1
Afrikaans
A West Germanic language that evolved from 17th-century Dutch in South Africa — the world's youngest major language and one of South Africa's eleven official tongues.
Below are languages that contain the letter A anywhere in the name. Each of the 146 languages below opens to a full profile.
Table of contents
List of Languages That Contain A
2
Ainu
A language isolate of northern Japan and Sakhalin — once spoken by the indigenous Ainu people, now critically endangered with only a handful of native speakers.
3
Akan
A cluster of closely related Niger-Congo languages of Ghana and Ivory Coast — including Twi and Fante — spoken by roughly 11 million people as a first language.
4
Akkadian
The Semitic language of ancient Mesopotamia — the tongue of Sargon, Hammurabi, and the Epic of Gilgamesh — written in cuneiform across three millennia.
5
Albanian
An Indo-European isolate forming its own branch — Albania's official language, also widely spoken in Kosovo and parts of North Macedonia and Montenegro.
6
Amharic
A Semitic language and the working language of Ethiopia — written in the ancient Geʽez script and spoken as a first or second language by tens of millions.
7
Ancient Greek
The classical language of Homer, Plato, and the New Testament — a Hellenic branch of Indo-European that shaped Western philosophy, science, and theology.
8
Arabic
A Central Semitic language whose Classical form is the liturgical tongue of Islam and whose Modern Standard form unites a continuum of regional varieties spoken from Morocco to Oman.
9
Aramaic
The Semitic lingua franca of the ancient Near East — spoken by Jesus, used in parts of the Hebrew Bible, and still alive today in scattered Christian and Jewish communities.
10
Armenian
An Indo-European language forming its own branch — official in Armenia, written in a 36-letter alphabet created by Mesrop Mashtots in 405 CE.
11
Assamese
An Indo-Aryan language and the official tongue of Assam in northeastern India — closely related to Bengali, with about 15 million native speakers.
12
Avestan
The Old Iranian language of the Zoroastrian sacred texts — closely related to Vedic Sanskrit and preserved entirely in religious literature.
13
Aymara
An Aymaran language spoken in the Andean Altiplano of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile — about 1.7 million speakers, official in Bolivia alongside Spanish and 35 others.
14
Azerbaijani
A Turkic language spoken in Azerbaijan and Iran's northwestern provinces — about 23 million speakers, closely related to Turkish.
15
Bashkir
A Turkic language of the Bashkir people in Russia — the official language of Bashkortostan, closely related to Tatar, with about 1.2 million speakers.
16
Basque
A language isolate spoken in the western Pyrenees — a linguistic mystery with no proven relatives, predating the arrival of Indo-European languages in Europe.
17
Belarusian
An East Slavic language closely related to Russian and Ukrainian — one of two official languages of Belarus, though increasingly endangered as Russian dominates.
18
Bengali
An Indo-Aryan language of Bengal — official in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal — with a rich literary tradition that produced Asia's first Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.
19
Berber (Tamazight)
A family of Afroasiatic languages indigenous to North Africa — collectively called Amazigh — with official status in Morocco and Algeria.
20
Bislama
An English-based creole that serves as the national language of Vanuatu — one of three official languages alongside English and French.
21
Bosnian
A South Slavic language standardized by Bosniaks — one of three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, mutually intelligible with Croatian and Serbian.
22
Bulgarian
A South Slavic language and the official tongue of Bulgaria — historically the first Slavic language to be written down, in the 9th-century Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts.
23
Buryat
A Mongolic language of the Buryat people in Siberia, Mongolia, and northern China — about 460,000 speakers, related to Khalkha Mongolian.
24
Catalan
A Romance language spoken in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic Islands, Andorra, and parts of France and Italy — co-official in Spain's autonomous communities and Andorra's sole national tongue.
25
Cebuano
An Austronesian language and the second-most-spoken language of the Philippines — dominant across the Visayas and northern Mindanao.
26
Chamorro
The Austronesian language of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands — the indigenous tongue of Pacific island communities heavily influenced by three centuries of Spanish contact.
27
Chuvash
The only surviving Oghur Turkic language — official in the Russian Republic of Chuvashia, spoken by about 1 million people and a key piece of Turkic linguistic history.
28
Corsican
A Romance language of the island of Corsica — closely related to Tuscan Italian, with about 130,000 speakers and growing institutional support in France.
29
Croatian
A South Slavic language and the official tongue of Croatia — written in Latin script and mutually intelligible with Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.
