Filipino is one of the major languages spoken in the Philippines, mostly by people from the Tagalog regions on the main island of Luzon. It is the lingua franca in Metro Manila, the capital region of the country. It also serves as a base for Filipino, one of the two official languages of the Philippines (along with English).
Penn Language Center offers courses in Mandarin Chinese for Specific Purposes. Additional Chinese courses at the University of Pennsylvania are organized by the Penn Chinese Language Program in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations.
Chewa, also known as Nyanja, is a language of the Bantu language family. The gender prefix chi- is used for languages, so the language is also known as Chichewa and Chinyanja.
Bengali (Bangla) is the essence and pride of all Bengal, no matter where its speakers reside or the number of years spent away from West Bengal (India) or Bangladesh, the two places where Bengali is a native language. While India has about 67 million Bengali speakers, its neighbor Bangladesh has approximately 100 million speakers. These figures do not indicate the entire population of Bengalis, as many speakers reside in various other countries. For instance, the UAE has about 70,000 Bengali speakers, and the US has a far greater number.
Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia, spoken by fourteen million native Amharas and by approximately eighteen million of the other ethnic groups in Ethiopia. Besides its national importance, it has also gained recognition in the US since 1985.
American Sign Language (ASL) is used by deaf communities throughout the United States and parts of Canada. It is a naturally formed, complex language that relies on manual and facial expressions. ASL, like other signed languages from around the world, uses expressive properties to produce language in three dimensions. The unique nature of signed language and of its development within deaf communities gives remarkable potential for insight into how human beings are equipped to access, form, and develop languages naturally.
The Cantonese language is also viewed as part of the cultural identity for the native speakers across large swathes of southern China, Hong Kong and Macau. Although Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin Chinese, the two languages are not mutually intelligible largely because of pronunciation and grammatical differences. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of the verb, sometimes differs between the two languages. The use of vocabulary in Cantonese also tends to have more historic roots.
