Essay on Asian Languages

Language and religion are the basic and vi­tal elements of culture that identify human groups. Languages tend to promote the transmission of ideas and the functioning of political, economic and religious sys­tems. They act as “cultural cement” that binds one generation with the next and one human group with the other. The dis­tributions of languages and religious affiliations are of particular interest to ge­ographers because they reveal the spatial interplay of political, economic and social forces that characterize human groups.

Unlike North America, which is es­sentially a unilingual English-speaking continent with substantial minorities of French and Spanish speakers and a largely vanished group of indigenous tongues, the continent of Asia exhibits linguistic diver­sity and complexity unmatched elsewhere except in the continent of Africa.

Accord­ing to linguistic historians, Asian languages (as well as those of Europe) originated somewhere in the present day east-central Europe and moved in two major streams: one, eastward to Iran and thence to the In­dian subcontinent and the other westward to Europe between c. 2500-1000 B.C. Sev­eral migrations and branches of the migrations established subsequent pat­terns.

Asia’s present linguistic patterns reflect the continent’s long and turbulent history, the historic migrations in its dis­tant past, the conquests of the medieval rules, as well as the paths of the imperial empires established by the British, the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese dur­ing relatively recent times. The present picture, hence, bears little resemblance to the past distributions.

The present map (4.1) of Asian lan­guages reflects patterns that had been established by the 18th century. At that time the largest language groups, by num­ber of speakers, were the Chinese and the Indo-Aryan languages but Tungusic lan­guages were probably used over wider areas in North Asia.

Since then the Tun­gusic group (and many other smaller ethnic groups) have been withering away, despite the Soviet practice of publishing books and newspapers in regional lan­guages. Mandarin Chinese has also been gaining ground at the expense of local lan­guages and dialects. In India, however, the regional languages are not losing ground, and languages have become a political is­sue.

Meanwhile, the Indian government continues to use English as an official lan­guage. In Indonesia, which has many local languages and dialects, Bahasa Indonesia, the national language, has failed to spread to all parts of the country. English remains the most commonly spoken language in the Philippines, despite the adoption of a
national Filipino language. The marked in­crease in populations of China, India, Japan, and Indonesia during the 20th cen­tury means Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Japanese can now claim to be world’s prominent languages.

On the other hand, many languages have been withering as ethnic groups disappear or merge with the larger groups. Many Paleo-Siberian lan­guages (just as most Native American Indian tongues) have vanished or declined in numbers. Many ancient languages spo­ken in Asia have also disappeared within the last millennium and others have been greatly modified by linguistic change.

Asia’s Major Language Families:

Before examining the distribution of the Asian languages it may be essential to ex­plain the basis of their classification. While some languages are related to each other by virtue of their origin, others may not share a common parentage. Languages grouped in a family are thought to have a shared, if a distant origin. When languages resemble in a systematic way (in grammar, syntax and structure) they are held to be genetically related and are identified with a particular family or they may be linked by contact.

In the sub-family group their com­mon traits become conspicuous. The sub-families are divided into groups con­sisting of individual languages. Languages that disappeared without descendants are known as extinct. These are known only through written records and comments by contemporaries. The classification for many extinct languages remains uncertain because of scarcity of data.

A language that cannot be assigned to an existing family is termed “language isolate.” Our knowledge of the languages of some isolated regions (e.g. New Guinea, and East Siberia) is too scanty to allow proper classification and are usually grouped as a separate entity.

Prehistoric humans perhaps used some 12,000 to 15,000 languages. Today nearly 6,000 of these are in use, although hun­dreds of those are spoken by merely 10,000 to 12,000 persons. Most of the smaller lan­guages are disappearing as these are being swallowed by such languages as English, Russian, French, and Spanish. It is believed in some quarters that by the middle of the 21st century only 600 or so languages may survive.

