юм. Ихэнх хэлүүд анхны дуу авиа, дохио зангаа, түүний утгыг бичихийн тулд глифээс бүрдсэн бичгийн системтэй байдаг. Like Kyrgyz, it features double vowels. It has no special Cyrillic letters that aren’t found in other languages.
Traditional Mongolian script is written vertically and read in columns from top to bottom, left to right across the page:
I think Mongolian script looks a bit like naskh Arabic script turned sideways. Vertical scripts are relatively rare nowadays; East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean were traditionally written vertically but are now much more likely to be seen written horizontally.
The Koreanic languages
Korean: 언어는 말, 몸짓 및 쓰기를 포함하여 인간이 사용하는 구조화된 의사 소통 시스템입니다. 대부분의 언어에는 원래 소리나 몸짓과 그 의미를 새기기 위해 상형 문자로 구성된 쓰기 시스템이 있습니다. Korean is the official language of North and South Korea. The way to tell the Korean script apart from Chinese characters, which it is commonly confused with, is that Korean features circles and ovals.
The Japonic languages
Japanese: 言語は、人間が使用する、音声、ジェスチャー、書き込みなどの構造化されたコミュニケーション システムです。ほとんどの言語には、元の音やジェスチャーとその意味を刻むためのグリフで構成される書記体系があります。. Japanese uses two main sets of characters; kanji (borrowed Chinese characters) and kana. Kanji appear more complicated, as they represent entire words or parts of words. Kana tend to be simpler, and represent syllables. Most Japanese text will contain a mixture of both kanji and kana, as does the example above.
The Sino-Tibetan languages
Chinese: Although I mentioned how ‘Chinese’ is actually a group of languages, as far as I know the languages will be identical when written. This is because, as above, Chinese characters represent entire words or parts of words, rather than the sounds needed to create the words. Therefore, the characters will be the same, but may be spoken out loud differently between, say, Mandarin and Yue. There may be nuances to this that I am missing though, so don’t quote me on it.
Chinese may be written with either simplified or traditional Chinese characters. Simplified characters are used in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia, and look like this: 语言是人类使用的结构化交流系统，包括语音、手势和书写。大多数语言都有一个由字形组成的书写系统，用于记录原始声音或手势及其含义。
Traditional characters are used in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau, and look like this: 語言是人類使用的結構化交流系統，包括語音、手勢和書寫。大多數語言都有一個由字形組成的書寫系統，用於記錄原始聲音或手勢及其含義。So essentially the same, for all intents and purposes. Sorry.
Burmese: ဘာသာစကားဆိုသည်မှာ အပြောအဆို၊ လက်ဟန်ခြေဟန်နှင့် အရေးအသား အပါအဝင် လူတို့အသုံးပြုသော ဖွဲ့စည်းတည်ဆောက်ထားသော ဆက်သွယ်ရေးစနစ်တစ်ခုဖြစ်သည်။ ဘာသာစကားအများစုတွင် မူရင်းအသံ သို့မဟုတ် အမူအရာနှင့် ၎င်း၏အဓိပ္ပာယ်ကို ရေးထိုးရန် ဂလစ်ဖ်များဖြင့် ဖွဲ့စည်းထားသော စာရေးစနစ်တစ်ခုရှိသည်။. Burmese is spoken in Myanmar. The Burmese script is most closely related to South Indian scripts so it shares their curvy appearance. Burmese is quite distinctive because it is made up of a series of uniform circles.
Tibetic languages: འདི་བཟུམ་གྱི་མནོ་ལུགས་འདི་ བཅུད་དོན་དང་ ཡོངས་ཁྱབ་ དེ་ལས་ སྐད་ཡིག་ཚུ་གི་དབྱེ་བ་ཚུ་གི་དོན་དང་འཁྲིལ་ཏེ་ ཚིག་ཡིག་ཚུ་གི་ནང་ ཚིག་ཡིག་ཚུ་དང་འཁྲིལ་ཏེ་སྟོན་འབདཝ་ཨིན། ཚིག་ཡིག་གི་ནང་དོན་ཚུ་ ཚིག་ཡིག་ཚུ་ ནང་འདྲེན་འབད་དགོཔ་ཨིན།. I’ve written ‘Tibetic languages’ here rather than naming a specific one, which is lazy but there are around fifty Tibetic languages, most of which are written using the script above, the Tibetan script. For someone who’s into lowbrow content like my articles, I think all you probably want to recognise is that you’re looking at a Tibetic language, so I won’t try and tell you how to distinguish them. One example of a Tibetic language is Dzongkha, which is the official language of Bhutan. The script is very cool, probably my favourite one. I think it looks like blades. Which are cool.
