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 N anywhere in the name. Each of the 117 languages below opens to a full profile.
Table of contents
List of Languages That Contain N
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
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.
7
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.
8
Avestan
The Old Iranian language of the Zoroastrian sacred texts — closely related to Vedic Sanskrit and preserved entirely in religious literature.
9
Azerbaijani
A Turkic language spoken in Azerbaijan and Iran's northwestern provinces — about 23 million speakers, closely related to Turkish.
10
Belarusian
An East Slavic language closely related to Russian and Ukrainian — one of two official languages of Belarus, though increasingly endangered as Russian dominates.
11
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.
12
Bosnian
A South Slavic language standardized by Bosniaks — one of three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, mutually intelligible with Croatian and Serbian.
13
Breton
A Celtic language of Brittany in northwestern France — closely related to Welsh and Cornish, with about 210,000 speakers and ongoing revitalization efforts.
14
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.
15
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.
16
Cebuano
An Austronesian language and the second-most-spoken language of the Philippines — dominant across the Visayas and northern Mindanao.
17
Chechen
A Northeast Caucasian language and the official language of Chechnya (within Russia) — spoken by about 1.4 million people in the North Caucasus and the Chechen diaspora.
18
Cornish
A revived Celtic language of Cornwall in southwestern England — extinct as a community language by the late 18th century, now spoken by a few hundred dedicated revivalists.
19
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.
20
Croatian
A South Slavic language and the official tongue of Croatia — written in Latin script and mutually intelligible with Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.
21
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.
22
Dzongkha
The national language of Bhutan — a Sino-Tibetan language of the southern Himalayas closely related to classical Tibetan.
23
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.
24
English
A West Germanic language with Norse and Norman French overlays — the most widely spoken language on Earth when second-language speakers are counted, and the de facto lingua franca of science, aviation, and the internet.
25
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.
26
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.
27
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.
28
Finnish
A Uralic language with elaborate agglutinative morphology — Finland's official tongue alongside Swedish, and one of the most grammatically distinctive languages in Europe.
29
French
A Romance language of global reach — official in 29 countries across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and a working language at the UN, EU, and Olympics.
30
Frisian
A cluster of West Germanic languages spoken in the Netherlands and Germany — English's closest living relative, with about 470,000 speakers.
31
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.
32
Galician
A Romance language closely related to Portuguese — co-official in Galicia in northwestern Spain, with about 2.4 million speakers.
33
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.
34
Greenlandic
An Eskimo-Aleut language and the sole official language of Greenland — a polysynthetic Inuit language spoken by about 50,000 people.
35
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.
36
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.
37
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.
38
Hawaiian Sign Language
An indigenous sign language of the Hawaiian Islands — only recently documented and likely the last surviving member of its language family.
39
Hindi
An Indo-Aryan language written in Devanagari and one of India's two official languages — the standardized form of a dialect continuum spoken across the Hindi Belt of northern India.
40
Hmong
A Hmong-Mien language spoken in southern China, Vietnam, Laos, and the diaspora — about 4 million speakers, with major communities in the United States after Indochina wars.
41
Hungarian
A Uralic language stranded among Indo-European neighbors in Central Europe — Hungary's official language, with rich agglutinative morphology and vowel harmony.
42
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.
43
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.
44
Inuktitut
An Inuit language spoken across the Canadian Arctic — co-official in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, written in both Latin and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics.
45
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.
46
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.
47
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.
48
Japanese
A Japonic language spoken by about 125 million people in Japan — written in a hybrid script combining Chinese characters with two indigenous syllabaries.
49
Javanese
An Austronesian language spoken by 82 million people on the Indonesian island of Java — famous for its elaborate speech levels marking social hierarchy.
50
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.
51
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.
52
Klingon
A constructed language created by linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek franchise — the most fully developed and widely spoken of all fictional languages.
53
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.
54
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
The most widely spoken Kurdish variety — a Northwestern Iranian language used by Kurds in Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq, Armenia, and the diaspora.