Eight language families cover nearly all of Asia: Indo-European, Semitic, Al­tai-Turkic, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan and Paleo-Si-berian. The Indo-European family is spoken by the largest number of speakers and covers the widest extent in the world. It probably originated in the steppe region of southern Russia around 4,000 B.C., and spread into the Danube area of Europe and beyond that to other parts of Europe, and to southwest Asia as also into East and Southern Asia.

There are several system­atic resemblances between the European languages and Sanskrit, the oldest-attested language of Southern Asia that point out the common ancestry of many languages of Europe and South Asia. Several well- known scholars have determined the geographical origins and lifestyle of the proto-Indo-European people by compar­ing the vocabulary of the extinct Indo- European languages, such as “mother,” “husband,” and “brother,” etc.

The proto- Indo-European language has words for horses, pigs, sheep, and some kind of wheeled vehicle. Words for flora and fauna provide us clues as to the place of origin of Lie speakers of the early (or proto-Indo- European) languages. It is now generally believed that the Indo-European family probably originated in north-central Europe, and from there one of its streams migrated to other parts of Europe, and an- other moved to parts of Asia.

The branch of Indo-European family moved into Asia is divided into two large groups, known as Indo-Aryan (or Indic) and Iranian, other branches moved into Europe. The Indo-Aryan sub-family; contained several subgroups, identified largely on a geographical basis: the Mid- subgroup includes Hindi/Urdu, and related languages of northern India; the Eastern subgroup includes Bengali and languages of eastern India, the western and southern subgroups include Gujarati, Marathi, etc. in India, and Sinhalese of Sri Lanka, and Northwest subgroup includes Punjabi, Pahari and Dardic languages of the Indian subcontinent.

The early form of Indo-Aryan dates from earlier before 1000 B.C.—the language in which the Vedas, the ancient sacred texts of the Hindus were composed. Later forms, the Prakrits, lasted 1,000 years, and were the medium of Buddhist and Jain literature. Several of the languages of western India and Pakistan such as Punjabi are related to Prakrit.

The Iranian languages—especially the Old Persian and Avestan (the sacred lan­guage of the Zoroastrians) have texts dating from the 6th century B.C. The modern Iranian languages, (Persian, Pashto, Baluchi, Kurdish, and Tajik) are spoken by over 60 million people.

The Semitic languages have the longest history and a large number of speakers in the world. They are located throughout Southwest Asia, including the Arabian Peninsula and across the whole of North Africa. The oldest of the Semitic languages (Akkadian, Phoenician, etc.) date from the third millennium B.C. Hebrew is the best known of these whose modern version dates from 2000 B.C. or so. Its classical form was preserved as the written language of Judaism; the modern and spoken form is used by over four million in Israel, and several million elsewhere throughout the world. A form of it—Syriac—is spoken by almost a million people in the Middle East and in the U.S.A.

The major Semitic language is Arabic, spoken by over 150 million as a mother tongue. The classical form is the sacred lan­guage of Islam and used as a lingua-franca in Southwest Asia from Syria, Lebanon, Is­rael, the West Bank, Jordan, Iraq and the nations of the Arabian peninsula that in­clude Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, and the United Arab Republic.

The Altai-Turkic family covers a large area, from the Balkan peninsula to the northeast of Asia—an area that includes the Altai mountain region of Central Asia, from which the family receives its name. It includes nearly three dozen languages, clas­sified into three subgroups: Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungusk. The best- known of the family is Turkish, spoken by about 45 million people of Turkey and sur­rounding territories.

Other languages in this group are: Azerbaijani (12 million), Turkmen (around 3 million), in Central Asia, Iran, and Afghanistan, Uzbek, in Uzbekistan (6 million), Uighur in mostly China (Xinjiang province), Kazam and Tartar (both around 2 million), in the Kazakhstan.

In the Mongolian subgroup Mongol is the chief language spoken by nearly 4 mil­lion people in the Mongolian People’s Republic and adjacent ports of China. The Manchu-Tungus subgroup was spoken over a wide area in Manchuria or North­east China by nearly 3 million, but very few now speak the once-important Manchu language.

