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Punjabi. Punjabi, sometimes spelled Panjabi, is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Punjab region of Pakistan and India. It is one of the most widely spoken native languages in the world, with approximately 150 million native speakers.
Mandarin. Mandarin is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are natively spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers, spread over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Its spread is generally attributed to the overall greater ease of travel in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of northern varieties to frontier areas.
Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect. Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin varieties are found north of the Yangtze River, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese.
Korean. Korean is the native language for about 81 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the national language of both North Korea and South Korea. In the south, the language is known as Hangugeo and in the north, it is known as Chos??n??. Since the turn of the 21st century, Korean popular culture has spread around the world through globalization and cultural exports. Korean uses the Hangul alphabet.
Malay. Malay is an Austronesian language native to several islands of Maritime Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula on mainland Asia. The language is an official language of Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, where the standardised variety is known as Indonesian; Indonesian is also one of the working languages of Timor-Leste. Malay is the ethnic language of Malays in Sumatra, Borneo and surrounding islands in Indonesia, southeast Philippines, southern Thailand, and the Southern Province of Sri Lanka. Altogether, it is spoken as a first language by about 80 million people and as a first or second language by close to 300 million.
Standard Chinese. Standard Chinese, often colloquially called Mandarin Chinese, is the modern standardized form of Mandarin Chinese, largely based on the Beijing dialect. It is the official lingua franca of the People's Republic of China, one of the six official languages of the United Nations and one of the four official languages of Singapore, and one of the national languages of Taiwan. It is a pluricentric language with local variations in Mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore, which mainly differ in accent and lexicon.
Modern Standard Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA) is the variety of standardized, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in some usages also the variety of spoken Arabic that approximates this written standard. MSA is the language used in literature, academia, print, mass media, and law and legislation, though it is generally not spoken as a first language, similar to Contemporary Latin. It is a pluricentric standard language taught throughout the Arab world in formal education, differing significantly from many vernacular varieties of Arabic that are commonly spoken as mother tongues in the area; these are only partially mutually intelligible with both MSA and with each other depending on their proximity in the Arabic dialect continuum.
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