The Kra-Dai languages
Thai: ภาษาเป็นระบบโครงสร้างการสื่อสารที่มนุษย์ใช้ รวมทั้งการพูด ท่าทาง และการเขียน ภาษาส่วนใหญ่มีระบบการเขียนที่ประกอบด้วยสัญลักษณ์เพื่อจารึกเสียงหรือท่าทางดั้งเดิมและความหมาย. Thai is written in the Thai script. Its characters often contain a straight line and often have loops on the end.
Lao: ພາສາແມ່ນລະບົບການສື່ສານທີ່ມີໂຄງສ້າງທີ່ໃຊ້ໂດຍມະນຸດ, ລວມທັງການປາກເວົ້າ, ທ່າທາງ ແລະການຂຽນ. ພາສາສ່ວນໃຫຍ່ມີລະບົບການຂຽນທີ່ປະກອບດ້ວຍການຈາລຶກສຽງຕົ້ນສະບັບ ຫຼືທ່າທາງ ແລະຄວາມຫມາຍຂອງມັນ. Lao is the official language of Laos and is written in the Lao script. It looks similar to Thai in that there are loops on the end of each character, but where Thai has a straight component to its characters, Lao’s are curved.
The Austroasiatic languages
Vietnamese: Ngôn ngữ là một hệ thống giao tiếp có cấu trúc được sử dụng bởi con người, bao gồm lời nói, cử chỉ và chữ viết. Hầu hết các ngôn ngữ đều có một hệ thống chữ viết bao gồm các nét tượng hình để khắc ghi âm thanh hoặc cử chỉ gốc và ý nghĩa của nó. Unusually for a mainland Southeast Asian language, Vietnamese is written in the Latin script. It’s extremely recognisable because of its overindulgent use of diacritics. It has four diacritics built into some letters in the script, then five more tone-related diacritics (like many East Asian languages, Vietnamese is a tonal language). These diacritics can combine; a letter like ê can acquire another diacritic to show its tone, and become ế, or ệ. Common letter sequences in Vietnamese are uo, ao, ng and nh.
Khmer: ភាសាគឺជាប្រព័ន្ធទំនាក់ទំនងដែលប្រើដោយមនុស្ស រួមទាំងការនិយាយ កាយវិការ និងការសរសេរ។ ភាសាភាគច្រើនមានប្រព័ន្ធសរសេរដែលផ្សំឡើងដោយ glyphs ដើម្បីចារឹកសំឡេងដើម ឬកាយវិការ និងអត្ថន័យរបស់វា។. Khmer is the official language of Cambodia. The Khmer script is fairly closely related to those of Thai and Lao (but the language isn’t). Khmer is distinctive because its letters have hooks on the end.
The Austronesian languages
Malay: Bahasa ialah sistem komunikasi tersusun yang digunakan oleh manusia, termasuk pertuturan, gerak isyarat dan tulisan. Kebanyakan bahasa mempunyai sistem tulisan yang terdiri daripada glif untuk menulis bunyi atau gerak isyarat asal dan maknanya. Malay is spoken in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei. It is most often written in Latin script and has the same letters as English; i.e. no diacritics. A lot of words end in -an or -ang. Due to Malaysia’s British colonial history, there are a number of loanwords from English which have taken on a different spelling, e.g. ‘basikal’ meaning ‘bicycle’, or ‘stesen’ meaning ‘station’. This can be contrasted with Indonesian, which takes more loanwords from Dutch. This distinction carries over into numbers too, with Malay using decimal points (0.01) and Indonesian using the more continental decimal comma (0,01).
Before the Romanisation of Malay, it was written in a version of the Arabic script called Jawi, which looks like this: بهاس اياله سيستم کومونيکاسي ترسوسون يڠ دݢوناکن اوليه ماءنسي، ترماسوق ڤرتوتورن، ݢرق اشارت دان توليسن. کباڽقن بهاس ممڤوڽاءي سيستم توليسن يڠ ترديري درڤد اونتوق منوليس بوڽي اتاو ݢرق اشارت اصل دان معناڽ. Jawi contains a few characters not found in Arabic, but I don’t think any of them are distinctive enough to learn. Jawi persists in some contexts in Malaysia, e.g. on street signs together with the Latin script, but is used more frequently in Brunei, where it is an official script.