55
Kurdish (Sorani)
The Central Kurdish variety — official in Iraqi Kurdistan and widely used in western Iran — written in a modified Arabic script.
56
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.
57
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.
58
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.
59
Levantine Arabic
The everyday Arabic vernacular of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine — known for its lighter sound and prominence in Arabic pop music.
60
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.
61
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.
62
Lojban
A constructed language designed for unambiguous logical expression — every sentence parses to exactly one syntactic and semantic interpretation.
63
Macedonian
A South Slavic language closely related to Bulgarian — official in North Macedonia, written in a distinctive Cyrillic alphabet.
64
Manchu
A Tungusic language of the Manchu people of northeastern China — once the language of China's last imperial dynasty, today critically endangered.
65
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.
66
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.
67
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.
68
Mapudungun
An indigenous Araucanian language of central-south Chile and Argentina — the Mapuche people's traditional language, with about 250,000 speakers.
69
Min Nan
A major Sinitic language of southeastern Fujian and the Chinese diaspora — known to its speakers as Hokkien, Hoklo, or Taiwanese.
70
Mongolian
A Mongolic language and the official tongue of Mongolia — about 5.7 million speakers across Mongolia, Inner Mongolia (China), and Russia.
71
N|uu
A critically endangered Tuu (formerly "Khoisan") language of South Africa — famous for having the world's largest known phoneme inventory.
72
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.
73
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.
74
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.
75
Norwegian
A North Germanic language with two written standards (Bokmål and Nynorsk) — official in Norway, mutually intelligible with Swedish and Danish.
76
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.
77
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.
78
Old English
The West Germanic language spoken in early medieval England — the language of *Beowulf*, unrecognisable to modern English speakers without study.
79
Old Norse
The North Germanic language of the Viking Age — ancestor of Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish — and the language of the Eddas and sagas.
80
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.
81
Plains Cree
The largest dialect of Cree — a Central Algonquian language spoken across the Canadian prairies from Alberta to Manitoba.
82
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.
83
Quenya
A fictional Elvish language created by J.R.R. Tolkien — the "Elven-Latin" of Middle-earth, designed to evoke Finnish and Latin aesthetics.
84
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.
85
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.
86
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.
87
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.
88
Sami (Northern)
A Uralic language and the most widely spoken Sami variety — indigenous to northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland with about 25,000 speakers.
89
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.
90
Sango
A Ngbandi-based creole that serves as the national language of the Central African Republic.
91
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.
92
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.
93
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.
94
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).
95
Sicilian
A Romance language spoken in Sicily, Calabria, and parts of Apulia — recognized by UNESCO as vulnerable, with about 4.7 million speakers.
96
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.
97
Sindhi
An Indo-Aryan language of the Indus delta — spoken by about 36 million people in Pakistan's Sindh province and the Indian diaspora, with rich Sufi poetic tradition.
98
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.
99
Slovene
A South Slavic language and Slovenia's official tongue — notable for preserving the rare grammatical dual number, used for exactly two of something.
100
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.
101
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.
102
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.
103
Sumerian
The language isolate of the world's earliest urban civilisation in southern Mesopotamia — the first language ever written down.
104
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.
105
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).
106
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.
107
Tigrinya
A Semitic language of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia — written in Geʽez script and closely related to Amharic and the ancient Geʽez liturgical language.
108
Tok Pisin
An English-based creole and one of the three official languages of Papua New Guinea — the lingua franca for a country of over 800 languages.
109
Toki Pona
A minimalist constructed language created by Sonja Lang in 2001 — with only about 120 root words, designed to encourage simple, mindful expression.
110
Tongan
A Polynesian language and the official tongue of the Kingdom of Tonga — a sister language to Samoan within the Polynesian family.
111
Turkmen
A Turkic language and the official tongue of Turkmenistan — closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani, with about 7 million speakers.
112
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.
113
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.
114
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.
115
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.
116
Wu Chinese
A major Sinitic branch centered on Shanghai and the lower Yangtze — its best-known variety, Shanghainese, has about 14 million speakers and a notable tonal system.
117
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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