Edit 1: I've updated the map and the data. The latest data avaliable is by Ethnologue and is as of 2019.
As per standards, I've removed dialects entirely, especially affecting Hindi (after much research on the Hindi Belt and languages/dialects such as Bhojpuri and Magahi). I have also replaced a small number of Ethnologue's estimations with figures from the languages' specific Wikipedia pages, if the former estimation was influenced by the splitting of dialects.
I've resized all of the circles, as well as redrawn the map to define the continental borders between Asia and other continents.
Bit strange for "Min" to be accepted as "Min nan", but to have to type "Min bei" in full. Min nan/Min bei just mean Southern/Northern Min. I think you should either combine the two into "min", or have to type Minnan/Minbei in full for each.
Another NALN here - not a language nerd. But then I'm also NAWCN (world capitals) and NAFN (not a flag nerd). (I am learning, thanks to these quizzes, but I'll never achieve nerd status on any of them.)
Ask your family, I m nowhere near knowing all the capitals, I think they think I am a geography nerd for even knowing all the countries. And well mainly for keeping on trying to learn things on here. (In a good way, like "man you must be a master at that stuff now" )
Now I'm wondering how many people in Asia count English as their native language. (Definitely some in Singapore, probably also in India and maybe Hong Kong. Probably not enough in total to make it into this quiz though.)
It is native speakers only. It's very subjective, the total number of speakers. What counts as fluent? Those kinds of questions need to be asked. I know that a couple hundred thousand people in India speak English natively, can't say about the other countries but the total number is probably no more than 1 to 2 million...? Just an estimate.
True, in Europe there's "Serbian" and "Croatian" where there used to be only Serbo-Croatian, and there's "Czech" and "Slovak" which (to a lesser degree) also used to be one language, until politics intervened in both cases.
Hindi and Urdu are under a similar scenario, as they were specifically seperated due to politics/religion. Urdu simply has more Persianised words, while Hindi has more Sanskritised words. The caveat explains you must guess them seperately, however.
Czech and Slovak are similar languages with some degree of mutual intelligibility. Although there never existed a Czechoslovak language, there was an effort to create one prior to WWII. To this day, people tend to group Czechs and Slovakia together, however the two nations are on friendly terms unlike the powder keg that was Yugoslavia.
my mum is slovak, and so its my second language. i can honestly tell you theres a difference in the pronunciation of the words and also changes in the words themselves. another thing is that whilst they can for the most part understand each other, it is more slovak speakers being able to understand czech ones, because of czech being a more spoken language (when things are dubbed/subtitled, czech is the more common option, meaning slovak speakers have to adapt).
Is it just my browser but randomly throughout this site, including this quiz, the map extends on to the answer grid, start button, type in field and other places. Can it be set to that it doesn't do that please? No form of zooming in or out on my screen affects this. In this one 3 of the answers when I finish are covered up (by Australia which doesn't need to be there) so I am clueless about what they were unless I hover over each individual dot to identify them.
And here I always thought Syhleti and Chittagonian are dialects of Bengali cause even I'm a bengi....🤣🤣🤣🤣....so funny....I don't even so this much about my mother tongue.
In future I will update this quiz and remove some dialects. I've come to learn that Chittagongian and Sylheti are part of the greater Bengali language :P
Actually after my research and also studying bengali (which is my compulsory school subject) I have also come to the conclusion that Shyleti is not really a full dialect of Bengali. Modern Bengali and Shyleti are not entirely intangible plus Shyleti uses its own Shyleti Nagari script.
btw, can you accept Dakhini for Deccani? That's what I know it.
Sylheti is, in the words of Wikipedia, 'generally considered to be a dialect of Bengali'. Just because a dialect is not understandable, it does not make it a seperate language. Examples of this include English--Scots, German--Swiss German, etc. While sometimes these dialects are considered seperate languages, and many dialects have movements to be recognised as such, for this quiz and my 'Top European Languages' quiz I am using a more conservative definition as is used across many Jetpunk quizzes. 'Dakhini' is accepted, as it is an automatic type-in.
Good Attempt, but recognising dialects like Haryanvi and Bhojpuri as languages is incorrect. And the anglicizations like "Deccani" and "Magahi" made me cringe.
Haryanvi is basically just Hindi, but Bhojpuri is usually classified as a distinct language despite mutual intelligence with surrounding languages. Sorry about the butchered Anglicisations, that is what us Anglophones do best, haha :P
why do you have different standards for what constitutes a language in this quiz as compared to your indo-aryan language quiz? in that one, you didn't include deccani but you did include Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, braj bhasha, awadhi, etc. if you wanted to avoid dialects, why is Hindustani split up into three, not including the actual languages considered dialects of it?
In this quiz there is more of a political element to why I divided Hindustani, and it's more so describing the formal versions of Urdu and Hindi which are standardised in Pakistan and India. Deccani is an awkward case here, because it doesn't fit into Urdu or Hindi. in the Indo-Aryan quiz, I could be a little more lenient because I was allowing dialects (which technically speaking are languages themselves) and I focused more on the regional varieties than the prescriptive languages which are taught by the state and used in media. The Indo-Aryan languages quiz was overall better researched than this one, although they both have their own flaws and take slightly different angles.
Bahasa Melayu/Bahasa Indonesia are the local names for the language, not the English names. If I were to accept them, I should also accept 'español', 'français' and 'русский' on this quiz/the European version I made.