Most of early Manchu texts date from the 8th century to the 17th century. In the 20th century, there has been a concerted effort to modernize the Altaic languages by injecting fresh vocabu­lary, and reforming the scripts as in the case of Turkish, where Latin script re­placed the Arabic.

The Dravidian family is a group of over 20 languages, clustered chiefly in the Southern India, although one language, Brahui, is isolated. Through emigration, the speakers of Dravidian languages are to­day found in Southeast Asia, in eastern and southern Africa, and in several ports of the world.

Tamil is the oldest language of the family, dating from the 3rd century B.C. There are several theories regarding the original home of Dravidian languages. The theory that carries a strong support among scholars is the view that these were spoken in northern India before the arrival of the Aryans, who subsequently pushed these into southern India.

The Austro-Asiatic family includes over 100 languages that cover a large area in Southeast Asia, in the countries between China and Indonesia, together with straggling outleis in the Nicobai Islands in the Indian Ocean and in parts of India. The origin of the family is still unclear. The largest branch of the family is the Mon- Khmer group of languages, spoken throughout Southeast Asian mainland, pri­marily in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, parts of Burma and Malaysia. Khmer is the offi­cial language of Cambodia and 5-6 million people.

Vietnamese is spoken by about 50 million people of Vietnam and Laos. Some scholars relate it to the Tai language group of the Sino-Tibetan group. The Munda group is spoken in India and the Nicobar Islands. Very little is known about the ori­gin and early movements of these languages. Possibly the various groups of this family began to split up in the second millennium B.C. but where it originated remains a puzzle of linguistic geography.

The family of Austronesian languages comprises close to 1,000 languages with an estimated 200 million covering a vast area extending essentially from Malaysia and Indonesia in the west, but including Mada­gascar in the Indian Ocean, to the Philippines and Taiwan, and from New Guinea in the east and further east in the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii—a territorial range which is reflected in an alternative name given to the family: Malayo-Polynesia.

Thus, in geographical extent and the number of speakers, it is one of the largest families. The family is usually divided into two main groups, the boundary lies in New Guinea: the western group contains over 400 languages, spoken in Malaysia, the Indonesian islands, the Philippines, some parts of Cambodia, and western parts of New Guinea; the eastern group covers most of New Guinea, and through­out the 10,000 or more islands of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Be­cause of many structural differences within the language, it is estimated that the family has a long history of evolution of over 4,000 years.

The classification of Sino-Tibetan fam­ily of language is highly controversial. The Sinitic part refers to the various Chinese languages (Cantonese, Hakka, Hunan, Kan, Mandarin, Min, and Wu), and the Ti­betan part to the several languages spoken in Tibet, Myanmar, and adjacent territo­ries. The Sinitic languages, referred to by the Chinese as Han (name derived from the Han dynasty) are spoken by over 1,100 million people, a large majority of which ire in China and Taiwan, but substantial numbers reside throughout Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and in the U.S.A.

There has tra­ditionally been a single method for writing the Chinese languages, and the Chinese re­fer to all as “dialects.” After Chinese, Burmese and Tibetan are the two main languages of the family. Burmese is spoken by over 25 million people in Myanmar as a mother tongue. The estimates for Tibetan ire uncertain because of the influence of the Chinese in recent years, but a figure of million speakers appear realistic.

There are nearly 300 languages in the Tibeto-Burmen group spoken by nearly 3 million people in parts of Myanmar, Thai­land, Vietnam and Laos. The Tai group (referred to by some as a separate family because of its association with both Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan families) is in Southeast Asia covering an area from Thai­land to Eastern region of Burma, Laos and Vietnam.

The Paleo-Siberian family is the name given to several loosely-linked languages of northeastern Siberia in Russia for these old languages, could not be fitted into any other category. These diverse languages currently claim several thousand speakers, though less than a century they numbered several times the present-day figure. Since the early 20th century these languages have been given a written form, based in Cyrillic alphabet.

