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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 R anywhere in the name. Each of the 82 languages below opens to a full profile.
Table of contents
List of Languages That Contain R
2
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.
3
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.
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
8
Azerbaijani
A Turkic language spoken in Azerbaijan and Iran's northwestern provinces — about 23 million speakers, closely related to Turkish.
9
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.
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
Berber (Tamazight)
A family of Afroasiatic languages indigenous to North Africa — collectively called Amazigh — with official status in Morocco and Algeria.
12
Breton
A Celtic language of Brittany in northwestern France — closely related to Welsh and Cornish, with about 210,000 speakers and ongoing revitalization efforts.
13
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.
14
Burmese
A Sino-Tibetan language and the official tongue of Myanmar — written in a rounded Brahmic script and spoken by about 33 million people as a first language.
15
Buryat
A Mongolic language of the Buryat people in Siberia, Mongolia, and northern China — about 460,000 speakers, related to Khalkha Mongolian.
16
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.
17
Cherokee
An Iroquoian language indigenous to the southeastern United States — written in an indigenous syllabary invented by Sequoyah in 1821.
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
Cree
An Algonquian language of the Canadian boreal forests and plains — the largest indigenous language group of Canada, with about 96,000 speakers and a unique syllabic script.
21
Croatian
A South Slavic language and the official tongue of Croatia — written in Latin script and mutually intelligible with Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.
22
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.
23
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.
24
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.
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
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.
27
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.
28
Frisian
A cluster of West Germanic languages spoken in the Netherlands and Germany — English's closest living relative, with about 470,000 speakers.
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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.
30
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.
31
Greek
A single-branch Indo-European language with a continuous 3,400-year written record — the language of Homer, Plato, and modern Greece and Cyprus.
32
Greenlandic
An Eskimo-Aleut language and the sole official language of Greenland — a polysynthetic Inuit language spoken by about 50,000 people.
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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.
34
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.
35
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.
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
Hebrew
A Northwest Semitic language with biblical roots — the official language of Israel, revived from liturgical use into a thriving modern vernacular in the 19th–20th centuries.
38
Hungarian
A Uralic language stranded among Indo-European neighbors in Central Europe — Hungary's official language, with rich agglutinative morphology and vowel harmony.
39
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.
40
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.
41
Irish
A Celtic language and the national language of Ireland — taught in all Irish schools, though daily speakers number only about 70,000 in the Gaeltacht regions.
42
Khmer
An Austroasiatic language and the official tongue of Cambodia — written in a Brahmic-derived script and notable for not being tonal, unlike its Southeast Asian neighbors.
43
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.
44
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.
45
Krio
An English-based creole that is the lingua franca of Sierra Leone — descended from the speech of freed Africans resettled in Freetown from the late 18th century.
46
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
The most widely spoken Kurdish variety — a Northwestern Iranian language used by Kurds in Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq, Armenia, and the diaspora.
47
Kurdish (Sorani)
The Central Kurdish variety — official in Iraqi Kurdistan and widely used in western Iran — written in a modified Arabic script.
48
Kyrgyz
A Turkic language and the official tongue of Kyrgyzstan — closely related to Kazakh, with about 5 million speakers.
49
Levantine Arabic
The everyday Arabic vernacular of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine — known for its lighter sound and prominence in Arabic pop music.
50
Luxembourgish
A West Germanic language of Luxembourg — a national language alongside French and German, with about 390,000 speakers.
51
Maghrebi Arabic
The collective vernacular Arabic varieties of northwest Africa — spoken across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania, often called Darija.
52
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.
53
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.
54
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.
55
Marshallese
A Micronesian language of the Marshall Islands — co-official with English in the central Pacific atoll nation.
56
Norwegian
A North Germanic language with two written standards (Bokmål and Nynorsk) — official in Norway, mutually intelligible with Swedish and Danish.
57
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.
58
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.
59
Oromo
A Cushitic language and the most widely spoken first language in Ethiopia — written in a Latin alphabet known as Qubee since the 1990s.
60
Plains Cree
The largest dialect of Cree — a Central Algonquian language spoken across the Canadian prairies from Alberta to Manitoba.
61
Portuguese
A Romance language born in the Iberian northwest and spread by maritime empire — today the official language of Portugal, Brazil, and several African and Asian states.
62
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.
63
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.
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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.
65
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.
66
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.
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Sami (Northern)
A Uralic language and the most widely spoken Sami variety — indigenous to northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland with about 25,000 speakers.
68
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.
69
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.
70
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.
71
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.
72
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.
73
Sumerian
The language isolate of the world's earliest urban civilisation in southern Mesopotamia — the first language ever written down.
74
Tatar
A Turkic language of the Tatar people in Russia — the official language of Tatarstan, spoken by about 5 million people.
75
Tigrinya
A Semitic language of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia — written in Geʽez script and closely related to Amharic and the ancient Geʽez liturgical language.
76
Turkish
The most spoken Turkic language and the official language of Turkey — famous for vowel harmony and a relentlessly suffixing morphology.
77
Turkmen
A Turkic language and the official tongue of Turkmenistan — closely related to Turkish and Azerbaijani, with about 7 million speakers.
78
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.
79
Urdu
An Indo-Aryan language and the national language of Pakistan — written in a flowing Perso-Arabic script, sharing colloquial Hindustani roots with Hindi but a literary Persian heritage.
80
Uyghur
A Turkic language of Xinjiang in northwestern China — spoken by about 11 million Uyghurs, written in a modified Perso-Arabic script.
81
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.
82
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.
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