Language directory

Albanian Shqip

Albanian · 50 clips

Albanian is the only surviving member of its own language branch.

Amharic አማርኛ

Semitic · 20 clips

Amharic is written in the unique Ethiopic syllabary, not the Latin or Arabic script.

Often confused with: Arabic

Arabic العربية

Semitic · 133 clips

Arabic has no verb "to be" in the present tense — sentences simply place words side by side.

Often confused with: Persian, Hebrew, Maltese

Armenian Հայերեն

Armenian · 50 clips

Armenian has had its own alphabet since the year 405.

Often confused with: Georgian

Azerbaijani Azərbaycan dili

Turkic · 20 clips

Azerbaijani is close enough to Turkish that the two are often mutually intelligible.

Often confused with: Turkish, Uzbek

Belarusian Беларуская

Slavic · 20 clips

Belarusian sits between Russian, Ukrainian and Polish and shares features with all three.

Often confused with: Russian, Ukrainian, Polish

Bengali বাংলা

Indo-Aryan · 20 clips

Bengali is the seventh most spoken language in the world and has no grammatical gender.

Bosnian Bosanski

Slavic · 50 clips

Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are mutually intelligible.

Often confused with: Croatian, Serbian

Bulgarian Български

Slavic · 50 clips

Bulgarian and Macedonian are among the few Slavic languages that attach definite articles as suffixes rather than using separate articles.

Often confused with: Macedonian, Serbian

Burmese မြန်မာဘာသာ

Sino-Tibetan · 20 clips

Burmese is written in a rounded script traditionally shaped for writing on palm leaves.

Often confused with: Thai

Cantonese 廣東話

Sino-Tibetan · 20 clips

Cantonese has six tones and preserves many sounds Mandarin has lost.

Often confused with: Mandarin Chinese

Catalan Català

Romance · 20 clips

Catalan is not a dialect of Spanish — it is closer in some ways to Occitan and French.

Often confused with: Spanish, French, Italian

Croatian Hrvatski

Slavic · 50 clips

Croatian has a pitch-accent system where the same word can carry a rising or falling tone on long or short syllables, a distinction rarely marked in ordinary spelling.

Often confused with: Bosnian, Serbian, Slovenian

Czech Čeština

Slavic · 50 clips

Czech has a rare rolled fricative sound written ř (háček), a feature shared with few other Slavic languages.

Often confused with: Slovak, Polish

Danish Dansk

Germanic · 50 clips

Danish uses a glottal feature called stød to tell words apart, one of the traits that sets it apart from its North Germanic neighbours.

Often confused with: Norwegian, Swedish

Dutch Nederlands

Germanic · 53 clips

Dutch sits linguistically between English and German, and Afrikaans grew directly out of it.

Often confused with: German

English English

Germanic · 345 clips

English vocabulary has been shaped by borrowings from many other languages, so a large share of its words are not Germanic in origin.

Often confused with: Dutch, German

Estonian Eesti

Uralic · 50 clips

Estonian has three degrees of vowel and consonant length, an unusual trait even within the wider Uralic family.

Often confused with: Finnish

Finnish Suomi

Uralic · 53 clips

Finnish has a large number of grammatical cases, commonly cited as around 15, and is unrelated to Swedish or Russian.

Often confused with: Estonian

French Français

Romance · 133 clips

French is an official language on multiple continents and is used in international organizations alongside English.

Often confused with: Italian

Georgian ქართული

Kartvelian · 50 clips

Georgian has its own unique alphabet with 33 letters.

Often confused with: Armenian

German Deutsch

Germanic · 53 clips

German allows long compound nouns to be built by joining words together, occasionally producing very long single words.

Often confused with: Dutch, English

Greek Ελληνικά

Hellenic · 53 clips

Greek has been written continuously for over 3,000 years — the longest of any Indo-European language.

Hebrew עברית

Semitic · 53 clips

Hebrew is the only language successfully revived as an everyday spoken language after centuries of liturgical use.

Often confused with: Arabic

Hindi हिन्दी

Indo-Aryan · 20 clips

Hindi and Urdu are largely mutually intelligible when spoken, but use completely different writing systems.

Often confused with: Urdu, Punjabi, Nepali

Hungarian Magyar

Uralic · 53 clips

Hungarian belongs to the Uralic family and is not Indo-European — its closest relatives are in Siberia.

Icelandic Íslenska

Germanic · 50 clips

Icelandic has changed relatively little over time, and speakers can often read medieval Old Norse texts with some effort — a hallmark of its North Germanic island isolation.

Indonesian Bahasa Indonesia

Austronesian · 50 clips

Indonesian verbs do not change for tense.

Often confused with: Malay

Italian Italiano

Romance · 53 clips

Modern Italian is largely based on the Tuscan dialect used by Dante in the 14th century.

Often confused with: Spanish, Portuguese

Japanese 日本語

Japonic · 53 clips

Japanese uses three writing systems at once: hiragana, katakana and kanji.

Often confused with: Korean

Kazakh Қазақша

Turkic · 20 clips

Kazakh is a Turkic language written in Cyrillic, with a gradual switch to Latin under way.

Often confused with: Tatar

Korean 한국어

Koreanic · 53 clips

Hangul is a featural alphabet devised in 1443 under King Sejong the Great, with letter shapes designed to reflect the position of the tongue and mouth during articulation.