Asia’s Language Map:

Of the world’s ten leading languages, six, which claim over 100 million speakers each, are spoken in Asia; namely, Manda­rin Chinese (850 million speakers, Hindi .340 million speakers), Arabic (185 million speakers), Bengali (180 million speakers), Indonesian (135 million speakers) and Japanese (125 million speakers). Two of these, Russian and English, each claim over million speakers worldwide, and are also spoken in Asian nations.

Russian speech is limited to the various republics of the former U.S.S.R., whereas English, the second largest language in the world after Chinese, is spoken widely in the Philip­pines, and is the lingua franca in several Asian nations, particularly those which formerly were a part of the British Empire. In India English retains the status of an as­sociate official language and is used as a lingua franca for the country.

Perhaps over 2,000 languages are spo­ken in Asia; and the pattern of their distribution is complex. Map 4.1 shows the distribution of the major language families and selected languages in a highly general­ized map but essentially obscures the overlapping distributions of multiple lan­guages that have emerged in several situations. For example, around some of the Central Asian oases and in southern Si­beria, migrants from Russia and China, and exiled ethnic groups have created lin­guistically mixed patterns.

Several large cities, such as Singapore, Mumbai, Hong Kong and Manila show complex language patterns. As Chinese have moved into Lhasa and other parts of Tibet, Chinese has become the predominant language of Tibet, while the numbers of Tibetan lan­guage speakers have been shrinking. Another example is that of English speech, which is widely spoken in the Philippines and used as an associate official language of administration in India and in cities all over Asia, but is not assigned a place in our language map.

Given Asia’s enormous size and cul­tural complexity, it may be convenient to analyze the distribution of languages within the framework of its major realms.

Languages of southwest Asia:

The area between the Mediterranean Sea and Afghanistan is dominated by three lan­guage families: Semitic, Indo-European, and Altaic (Turkic). Linguistic diversity is greatest in the two countries of Turkey and Afghanistan that define the western and eastern peripheries of the realm. In the Semitic family, Arabic claims the largest number of speakers, and territory.

It is spoken in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and a small section of Southern Iran; whereas Hebrew is exclusively spo­ken in Israel. An ancient tongue, Sumerian, now extinct and unrelated to the Semitic or Indo-European languages, was spoken four thousand years ago in the region stretching from the Euphrates-Tigris basin to Israel. How did the splendid Sumerian civilization and language vanish remains a historical mystery?

Most of the living languages of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family are spoken in Iran and Af­ghanistan, and occasionally extend beyond into neighboring regions. Persian (or Farsi) is largely centered in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, but not entirely confined to these countries. Pashto is spoken by major­ity of the people in the linguistically diverse Afghanistan, and spills over to Pakistan, and Iran.

Kurdish is spoken by Kurds in an area that cuts across the terri­tories of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq. Baluchi-speakers live in southern Iran, southwestern sections of Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. About half a dozen other, smaller languages classified as the Dardic sub-group of Indo-Iranian tongues, are spoken in Afghanistan.

Turkish, the principal language be­longing to the Altaic family, is spoken largely in Turkey, but also spoken in the surrounding countries of Azerbaijain and Iran. Three other Turkic languages of the Altaic family: Uzbek, Turkmen and Kyrghyz are spoken in the Central Asian which carry their names.

Nearly 40 or so languages are spoken in the Caucacus area that lies between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. The region has been the major land route from south to north, and exhibits an extraordinary ethnic and cultural variety. The Caucasus languages reflect an influence of Russian, Persian and Arabic languages, and cannot be easily grouped into any family category.

In all, there are around 5 million speakers of the Georgian language outnumbering all others. Armenian and Azerbaijain are two other major languages in the area, but those are classified in the Turkic family. The written form of the Caucasus lan­guages is based on Cyrillic alphabets.

