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.