30
Danish
A North Germanic language and the official tongue of Denmark — famous for soft "d" sounds, glottal stops (stød), and being notoriously hard to pronounce.
31
Dari
The Afghan variety of Persian and one of Afghanistan's two official languages — mutually intelligible with Iran's Farsi and Tajikistan's Tajik, forming the Persian dialect continuum.
32
Dothraki
A fictional language created by linguist David J. Peterson for HBO's *Game of Thrones* adaptation — the language of the nomadic Dothraki horse-lords.
33
Dzongkha
The national language of Bhutan — a Sino-Tibetan language of the southern Himalayas closely related to classical Tibetan.
34
Egyptian Arabic
The most widely understood spoken variety of Arabic — Egypt's everyday vernacular, spread across the Arab world by Cairo's enormous film, TV, and music industries.
35
Esperanto
The most successful constructed international auxiliary language — created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to serve as a politically neutral second language for all.
36
Estonian
A Uralic language closely related to Finnish — Estonia's official tongue, with 14 grammatical cases and three contrastive degrees of vowel and consonant length.
37
Faroese
A North Germanic language of the Faroe Islands — closely related to Icelandic, spoken by about 72,000 people in the autonomous territory of Denmark.
38
Fijian
An Austronesian (Oceanic) language and one of Fiji's three official languages — spoken alongside English and Fiji Hindi by most of the indigenous Fijian population.
39
Frisian
A cluster of West Germanic languages spoken in the Netherlands and Germany — English's closest living relative, with about 470,000 speakers.
40
Friulian
A Romance language spoken in Italy's Friuli-Venezia Giulia region — about 420,000 speakers, recognized as a minority language with regional cultural support.
41
Fula
A Niger-Congo language spoken across the Sahel from Senegal to Sudan — the language of the historically pastoralist Fulani people, with about 65 million speakers.
42
Galician
A Romance language closely related to Portuguese — co-official in Galicia in northwestern Spain, with about 2.4 million speakers.
43
Georgian
A Kartvelian (South Caucasian) language and the official language of Georgia — written in its own unique 33-letter alphabet, with about 3.7 million speakers.
44
Greenlandic
An Eskimo-Aleut language and the sole official language of Greenland — a polysynthetic Inuit language spoken by about 50,000 people.
45
Guarani
A Tupian language and the co-official language of Paraguay — spoken by about 5 million people, unique among major Latin American languages for being used by both Indigenous and mestizo populations.
46
Gujarati
An Indo-Aryan language of western India and the mother tongue of about 56 million people — official in Gujarat and Dadra and Nagar Haveli, with global diaspora communities.
47
Gulf Arabic
The Arabic vernacular of the Persian Gulf coast — spoken from Kuwait to Oman, blending peninsular Arab features with Persian and South Asian loanwords.
48
Haitian Creole
A French-based creole and the most widely spoken creole language in the world — Haiti's co-official language alongside French, spoken by virtually all 12 million Haitians.
49
Hakka
A Sinitic language of the dispersed Hakka people — historically labelled "guest families" — spoken across southern China, Taiwan, and a wide diaspora.
50
Hausa
A Chadic language and one of Africa's largest lingua francas — spoken across northern Nigeria, southern Niger, and as a trade language throughout West Africa.
51
Hawaiian
A Polynesian language indigenous to the Hawaiian Islands — one of two official languages of the State of Hawaii, undergoing dramatic revitalization since the 1980s.
52
Hawaiian Sign Language
An indigenous sign language of the Hawaiian Islands — only recently documented and likely the last surviving member of its language family.
53
Hungarian
A Uralic language stranded among Indo-European neighbors in Central Europe — Hungary's official language, with rich agglutinative morphology and vowel harmony.
54
Indonesian
A standardized form of Malay and the national language of Indonesia — a deliberate lingua franca for the world's fourth-most-populous country, with about 200 million speakers.
55
Interlingua
A naturalistic auxiliary language compiled in 1951 from the shared Romance and Latinate vocabulary of major European languages — readable on first sight by their speakers.
56
Iranian Persian (Farsi)
A Western Iranian language and the official language of Iran — successor to Old and Middle Persian, written in a modified Arabic script and source of much vocabulary across the Islamic world.
57
Italian
A Romance language descended from Tuscan dialects of the late medieval period — Italy's national language and one of four official languages of Switzerland.