Often confused with: Japanese

Latin Latina

Italic · 20 clips

Latin is the ancestor of every Romance language and is still the official language of Vatican City.

Often confused with: Italian

Latvian Latviešu

Baltic · 50 clips

Latvian stress falls fixed on the first syllable of nearly every word, unlike its close relative Lithuanian, where stress can move between syllables.

Often confused with: Lithuanian

Lithuanian Lietuvių

Baltic · 50 clips

Lithuanian keeps a free, movable pitch-accent system and is often cited as the most phonologically conservative living Indo-European language.

Often confused with: Latvian

Macedonian Македонски

Slavic · 50 clips

Macedonian is the only South Slavic language with fixed antepenultimate stress, meaning stress almost always falls on the third-to-last syllable of a word.

Often confused with: Bulgarian, Serbian

Malay Bahasa Melayu

Austronesian · 20 clips

Malay and Indonesian are close enough that speakers understand each other easily.

Often confused with: Indonesian

Maltese Malti

Semitic · 50 clips

Maltese is a Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet.

Often confused with: Arabic, Italian

Mandarin Chinese 普通话

Sino-Tibetan · 20 clips

Mandarin uses four tones; the same syllable can mean four different things.

Often confused with: Cantonese

Nepali नेपाली

Indo-Aryan · 20 clips

Nepali uses the same Devanagari script as Hindi but the two languages have distinct pronunciation and grammar.

Often confused with: Hindi

Norwegian Norsk

Germanic · 50 clips

Norwegian has two official written standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk, both within the North Germanic branch.

Often confused with: Swedish, Danish

Persian فارسی

Iranian · 50 clips

Persian is written in Arabic script but is an Indo-European language.

Often confused with: Arabic

Polish Polski

Slavic · 53 clips

Polish is famous for consonant clusters like "szcz", as in the city Szczecin, typical of the West Slavic branch it shares with Czech and Slovak.

Often confused with: Czech, Slovak, Belarusian

Portuguese Português

Romance · 93 clips

More people speak Portuguese in Brazil than in every other Portuguese-speaking country combined.

Often confused with: Spanish, Italian

Punjabi ਪੰਜਾਬੀ

Indo-Aryan · 20 clips

Punjabi is one of the few Indo-European languages that is tonal.

Often confused with: Hindi, Urdu

Romanian Română

Romance · 50 clips

Romanian is one of the few Romance languages spoken natively in Eastern Europe.

Often confused with: Italian, Spanish

Russian Русский

Slavic · 53 clips

Russian is one of the most widely spoken languages in Europe by number of native speakers.

Often confused with: Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian

Serbian Srpski

Slavic · 50 clips

Serbian is written in both Cyrillic and Latin script.

Often confused with: Bosnian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian

Slovak Slovenčina

Slavic · 50 clips

Slovak and Czech speakers, both West Slavic, usually understand each other easily.

Often confused with: Czech, Polish

Slovenian Slovenščina

Slavic · 50 clips

Slovenian still uses the dual, a form for exactly two things.

Often confused with: Croatian

Spanish Español

Romance · 161 clips

Spanish is the world's second-most spoken native language, with around 480 million native speakers.

Often confused with: Italian, Portuguese, Catalan

Swahili Kiswahili

Bantu · 20 clips

Swahili is a Bantu language written in the Latin alphabet with many Arabic loanwords, reflecting centuries of East African coastal trade.

Swedish Svenska

Germanic · 53 clips

Swedish has a musical pitch accent, common among North Germanic languages — the same syllables can mean different things depending on melody.

Often confused with: Norwegian, Danish

Tagalog Tagalog

Austronesian · 20 clips

Tagalog mixes Austronesian grammar with a large amount of Spanish vocabulary.

Often confused with: Indonesian, Malay

Tajik Тоҷикӣ

Iranian · 20 clips

Tajik is a variety of Persian written in Cyrillic.

Often confused with: Persian

Tamil தமிழ்

Dravidian · 20 clips

Tamil has a continuous literary tradition of more than 2,000 years.

Tatar Татарча

Turkic · 20 clips

Tatar is a Turkic language spoken along the Volga, written in Cyrillic.

Often confused with: Kazakh

Thai ไทย

Kra-Dai · 53 clips

Written Thai has no spaces between words — readers infer the boundaries.

Often confused with: Vietnamese, Burmese

Turkish Türkçe

Turkic · 53 clips

Turkish is agglutinative: a single word can carry what English needs a whole sentence for.

Often confused with: Azerbaijani, Uzbek

Ukrainian Українська

Slavic · 50 clips

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language with its own distinct phonology, vocabulary, and literary tradition separate from Russian.

Often confused with: Russian, Polish, Belarusian

Urdu اردو

Indo-Aryan · 20 clips

Urdu is written in a flowing Perso-Arabic script and borrows heavily from Persian and Arabic vocabulary.

Often confused with: Hindi, Punjabi

Uzbek Oʻzbekcha

Turkic · 20 clips

Uzbek is the most widely spoken Turkic language of Central Asia.

Often confused with: Azerbaijani, Turkish

Vietnamese Tiếng Việt

Austroasiatic · 53 clips

Vietnamese has six tones, and writes them with a Latin alphabet full of diacritics.

Often confused with: Thai

Zulu isiZulu

Bantu · 20 clips

Zulu is a Southern Bantu language known for click consonants written as c, q and x, borrowed historically from neighbouring Khoisan languages.