South Asian Language:

The Indo-European family, some indigenous families (as Dravidian) a few Sino-Tibetan-languages and some “language isolates” nearly cover the territory of South Asia. The Indo-Aryan group containing about II languages covers the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhu­tan and most of Sri Lanka. The boundaries of these languages are difficult to demarcate as their dialects gradually grade into one another.

The problem of boundary demarcation is further compounded by the degree of assimilation of Sanskritic vocabulary these, thus making one language quite different from the other. Sanskrit, a classical Indo-Aryan language, preserved mostly in writing, enters deeply into the vocabulary of the present-day languages. Thus, Hindi of India and Urdu of Paki­stan, both using the same grammatical forms, differ linguistically from one an­other because the former may be heavily Sinskriticized in vocabulary, while the lat­ter draws for its vocabulary upon Persian sources.

There are over 500 Indo-Aryan languages, spoken by over 500 million people. Hindi and Hindi-related languages claim nearly 280 million speakers in India alone there are probably another 50 million Hindi-speakers in the world). Thus Hindi is the second largest spoken language in Asia, and the third largest in the world (after Chinese and English) Among the Indo-Aryan languages, Bengali, and Urdu each claim 160 and 100 million speakers re­spectively. In the Iranian groups, Pashto and Baluchi are spoken in southwestern Pakistan.

The Dravidian family is almost exclu­sively concentrated in southern India; although one language, Brahui, is isolated in Pakistan, separated from the others by 800 miles. By virtue of their long literary traditions and by the substantial number of speakers, four Dravidian languages may be termed as the major languages of India: Telugu (75 million speakers), Tamil (78 million speakers), Kannada (38 million speakers), and Malayalam (35 million speakers). Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Singapore, also contain substantial mi­norities of Dravidian speakers. In India, each of the four major Dravidian languages can be identified with a state.

A dozen or so Munda languages, which are possibly related to the Mon- Khmer languages of Southeast Asia and assigned to the Astro-Asiatic family, are concentrated in the tribal regions of India. The various languages of the Sino-Tibetan family are distributed from Kashmir to Bhutan along India’s northern borders.

Languages of Southeast Asia:

Southeast Asia includes two sub regions: mainland (Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos); and an insular sec­tion (Eastern Malaysia, all of Indonesia, and the islands of the Philippines). The languages of insular southeast Asia almost entirely belong to the Austronesian family; whereas those of the mainland belong to the Austro-Asiatic, Tai, and the Sino-Ti- betan families.

The Austronesian family extends to a vast and remote area in Oceania as well. Though the languages of the mainland are genetically diverse, the Mon-Khmer group (containing 50 or so languages) of the Austro-Asiatic family is most widely spoken, covering an area from Myanmar to Vietnam. In Cambodia, Khmer is the official language.

Vietnamese, however, claims the largest number of speakers, nearly 60 million speakers, on the mainland, spoken primarily in Viet­nam but also by smaller numbers in the neighboring countries of Cambodia, Thai­land and Laos.

Sino-Tibetan and Tai languages, spo­ken in Southeast Asia are: Thai in Thailand; Lao in Laos, Thailand, and Cam­bodia; Yan in Thailand; Shan in Myanmar and a few other related languages in Viet­nam. Prominent in the family of Sino-Tibetan languages is Chinese, which is spoken by over nine million people of Chinese descent distributed throughout Southeast Asian mainland with significant numbers in Thailand (7 million), and in Malaysia (4.5 million) and smaller numbers in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.

The Burmese language is the predominant lan­guage of Burma, where 90 percent of the population claims it as a mother tongue, and the remaining use it as a second language. Several related Sino-Tibetan tongues (like Karen, Kachin) are also m tribal areas of Burma.

Insular Southeast Asia shows a greater linguistic diversity with 500 or so languages spoken in its hundreds of islands which may be grouped into two bro categories: western Austronesian (or Indonesian) and Eastern Austronesian (also called Oceanic). Important languages the Austronesian family is: Malay (includes Bahasa Indonesia, Indonesia national language), and Tagalog (inch Pilipino, the national language of the Philippines). In addition, several non Austronesian languages are also spoken this vast, islandic world that stretches and southeast of Indonesia.