58
Jamaican Patois
An English-based creole spoken by virtually all Jamaicans — about 3 million native speakers and a growing presence in global music and pop culture.
59
Japanese
A Japonic language spoken by about 125 million people in Japan — written in a hybrid script combining Chinese characters with two indigenous syllabaries.
60
Javanese
An Austronesian language spoken by 82 million people on the Indonesian island of Java — famous for its elaborate speech levels marking social hierarchy.
61
Kannada
A Dravidian language and the official tongue of Karnataka — spoken by about 44 million people and one of India's six classical languages, with a literary history stretching back 1,500 years.
62
Kazakh
A Turkic language and the official language of Kazakhstan — about 13 million speakers, transitioning from Cyrillic to a Latin-based script by 2025.
63
Kinyarwanda
A Bantu language and the national language of Rwanda — spoken by virtually all 13 million Rwandans and shared with related dialects in Uganda and DR Congo.
64
Korean
A language isolate spoken by about 80 million people across the Korean peninsula and its diaspora — written in Hangul, an alphabet designed for it in the 15th century.
65
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
The most widely spoken Kurdish variety — a Northwestern Iranian language used by Kurds in Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq, Armenia, and the diaspora.
66
Kurdish (Sorani)
The Central Kurdish variety — official in Iraqi Kurdistan and widely used in western Iran — written in a modified Arabic script.
67
Ladino
The Judaeo-Spanish language preserved by Sephardic Jews after the 1492 expulsion from Spain — a 15th-century Iberian Romance variety with Hebrew, Turkish, and Greek admixture.
68
Lakota
A Western Siouan language of the Great Plains — spoken by the Lakota people across the Dakotas, Nebraska, and southern Saskatchewan.
69
Lao
A Tai-Kadai language and the official tongue of Laos — closely related to Thai and written in a similar Brahmic script, with about 30 million speakers including northeast Thailand.
70
Latin
The Italic language of ancient Rome that became Western Europe's intellectual lingua franca for over a millennium and the parent of all modern Romance languages.
71
Latvian
A Baltic language and the official tongue of Latvia — closely related to Lithuanian and similarly conservative, though with some innovations like fixed first-syllable stress.
72
Levantine Arabic
The everyday Arabic vernacular of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine — known for its lighter sound and prominence in Arabic pop music.
73
Lingala
A Bantu language and a lingua franca along the Congo River — spoken by tens of millions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of the Congo.
74
Lithuanian
A Baltic language famous for preserving many archaic Proto-Indo-European features — Lithuania's official tongue, considered the most conservative living Indo-European language.
75
Lojban
A constructed language designed for unambiguous logical expression — every sentence parses to exactly one syntactic and semantic interpretation.
76
Macedonian
A South Slavic language closely related to Bulgarian — official in North Macedonia, written in a distinctive Cyrillic alphabet.
77
Maghrebi Arabic
The collective vernacular Arabic varieties of northwest Africa — spoken across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania, often called Darija.
78
Malagasy
An Austronesian language spoken on Madagascar — uniquely related to languages of Borneo, 7,000 km away, brought by ancient seafarers across the Indian Ocean.
79
Malay
An Austronesian language and the national language of Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore — closely related to Indonesian, with a 1,500-year history as a regional trade lingua franca.
80
Malayalam
A Dravidian language of southwestern India and the official language of Kerala — known for its complex script and one of the highest literacy rates in India.
81
Manchu
A Tungusic language of the Manchu people of northeastern China — once the language of China's last imperial dynasty, today critically endangered.
82
Mandarin Chinese
The world's most-spoken first language, based on the Beijing dialect and codified as Standard Chinese (Putonghua) — the official language of mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore.
83
Mandinka
A Mande language spoken across the western Sahel — the most widely spoken language in The Gambia and a major language in Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.
84
Manx
The Goidelic Celtic language of the Isle of Man — extinct in 1974 with the death of its last native speaker, then revived from records and is now learnt anew.
85
Maori
An Eastern Polynesian language and the indigenous language of New Zealand — an official language of Aotearoa, undergoing active revitalization after late-20th-century decline.
86
Mapudungun
An indigenous Araucanian language of central-south Chile and Argentina — the Mapuche people's traditional language, with about 250,000 speakers.
87
Marathi
An Indo-Aryan language of western India and the official language of Maharashtra — written in Devanagari and famous for the poetry of saints like Tukaram and Dnyaneshwar.