Indonesian does not make use of Jawi, so if you see something which looks like Malay or Indonesian, in conjunction with an Arabic script, then it’s likely to be Malay.
Indonesian: Bahasa adalah sistem komunikasi terstruktur yang digunakan oleh manusia, termasuk ucapan, gerak tubuh, dan tulisan. Sebagian besar bahasa memiliki sistem penulisan yang terdiri dari mesin terbang untuk menuliskan suara atau gerakan asli dan artinya. Indonesian is the variety of Malay spoken in Indonesia, and acts as the official ‘unifying’ language of the country. There are many other minority languages spoken within Indonesia, including Javanese and Sundanese. Indonesians tend to regard the Indonesian language as its own language, rather than simply a form of Malay. Visually it appears very similar to Malay, and by and large they are mutually intelligible, however there are differences not only in loanwords and vocabulary, but also grammar. I don’t think there is a reliable way to tell Malay and Indonesian apart visually at a glance, unless you are lucky enough to see an obvious English or Dutch loanword in the text, or Jawi next to it.
Filipino: Ang wika ay isang nakabalangkas na sistema ng komunikasyon na ginagamit ng mga tao, kabilang ang pananalita, kilos at pagsulat. Karamihan sa mga wika ay may sistema ng pagsulat na binubuo ng mga glyph upang isulat ang orihinal na tunog o kilos at ang kahulugan nito. Filipino is a variety of Tagalog which serves as one of the official languages of the Philippines, along with English. Again, it appears visually similar to Malay and Indonesian (a lot of -an and -ang) but is less closely related, and is not mutually intelligible with them. Up to a third of Filipino’s vocabulary derives from Spanish, e.g. the greeting “Kumusta” comes from “cómo estás”. The letter ñ is present in the Filipino alphabet, but is not seen often. Other diacritics, e.g. acute and grave accents, can be added to Filipino vowels, but these are optional and may not be present.
Javanese: ꦧꦄꦱꦄ ꦩꦶꦤꦄꦤꦒꦏꦄ ꦱꦶꦱꦠꦼꦩ ꦏꦺꦴꦩꦸꦤꦶꦏꦄꦱꦶ ꦠꦼꦫꦱꦠꦫꦸꦏꦠꦸꦫ ꦱꦶꦤꦒ ꦢꦶꦒꦸꦤꦄꦏꦄꦏꦼ ꦢꦼꦤꦶꦤꦒ ꦩꦄꦤꦸꦤꦒꦱꦄ, ꦏꦄꦭꦼꦧꦸ ꦮꦶꦕꦄꦫꦄ, ꦥꦄꦠꦫꦄꦥ ꦭꦄꦤ ꦠꦸꦭꦶꦱꦄꦤ. Uꦩꦸꦩꦼ ꦧꦄꦱꦄ ꦢꦸꦮꦼ ꦱꦶꦱꦠꦼꦩ ꦥꦄꦤꦸꦭꦶꦱꦄꦤ ꦱꦶꦤꦒ ꦏꦄꦱꦸꦱꦸꦤ ꦱꦄꦏꦄ ꦒꦭꦪꦥꦲꦱ ꦏꦄꦤꦒꦒꦺꦴ ꦤꦸꦭꦶꦱ ꦱꦮꦄꦫꦄ ꦸꦠꦄꦮꦄ ꦒꦼꦫꦄꦏꦄꦤ ꦄꦱꦭꦶ ꦭꦄꦤ ꦩꦄꦏꦤꦄꦤꦼ. Javanese is spoken on the island of Java in Indonesia, specifically the central and eastern parts. Nowadays it tends to be written in the Latin script, however I have shown the traditional Javanese script above because in the Latin script the language is not meaningfully distinguishable from other major Austronesian languages. The Javanese script looks like Thai without the loops on every letter. Javanese may also be written in a modified Arabic script known as Pegon (basically its equivalent of Jawi), but this is now usually reserved for religious texts.
Sundanese: While Javanese is spoken in the central and eastern parts of Java, Sundanese is spoken in the west. Just like Javanese, it is mainly written in the Latin script now, and Pegon is used in religious contexts. The traditional Sundanese script is also used sometimes. I’ll show this script because, again, the Latin transliteration will not stand out to English speakers when compared to Malay/Indonesian/Filipino/Javanese:
The repeating shape in the Sundanese script looks like a number 7.
Fin
Hope it was useful.
