1
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.
Below are languages that contain the letter Y anywhere in the name. Each of the 17 languages below opens to a full profile.
List of Languages That Contain Y
2
Buryat
A Mongolic language of the Buryat people in Siberia, Mongolia, and northern China — about 460,000 speakers, related to Khalkha Mongolian.
3
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.
4
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.
5
Kyrgyz
A Turkic language and the official tongue of Kyrgyzstan — closely related to Kazakh, with about 5 million speakers.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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.
9
Quenya
A fictional Elvish language created by J.R.R. Tolkien — the "Elven-Latin" of Middle-earth, designed to evoke Finnish and Latin aesthetics.
10
Tigrinya
A Semitic language of Eritrea and northern Ethiopia — written in Geʽez script and closely related to Amharic and the ancient Geʽez liturgical language.
11
Uyghur
A Turkic language of Xinjiang in northwestern China — spoken by about 11 million Uyghurs, written in a modified Perso-Arabic script.
12
Yakut
A Turkic language of the Sakha Republic in eastern Siberia — the easternmost Turkic language, spoken by about 450,000 people.
13
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.
14
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.
15
Yucatec Maya
A Mayan language spoken across Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and Belize — the largest of the Mayan languages, with about 770,000 speakers.
16
Yuchi
A language isolate of the Yuchi people of Oklahoma — once spoken across the southeastern United States, now critically endangered.
17
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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