88
Marshallese
A Micronesian language of the Marshall Islands — co-official with English in the central Pacific atoll nation.
89
Min Nan
A major Sinitic language of southeastern Fujian and the Chinese diaspora — known to its speakers as Hokkien, Hoklo, or Taiwanese.
90
Mohawk
An Iroquoian language of upstate New York and southern Canada — the easternmost language of the Iroquois Confederacy, now undergoing significant revival.
91
Mongolian
A Mongolic language and the official tongue of Mongolia — about 5.7 million speakers across Mongolia, Inner Mongolia (China), and Russia.
92
Nahuatl
A Uto-Aztecan language of central Mexico — the language of the Aztec Empire, today spoken by about 1.7 million people across more than two dozen regional varieties.
93
Navajo
An Athabaskan language and the most spoken Native American language in the United States — famed for its role in the WWII Code Talkers who transmitted unbreakable battlefield codes.
94
Nepali
An Indo-Aryan language and the official tongue of Nepal — written in Devanagari and the lingua franca for a country of more than 100 ethnic groups.
95
Norwegian
A North Germanic language with two written standards (Bokmål and Nynorsk) — official in Norway, mutually intelligible with Swedish and Danish.
96
Occitan
A Romance language of southern France, Monaco, parts of Italy and Spain — once the prestige tongue of medieval troubadour poetry, today minority and endangered.
97
Odia
An Indo-Aryan language and the official tongue of the Indian state of Odisha — one of India's six classical languages, with a literary tradition dating to the 13th century.
98
Old Church Slavonic
The first literary Slavic language — developed in the 9th century by Saints Cyril and Methodius for the Christianisation of the Slavs, still used liturgically by Orthodox churches.
99
Ossetian
An Eastern Iranian language and the official language of North Ossetia (Russia) and South Ossetia — about 540,000 speakers, descended from the Alans and Scythians.
100
Pali
The Middle Indo-Aryan language of the Theravada Buddhist canon — preserved across South and Southeast Asia in monastic recitation.
101
Pashto
An Eastern Iranian language and one of two official languages of Afghanistan — also spoken across the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier by tens of millions of Pashtuns.
102
Plains Cree
The largest dialect of Cree — a Central Algonquian language spoken across the Canadian prairies from Alberta to Manitoba.
103
Punjabi (Eastern)
The Indian variety of Punjabi — official in the state of Punjab, written in the Gurmukhi script developed in the 16th century for Sikh scripture.
104
Quechua
A family of indigenous Andean languages — the language of the Inca Empire, today spoken by about 8 to 10 million people across Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and beyond.
105
Quenya
A fictional Elvish language created by J.R.R. Tolkien — the "Elven-Latin" of Middle-earth, designed to evoke Finnish and Latin aesthetics.
106
Romani
An Indo-Aryan language of the Roma people — spoken across Europe and the Americas by an estimated 4 million people, with many regional dialects.
107
Romanian
The only major Eastern Romance language — the official language of Romania and Moldova — descended from Vulgar Latin spoken in the Roman province of Dacia.
108
Romansh
A Romance language of the Swiss canton of Graubünden — one of Switzerland's four national languages, with about 60,000 speakers across five distinct dialects.
109
Russian
An East Slavic language and the most widely spoken Slavic tongue — official across the Russian Federation and a key second language throughout the former Soviet sphere.
110
Sami (Northern)
A Uralic language and the most widely spoken Sami variety — indigenous to northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland with about 25,000 speakers.
111
Samoan
A Polynesian language and the official tongue of Samoa and American Samoa — closely related to other Polynesian languages and the foundation for understanding the Polynesian dispersal.
112
Sango
A Ngbandi-based creole that serves as the national language of the Central African Republic.
113
Sanskrit
The classical liturgical and literary language of the Indian subcontinent — the language of the Vedas, the Mahabharata, and a millennia-spanning tradition of grammar and poetics.
114
Sardinian
A Romance language of Sardinia often called the most conservative Romance language living today — about 1 million speakers, recognized as a minority language by Italy.
115
Scottish Gaelic
A Celtic language brought from Ireland to Scotland in the early medieval period — recognized but minority, with about 57,000 speakers concentrated in the Hebrides and Highlands.
116
Serbian
A South Slavic language and the official tongue of Serbia — the only major European language to use both Latin and Cyrillic scripts in everyday life.
117
Shona
A Bantu language and the most-spoken first language in Zimbabwe — also widely used in Mozambique, with a vibrant oral and musical tradition (especially mbira music).