East Asian Languages:

Most important in terms of speakers and their influence on the other languages of East and Southeast Asia are the Chinese languages that belong to the Sino-Tibetan family. Of these Mandarin is the most in­fluential and is spoken by over 70 percent of China’s population. It has traditionally been the language of administration.

It is also the world’s leading language claiming over 700 million speakers and spoken by a greater number of speakers in China than all other Chinese languages (Wu, Canton­ese, Hsiang, Hakka, and Min). Prior to 1950 most Chinese were supposed to be il­literate because the Chinese languages consisted of thousands of word-images re­mained mostly unwritten as each generation had to learn thousands of char­acter signs that were needed for literacy. With the introduction of simplified charac­ter, and Romanization of the language by the People’s Republic of China since 1950, and compulsory’ education in schools, most Chinese have now become literate.

Languages of the Tibeto-Burman sub-1 group are spoken in Tibet, parts of Nepal,’ Assam (India) and Bangladesh. The Altaic- family languages are spoken in western parts of China and Manchuria. Uighur, a Turkic language is spoken in Xinjiang (Sinkiang) and Kansu provinces of China. Manchu, which claims a fairly long literary tradition dating from the 16th century, is the best known of the Machu-Tungus group, is spoken in Manchuria province of China, but has been largely replaced by Mandarin and is now spoken only in scat­tered localities.

Korean and Japanese are two other im­portant languages in East Asia. They are related to the Altaic family, although these have borrowed their scripts and characters from Chinese. Korean is spoken by well over 50 million people in North and South Korea and by sizable minorities in Japan and China. The language has been influenced greatly by Chinese containing more than half of its vocabulary is of Chinese origin. The Japanese subfamily includes, resides Japanese, several dialects spoken in the Ryukyu Islands by people who are bilingual in Japanese.

Numerically, there are nearly 140 million Japanese speakers in the world, over 90 percent of which reside in Japan, the remaining in Taiwan, Brazil and the U.S. (particularly in Hawaii). The Ainu language spoken only on the island of Hokkaido and in northern Japan, and the island of Sakhalin, is a linguistic puzzle as it is totally unrelated to other surrounding languages and is the speech of the Ainus who are ethnically distinct from the neighboring races.

Language of North and Central Asia:

The languages of this vast, sprawling religion are those spoken from the Arctic Ocean to Central Asia and China and from the Caspian Sea and the Ural Moun­tains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. Most languages belong to the Ural-Altaic family (Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus) or to the Indo-European family. The Turkic languages are distributed over an extensive area in south­ern Siberia (Russia) through the Central Asian nations to include Turkmen in the Turkmenistan, northern Iran and Afghani­stan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. A few Turkic languages are spoken in western Mongolia, and in north­ern Siberia.

The Mongolian or Mongol branch of the Ural-Altaic family is dispersed throughout Central Asia from Afghani­stan to Manchuria, occupying large parts of North and East Asia. Among the Mongolian languages are Mongol, spoken in Afghanistan, and a few other languages in­fluenced by Iranian and Turkic languages.

The Manchu-Tungus branch has speakers scattered from central interior Si­beria to the shores of the seas of Japan and Okhotsk including the Sakhalin Island. Most speakers of these languages are now becoming increasingly bilingual in Russian or Chinese or altogether giving up their native languages. In northernmost Siberia several Paleo-Siberian tongues are still spo­ken by the indigenous tribes.

Indo-European languages in northern and Central Asia, in addition to Russian which was introduced relatively recently by the Soviets, include the Iranian lan­guages in Tajikistan (Persian), and Baluchi in Turkmenistan. Since the occupation of these territories by the Soviet Union in the later part of the 19th century and early 20th century, Russian replaced the native languages in administration and educa­tional institutions as the official language, and has served as the linga Franca for the region.

