TOP 10 LANGUAGE COURSES IN BLOOMSBURY, LONDON - PAGE 33

Korean is the official language spoken by North and South Koreans. There are approximately 78 million Korean speakers around the world. The language has its own writing system called ‘Hangul’  created in 1443 by King Sejong with a group of scholars. Korea [ ?? ], once known as ‘Land of the ...

Tamil belongs to the Dravidian family of languages along with Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. It is the Dravidian language with the longest recorded history by far with epigraphic records dating back several centuries before the Common Era and an unbroken literary tradition of more than two thousand...

Alongside Assamese, to which it is closely related and with which it shares the same script, Bengali represents the most easterly of all Indo-European languages. It is the national language of Bangladesh (former East Pakistan) and the state language of West Bengal in India.

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.

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.

Chinese is a vibrant section within SOAS Language Centre and the study of Chinese is a popular choice with language learners from all walks of life. Currently, there are around a dozen teachers of Chinese, all of whom have considerable expertise in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.

It is sometimes assumed, on the basis of its script, that Persian is related to Arabic. This is false. As an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian branch. Persian is closely related to Kurdish and Pashto and even more closely related to Dari (an official language of Afghanistan) and to Tajik.

The Tibetan language area covers a substantial territory ranging from Pakistan (Baltistan) in the west to India (Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh) and China (Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan) in the east. A Tibetan language, Dzongkha, is the national language of the independent.

Hindi is one of twenty-two languages currently designated as ‘official’ within the Republic of India. It has the greatest number of speakers of any Indian language and is spoken, as either a first or additional language, by a number of people estimated to be in excess of 500 million.

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.