118
Sicilian
A Romance language spoken in Sicily, Calabria, and parts of Apulia — recognized by UNESCO as vulnerable, with about 4.7 million speakers.
119
Sindarin
A fictional Elvish language created by J.R.R. Tolkien — the everyday language of the Grey-elves of Middle-earth, modelled on Welsh phonology.
120
Sinhala
An Indo-Aryan language brought to Sri Lanka over two millennia ago — official in the island nation alongside Tamil, with about 16 million native speakers.
121
Slovak
A West Slavic language closely related to Czech — the official language of Slovakia, often considered the most central Slavic tongue in mutual intelligibility.
122
Sogdian
The Middle Iranian language of the Sogdian merchant city-states of Central Asia — the lingua franca of the Silk Road for over a thousand years.
123
Somali
A Cushitic language and the official tongue of Somalia — distinguished by its complex tone-accent system and a uniquely Latin-based orthography adopted in 1972.
124
Spanish
A Romance language born in medieval Castile and carried by empire across the Americas — today the world's second-most-spoken native language and official in 21 countries.
125
Standard German
The standardized West Germanic language of Germany, Austria, and most of Switzerland — built on Luther's Bible translation and refined into one of Europe's most influential languages.
126
Sumerian
The language isolate of the world's earliest urban civilisation in southern Mesopotamia — the first language ever written down.
127
Swahili
A Bantu language born from East African Indian Ocean trade — official in five countries and the lingua franca for over 200 million people across the African Great Lakes region.
128
Tagalog (Filipino)
An Austronesian language and the basis for Filipino, the national language of the Philippines — spoken natively by about 28 million people and as a second language by most Filipinos.
129
Tahitian
A Polynesian language indigenous to French Polynesia — co-official with French, and the basis for much of the global vocabulary of Polynesia (such as "tattoo" from tatau).
130
Tamil
A Dravidian language with one of the world's longest continuous literary traditions — official in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, and Singapore, with about 78 million native speakers.
131
Tatar
A Turkic language of the Tatar people in Russia — the official language of Tatarstan, spoken by about 5 million people.
132
Thai
A Tai-Kadai language and the official tongue of Thailand — tonal, with five distinct tones and a Brahmic-derived script not separated by spaces between words.
133
Tibetan
A Sino-Tibetan language and the traditional language of Tibet — written in a Brahmic script developed in the 7th century, with about 6 million speakers.
134
Tigrinya
A Semitic language of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia — written in Geʽez script and closely related to Amharic and the ancient Geʽez liturgical language.
135
Toki Pona
A minimalist constructed language created by Sonja Lang in 2001 — with only about 120 root words, designed to encourage simple, mindful expression.
136
Tongan
A Polynesian language and the official tongue of the Kingdom of Tonga — a sister language to Samoan within the Polynesian family.
137
Ukrainian
An East Slavic language spoken by about 40 million people — Ukraine's official language, written in Cyrillic and closely related to Russian and Belarusian.
138
Vietnamese
An Austroasiatic language spoken by about 85 million people — Vietnam's national language, written in a Latin-based script designed by 17th-century missionaries.
139
Volapük
The first widely successful constructed international auxiliary language — created by Johann Martin Schleyer in 1879 and peaking before Esperanto overtook it.
140
Wampanoag
An Eastern Algonquian language of the Wampanoag people of present-day Massachusetts — extinct as a first language in the 19th century, now being revived.
141
Western Punjabi
The most widely spoken language of Pakistan — known there as Punjabi or sometimes Lahnda — written in the Perso-Arabic Shahmukhi script and spoken by over 100 million people.
142
Xhosa
A Nguni Bantu language famous for its three click consonants — South Africa's second-most-spoken language and the mother tongue of Nelson Mandela.
143
Yakut
A Turkic language of the Sakha Republic in eastern Siberia — the easternmost Turkic language, spoken by about 450,000 people.
144
Yoruba
A Niger-Congo language spoken by about 47 million people in southwestern Nigeria and Benin — known for its rich oral tradition and tonal phonology.
145
Yucatec Maya
A Mayan language spoken across Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and Belize — the largest of the Mayan languages, with about 770,000 speakers.
146
Yue Chinese (Cantonese)
A southern Chinese branch centered on Guangzhou and Hong Kong — famous for preserving more tones and finals than Mandarin and for its prolific role in global Cantonese pop culture.
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