The Countries of the World in 128 Languages and 16 Scripts

One heading, 128 languages

The countries of the world, les pays du monde, los países del mundo, die Länder der Welt: the phrase below is the same in every row, a heading meaning “the countries of the world” followed by the name of the language it is written in. The collection covers 128 languages in 16 scripts, from Abkhaz to Zazaki, and gives each in the script or scripts its speakers use.

Languages that are written in more than one alphabet appear once per script. Uzbek is given in Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic letters, and Tatar likewise. Bosnian appears in Latin, Cyrillic and the Arabic-based Arebica, Malay in Latin (Rumi) and Arabic-based Jawi, and Ladino in Hebrew and Latin letters. Kazakh and Kyrgyz have a Cyrillic and an Arabic-script version, Uyghur an Arabic-script and a Cyrillic one. The tables are sorted by script, so the Cyrillic line for Uzbek sits among the Cyrillic entries and the Arabic-script line among the right-to-left ones.

How the languages say “of the world”

The two halves of the heading, the countries and the world, are joined in very different ways, and the lines above show most of them.

Possessive endings and articles

Danish Verdens lande and Swedish Världens länder put the world first in the genitive, with the article fused to the noun. Finnish Maailman maat and Estonian Maailma maad also use a genitive. Hungarian turns the order round and marks the owned thing: A világ országai, literally “the world its-countries”. Turkish dünya ülkeleri and Uzbek dunyo davlatlari do the same with a possessive suffix on the second word.

The construct state and the ezafe

Arabic بلدان العالم sets the two nouns side by side and gives the article only to the second, the construct form of Semitic grammar; Hebrew ארצות העולם works the same way. Persian کشورهای جهان links them with the unwritten vowel e, the ezafe, and Tajik writes the same phrase in Cyrillic as Кишварҳои ҷаҳон.

Naming the language

The second half, “in English”, is just as varied. Russian по-русски and Polish po polsku use an adverb, Hungarian magyarul and Basque euskaraz a case ending, Welsh yn Gymraeg a mutated noun after a preposition. Swahili Kiswahili carries the class prefix ki- that marks language names, and Japanese 日本語 ends in 語, the character for language.

Old typefaces and other spellings

The second German line, Die Länder der Welt auf Deutſch, shows the long s of Fraktur printing; the Irish Tíorṫa an doṁain shows the dot above that Gaelic type used where modern spelling writes an h. Moldovan appears in Latin letters and in the Cyrillic alphabet used in the Soviet period: Țările lumii în moldovenească and Цэриле лумий ын молдовеняскэ.