Asian Languages
We are excited to offer language services in over forty Asian languages. Take a look below to see our most requested language. Or get it touch and discuss our full language list with a language coordinator.
A Widely Diverse Continent
Asian languages are numerous and widely diverse, with over 2,300 languages currently being spoken, by the 4.3 billion people across the continent.
One of the reasons for the diversity in Asian languages is geography. Remote regions, caused by mountains, deserts, jungles and islands, allow languages to develop in isolation with little influence from other areas of the world. These isolated communities allow languages to thrive while communities in close contact with one another find one language dying out in favour of another.
Because of Asia’s geography it has developed the largest number of language families. Asia has the second largest number of individual languages, exceeded only by the continent of Africa.
South Asia
Home to at least 460 languages, the spoken languages of the region are mainly based on geography, while written script is divided by religious boundaries. Seven different language families can be found in the region, as well as a number of unclassified languages in the Himalayas. The most spoken languages in the region include Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Mrathi, Gujarati and Punjabi.
Southeast Asia
One of the most linguistically diverse regions, Southeast Asia houses languages from almost every language family in Asia. These include Burmese, Filipino, Khmer, Lao, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, Tetum, Thai, Vietnamese, Portuguese and Indonesian. Indonesian is one of the most widely spoken languages in Asia, spoken by 10% of Asia’s population, 240 million people.
Western Asia
In Western Asia the most widely spoken languages are Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, with each language having over 70 million speakers in the region. Following them, the next largest language groups are Kurdish, Hebrew, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Aramaic.
Asian Language Translation
Asia is a continent with many vastly different writing systems from Chinese characters to the Arabic alphabet. Some writing systems use an alphabet, while some use an abjad, where symbols only stand for consonants not vowels. In other writing systems, like abugidas and syllabary systems are more focused on expressing syllables. Some Asian languages have logogram writing systems, where an entire word is represented with a singular character.
To make matters more complicated a language may have multiple writing systems for expressing it, for example Hindi and Urdu. Additionally, one writing system may be used for multiple languages, such as Arabic script. This is one of the reasons we recommend always translating into your mother tongue, so that the complexity of the language is understood, and no nuances are lost.
East Asia
In East Asian languages such as Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, and Tibetan are spoken. Chinese the most spoken native language, not just in East Asia but throughout the world. This includes several variants of Chinese including Mandarin, which has 800 million speakers. Chinese includes more than a billion native speakers and is spoken by 51% of Asia’s total population.
North Asia
North Asia consists of the Russian regions of Ural, Siberia and the Russian Far East. In this region the only official language spoken in this is Russian. However, there are several unofficial languages spoken. These include Ainu, Turkic, Uralic, Yeniseian, Yukaghir and Mongolic.
Reach Larger Communities
The Asian continent is the most populous by far, containing more than half the world’s population. Because of this many businesses are seeking to expand into countries like China, Japan, and South Korea. To thrive and get the most out of these Asian markets, accurate and professional translations are needed. We can provide these for all marketing material as well as any other documents.
There are thousands of languages and many unique regional dialects in Asia. So, whether you are seeking a translation for an obscure language or trying to reach a larger Asian audience, we can help. Contact us today to find out more.