Examples of Different Orthographies
BUGINESE
Buginese is spoken by about 4 million people in Southern Sulawesi (Celebes).
The Buginese-Mascassarese syllabary is based on an Indian model.
Attempts have been made in the twentieth century to write Buginese in the
Roman alphabet.
KHMER (Cambodian)
Cambodian is spoken by 6 or 7 million speakers in Cambodia and Vietnam.
The Khmer script derives from a variant of Devanagari.
MONGOLIAN (Classical)
The Mongolian literary language first appears in the thirteenth century
AD. According to Poppe (1964), the classical written language is still
used by Khalkhas and Buryats for private purposes.
The script derives from Aramaic via Sogdian and Uyghur.
RUSSIAN
Russian is spoken by about 160 million people as mother tongue, and by 60-70 million as second language.
Written Russian comes from Cyrillic, which replaced the original Church Slavonic script during the
language reform in the middle of the eighteenth century.
KOREAN
Korean is spoken by between 50 and 60 million people in North and South
Korea, and in Korean colonies in China, Japan, and elsewhere.
Korean was originally written with Chinese characters. King Sejong of the
fifteenth century commissioned the production of a phonetic alphabet of 28
letters to be used for writing Korean, but Chinese script continued to be
used for notating Korean until well into the nineteenth/twentieth
century. This method of writing (so-called Ômixed scriptÕ) was abandoned
in North Korea after 1945, and attempts are being made to phase it out in
South Korea.
This page was last updated on Tuesday, February 18, 1997
