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Oriental Languages


There is a wide variety of languages spoken throughout Asia, comprising different language families and some unrelated isolates. Asian languages usually have a long tradition of writing, but not always.

The major families in terms of numbers are Indo-European in South Asia and Sino-Tibetan in East Asia. Several other families are regionally dominant.

Sino-Tibetan includes Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and numerous languages of the Tibetan Plateau, southern China, Burma, and North east India.

The Indo-European family is primarily represented by the Indo-Iranian branch. It includes both Indic languages (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Sinhalese and other languages spoken primarily in South Asia) and Iranian (Persian, Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi and other languages spoken primarily in Iran, Central Asia and parts of South Asia). In addition, other branches of Indo-European spoken in Asia include the Slavic branch, which includes Russian in Siberia; Greek around the Black Sea; and Armenian; as well as extinct languages such as Hittite of Anatolia and of (Chinese) Turkestan.


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