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 S anywhere in the name. Each of the 75 languages below opens to a full profile.
Table of contents
List of Languages That Contain S
2
Assamese
An Indo-Aryan language and the official tongue of Assam in northeastern India — closely related to Bengali, with about 15 million native speakers.
3
Avestan
The Old Iranian language of the Zoroastrian sacred texts — closely related to Vedic Sanskrit and preserved entirely in religious literature.
4
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.
5
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.
6
Belarusian
An East Slavic language closely related to Russian and Ukrainian — one of two official languages of Belarus, though increasingly endangered as Russian dominates.
7
Bislama
An English-based creole that serves as the national language of Vanuatu — one of three official languages alongside English and French.
8
Bosnian
A South Slavic language standardized by Bosniaks — one of three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, mutually intelligible with Croatian and Serbian.
9
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.
10
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.
11
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.
12
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.
13
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.
14
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.
15
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.
16
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.
17
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.
18
Finnish
A Uralic language with elaborate agglutinative morphology — Finland's official tongue alongside Swedish, and one of the most grammatically distinctive languages in Europe.
19
Frisian
A cluster of West Germanic languages spoken in the Netherlands and Germany — English's closest living relative, with about 470,000 speakers.
20
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.
21
Hawaiian Sign Language
An indigenous sign language of the Hawaiian Islands — only recently documented and likely the last surviving member of its language family.
22
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.
23
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.
24
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.
25
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.
26
Japanese
A Japonic language spoken by about 125 million people in Japan — written in a hybrid script combining Chinese characters with two indigenous syllabaries.
27
Javanese
An Austronesian language spoken by 82 million people on the Indonesian island of Java — famous for its elaborate speech levels marking social hierarchy.
28
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
The most widely spoken Kurdish variety — a Northwestern Iranian language used by Kurds in Turkey, Syria, northern Iraq, Armenia, and the diaspora.
29
Kurdish (Sorani)
The Central Kurdish variety — official in Iraqi Kurdistan and widely used in western Iran — written in a modified Arabic script.
30
Luxembourgish
A West Germanic language of Luxembourg — a national language alongside French and German, with about 390,000 speakers.
31
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.
32
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.
33
Marshallese
A Micronesian language of the Marshall Islands — co-official with English in the central Pacific atoll nation.
34
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.
35
Old English
The West Germanic language spoken in early medieval England — the language of *Beowulf*, unrecognisable to modern English speakers without study.
36
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.
37
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.
38
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.
39
Plains Cree
The largest dialect of Cree — a Central Algonquian language spoken across the Canadian prairies from Alberta to Manitoba.
40
Polish
A West Slavic language spoken by about 45 million people — Poland's national language and a major European tongue with a famously consonant-rich phonology.
41
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.
42
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.
43
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.
44
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.
45
Sami (Northern)
A Uralic language and the most widely spoken Sami variety — indigenous to northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland with about 25,000 speakers.
46
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.
47
Sango
A Ngbandi-based creole that serves as the national language of the Central African Republic.
48
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.
49
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.
50
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.
51
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.
52
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).
53
Sicilian
A Romance language spoken in Sicily, Calabria, and parts of Apulia — recognized by UNESCO as vulnerable, with about 4.7 million speakers.
54
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.
55
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.
56
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.
57
Slovak
A West Slavic language closely related to Czech — the official language of Slovakia, often considered the most central Slavic tongue in mutual intelligibility.
58
Slovene
A South Slavic language and Slovenia's official tongue — notable for preserving the rare grammatical dual number, used for exactly two of something.
59
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.
60
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.
61
Sotho
A Bantu language spoken by about 6 million people across Lesotho, South Africa, and Zimbabwe — also called Sesotho or Southern Sotho.
62
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.
63
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.
64
Sumerian
The language isolate of the world's earliest urban civilisation in southern Mesopotamia — the first language ever written down.
65
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.
66
Swedish
A North Germanic language and the most-spoken Scandinavian tongue — official in Sweden and Finland, with a characteristic pitch accent.
67
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.
68
Turkish
The most spoken Turkic language and the official language of Turkey — famous for vowel harmony and a relentlessly suffixing morphology.
69
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.
70
Welsh
A Celtic language and one of the oldest living languages in Europe — co-official in Wales, with about 884,000 speakers and active government support for revitalization.
71
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.
72
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.
73
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.
74
Yiddish
A High German language with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic admixture — the historical mother tongue of Ashkenazi Jews and still spoken in Hasidic communities worldwide.
75
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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