The Soviets encouraged the native languages in order to preserve the cultural identity of the various ethnic groups (Kazakhs, Turkmens, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kirghis), but Russian was aggressively im­planted in administration, among the elites, and in educational institutions. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 the assertion of native languages is likely to be vigorously pursued by the newly-inde­pendent nations which bear the names of their leading languages.

The Problem of a National Language:

Asia’s language patterns outlined in the preceding paragraphs indicate that a large variety of linguistic forms are used on the continent. However, these patterns fail to bring out the complex problems that these have created in several nations. Only seven of the Asian nations are close to being homogeneous in their lin­guistic composition: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Japan, Jordan, North Korea and South Korea, each of which claims over 90 percent of its population speaking the lead­ing language of the country.

In Afghanistan, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, and Uzbekistan where 70 percent of their populations speak the leading lan­guage of the country but contain substantial linguistic minorities. The re­maining Asian nations contain a wide- ranging linguistic diversity. In most na­tions no single language is spoken by a majority of the population.

The number of significantly different languages within several countries has made it necessary to establish the so-called “national” or “official” languages. The fear of neo-colonial domination has motivated the distrusts of the old languages of coloni­alism—English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and also of now Japanese and Russian—al­though these were used in administration and continue to be the linga Franca within the countries.

Language as a cohesive force for nation-states and for linguistic groups within the countries has for long been ma­nipulated for political ends. Language riots have occurred in India and Pakistan be­tween rival vernacular communities. Languages have also become focus of loy­alty for religious communities that consider themselves as suppressed or sub­jected to discrimination. Sikhs, a minority group m the state Punjab in India, success­fully agitated for the formation of a linguistic state within India which was formed in 1966.

Given the turbulent politi­cal climate in India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu were designated over the objec­tions of other groups as the national languages although both are spoken by less than the majority of their countries’ popu­lations. India recognizes 18 languages in its constitution, several of which act as the of­ficial language for states within the country, and in the case of Hindi, for sev­eral states.

Two of these, Hindi and Bengali are among the world’s leading lan­guages. In Pakistan nearly 48 percent of its population speaks Punjabi, although the status of the official language is reserved for Urdu which claims only 7.6 percent of the country’s population. Sindhi, Baluchi and Pashto are some other languages in Pakistan. Both in Pakistan and in India, the decision to declare “national” or “offi­cial” languages for their countries stemmed from either historical, and political rea­sons, or religious consideration, rather than from reasons of the numerical strength of the languages.

Linguistic diversity is even greater in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, where more than a dozen Malay languages are spoken, dialectical differences are so great that a na­tional tongue, Bahasa Indonesia, has been established.

In the Philippines, where more than a dozen languages are spoken, less than a third of the population speaks Tagalog, and English is universally under­stood and used as a lingua franca of commerce. However, Pilipino (based on Tagalog) is the declared national lan­guage, even though it is learned as a second language by most Filipinos.

Malaysia is an­other multilingual nation containing substantial number of speakers of Chinese and Indian languages. The majority of the population is Malay-speaking (61 percent); the national language is Malay, but English is widely spoken and used in administration.

In Southwest Asia, Iran and Qatar are linguistically diverse where majority of the populations do not speak the leading lan­guage of the countries. Persian, the leading language of Iran claims only about 45 per­cent of population of Iran which contains substantial minorities of Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Baluchi, Turkmeni, and Arabic speakers. Over a third of Qatar’s popula­tion consists of the speakers of South Asian languages and one-sixth that of Per­sian speech, while only a quarter of its population speaks Arabic. But Arabic is re­tained as the official language.

Among the Central Asian nations Kazakhstan, with less than 40 percent of its population speaking Kazakh language belongs to the category of linguistically di­verse countries. Thirty-eight percent of its population speaks Russian, and Kazakh is the “official” language. With the newly- found independence in these nations nationalist urges are likely to find expres­sion in the reassertion of Central Asian languages as the official languages of their nations.