Polish is spoken by about 43 million people, 36.5 million of whom live in Poland, where it is the official language. After the end of Word War II, following border readjustments, Poland became more linguistically and ethnically homogeneous; over 98% of the population spoke Polish. Another 2.5 million Polish speakers live in the USA; 1 million in Ukraine; about 100,000 or so each in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, Israel, and Canada; and lesser numbers in Australia and Romania.
Persian has been taught at Penn since 1949, and our program continues to engage students in the language and culture of the Persian-speaking world. The program offers courses at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels, as well as for heritage speakers. Based in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Persian Program works in collaboration with the university’s Middle East Center and the Penn Language Center.
Pashto is one of the national languages of Afghanistan (Dari Persian is the other), and it is the home language of Pashtuns living in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, as well as of those living in Baluchistan (Iran and Pakistan). Major Pashto-speaking cities include Afghanistan's Qandahar, Jalal Abad, and Kabul, as well as Peshawar in Pakistan. There are 8 million speakers of Pashto in Afghanistan (45% of the population) and almost 9 million in Pakistan (13% of the population). Pashto is one of the East Iranian group of languages.
Punjabi, the language of the land of five rivers, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by over 105 million people - mainly Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in both India and Pakistan. Punjabi is one of the most widely used languages of South Asian communities in the UK, USA, Canada and many other Asian and African countries. The Punjabi language has many different dialects, spoken in different sub-regions. In India, Punjabi is written with the Gurmukhl script, while in Pakistan it is written with the Persian script known as Shahmukhl.
Modern Greek (Greek: Νέα Ελληνικά or Νεοελληνική γλώσσα, "Neo-Hellenic", historically and colloquially, also known as Ρωμαίικα, "Romaic" or "Roman") refers to the varieties of the Greek language spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features of the language had been present centuries earlier - from the fourth to the fifteenth century AD.
Marathi is an Indo-European language spoken by the Marathi people. It is the offical language of Maharashtra, Goa and is one of the 23 offical languages of India. It is the 15th most spoken language in the world, and in 2011, there were 91 million speakers. Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India. Marathi has some of the oldest literature of all modern Indo-European, Indic languages, dating from about 1000 AD. The major dialects of Marathi are called Standard Marathi and Warhadi Marathi.
Malayalam is the language of Kerala, the southernmost state in India. Over 35 million people speak this language. Malayalam, one of the Dravidian languages, has its own alphabet and grammar. It originally developed from Tamil and uses many Tamil words. It has also adapted many words from Sanskrit, other Indian languages, and English.
Malagasy is the national language of Madagascar, along with French. Although the island nation of Madagascar is located just across the Mozambique Channel from the African continent, Malagasy belongs to the Austronesian family of languages. Anthropologists theorize that 2,000 years ago, the first humans to arrive in Madagascar were seafarers from Indonesia. Over the past two millennia, other African migrants and Arab traders settled in Madagascar to create the Malagasy people’s diverse and fascinating identity. Malagasy is a unique, yet thriving language.
Korean (한국어/조선말) is the official language of South Korea and North Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. Approximately 78 million people speak Korean worldwide. For over a millennium, Korean was written with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems like hyangchal, gugyeol, and idu.
Kannada is a Dravidian language spoken primarily in Karnataka State in South India, and it has a literature that dates from the ninth century. Kannada has a population of about 38 million speakers, and it is spoken not only in Karnataka, but, to some extent, in the neighboring states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra. The literacy rate in Kannada is estimated to be about 60%. Kannada is written with its own script, which is similar to the script used in Telugu. The script is also used for writing Tulu.
