Indonesian

Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), a form of Malay, is spoken in Indonesia. It is an Austronesian language, a language family that extends across the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The term “Indonesian” is more political than linguistic, as Indonesian Malay is extremely similar to the Malay spoken in Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei. It is also an important native language in the southern provinces of Thailand, in East Timor, and among the Malay people of Australia’s Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean.

Igbo

The term "Igbo" often denotes community or the inhabited world, as in the expression, "Igbo bia lere (world or whole community, come see!)!"  The Igbo language has dozens of geographical dialects and belongs to the Niger-Congo family / Benue-Congo group of languages. It is also the second most populous indigenous language of southern Nigeria.

Hungarian

Hungarian (Magyar) is an official language of Hungary, spoken by 10.5 million people (98% of the population). Substantial populations of speakers are also found in adjacent countries: Romania (2 million); the Czech and Slovak Republics (600,000); the former Yugoslavia (450,000); Ukraine (170,000); and Israel (150,000). A significant number of speakers live in the US (450,000) and smaller populations--under 20 thousand--live in Slovenia, Canada, and Austria.

Filipino

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).

Chichewa

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

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

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)

Introduction

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.

Cantonese

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.