SOAS University Of London

With over 80 million, Vietnamese has the greatest number of speakers of any language of continental Southeast Asia. Indeed, with the exception of Indonesian, it is the most widely spoken of all Southeast Asian languages. There are significant Vietnamese communities in the countries neighbouring.

Turkish is a language spoken by 65–73 million people worldwide, predominantly in Turkey with smaller communities of speakers in Cyprus, Greece and Eastern Europe, as well as by several million immigrants in Western Europe, particularly Germany, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic.

Thai is from the Tai-Kadai language family and is the official language of Thailand. Thai (formerly referred to as ‘Siamese’) is mutually intelligible with Lao but from a different language family to Burmese, Khmer and Malay, its western, Eastern and southern neighbours, respectively.

Swahili belongs to the Bantu family of languages spoken throughout east, central and southern Africa. It has absorbed words from non-Bantu languages such as Arabic, Persian, Portuguese and English. Swahili is known by its speakers as Kiswahili and is spoken by approximately 80 million people.

Kurdish belongs to the Western Iranian group of the Indo-European family of languages. It is spoken in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and the Caucasus, and by sizable communities elsewhere. It has an important tradition of poetry dating back many centuries and, with recent political changes.