I have updated the quiz to include 'Nepalese' as a type in. However, 'Nepalese' generally refers to the people rather than the language. Wikipedia lists it as an alternative name for the language, along with Gorkhali, Khas Kura and Parbate.
I don't believe the Chinese languages can be reasonably called dialects, I am not sure why they are sometimes grouped together. On the other hand, while I do believe than Hindi and Urdu (and less importantly Deccani) can be called a single language, many would seperate them as distinct languages. Therefore I see no reason to have anything else as the caveat.
North Indian languages (Punjabi, Gujarati, etc.) are typically Indo-Aryan and closely related Hindi is the second language (with English being a third language especially amongst the educated). Meanwhile there isn't really a dominant South Indian language, they are mostly Dravidian and not related to the North Indian languages at all. Therefore South Indians will learn English and knowledge of Hindi is less common. In Northeast India you can find Sino-Tibetan languages, and it's another story altogether.
Expanding on that (as a semi-fluent Bengali speaker), Indo-Aryan languages often have similar vocabulary and grammar but can sound completely different. When I hear spoken Hindi or Punjabi, I can't keep track of the words for the life of me, but when I see it transliterated into English, I see the resemblance to Bengali. South Indian languages, on the other hand, are completely different. Comparing Hindi to Tamil, for example, would be like comparing English to Arabic--maybe some loan words and a few glancing similarities, but otherwise not alike in any way.
Also, among the upper classes of South Asian society, code-switching between English and the regional language is very common. My cousins don't even usually speak pure Bengali to each other--there's almost always some English mixed in. This changes when you start talking about older people or poorer people though--one of my grandmothers has lived in the countryside her whole life and can't speak a word of English.
I find this really interesting about some of the Indo-Aryan languages. Between Hindi and Nepali, many of the words are the exact same, yet the accent sounds very different. I guess if people are really used to hearing the words of another language, then they become quicker at identifying them and understanding.
I have Nepali friends who consume a lot of Hindi media (songs, Bollywood films, serials) and so they understand it well, even if their speaking skills are not so high. Once they went to an event with Gujarati speakers, and not only could they not understand anything, but they found the speech quite funny because a lot of the words had vastly different meanings in Nepali.
They code-switch a lot too. I guess when you interact in multiple languages (or even accents) frequently enough, you don't even have to think about it!
Yeah, I also code-switch a lot, it's pretty normal in India. Most of the words that get replaced with English is Sanskrit vocabulary from my observation, as it is seen as obscure and archaic, even though it shouldn't be. I hope that I and other Indians can be able to speak fully in our own languages again. I'm fine with loan words entering and code-switching for convenience but also forgetting native words is sad.
You can divide them into 2 groups, south and north. These are 95% unintelligible, except for the occasional common Sanskrit word. South Indian languages have similar grammar between each other but otherwise are very different, so South Indians like me usually speak English as a second language. English is almost always used to communicate between people who know English and speak different languages. I speak Telugu so I don't know about the differences between North Indian languages, but I know a bit of Hindi and even less of Marathi, and I think a comparison could be English with Dutch and German. You sometimes find a familiar or the same noun or verb, but the grammar and sounds are pretty different and there are of course many false friends.
So unfortunately for us Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam speakers, we have to start almost from scratch when learning a new language.
Dari is considered as a Persian dialect for the purpose of this quiz (although as a non-Persian speaker I cannot comment on the differences between Iranian Farsi and Dari).
Great quiz! How did you determine exactly where the language originated from? I am working on a map of every Wikipedia language and am unsure where I should place the dots. I haven't found any good sources detailing the exact cities/areas where the languages' origins came from
Thank you! That is a good question, I had to do less original research on this quiz as opposed to my European languages quiz, since another quiz by relessness had already done that for me. Research involves pretty much just scrolling through Wikipedia articles on each of the languages under the history section, although it is highly debatable when the 'modern version' of each language truly began.
For example, I have one source claiming the Nepali language originated in northwestern Nepal, but Wikipedia claims it was first institutionalised by the Gorkha Kingdom which is where the dot is placed on my map.
It is a little subjective, but I prefer this method to placing the dot over the largest city that speaks X language. The placements are not exact. Best of luck with your Wikipedia quiz and I hope I was able to help :D
Edit 1: I've updated the map and the data. The latest data avaliable is by Ethnologue and is as of 2019.
As per standards, I've removed dialects entirely, especially affecting Hindi (after much research on the Hindi Belt and languages/dialects such as Bhojpuri and Magahi). I have also replaced a small number of Ethnologue's estimations with figures from the languages' specific Wikipedia pages, if the former estimation was influenced by the splitting of dialects.
I've resized all of the circles, as well as redrawn the map to define the continental borders between Asia and other continents.
Thank you everyone for playing!
Marwadi for Marwari and Khazakh for Kazakh
btw, can you accept Dakhini for Deccani? That's what I know it.
Also, among the upper classes of South Asian society, code-switching between English and the regional language is very common. My cousins don't even usually speak pure Bengali to each other--there's almost always some English mixed in. This changes when you start talking about older people or poorer people though--one of my grandmothers has lived in the countryside her whole life and can't speak a word of English.
I have Nepali friends who consume a lot of Hindi media (songs, Bollywood films, serials) and so they understand it well, even if their speaking skills are not so high. Once they went to an event with Gujarati speakers, and not only could they not understand anything, but they found the speech quite funny because a lot of the words had vastly different meanings in Nepali.
They code-switch a lot too. I guess when you interact in multiple languages (or even accents) frequently enough, you don't even have to think about it!
So unfortunately for us Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam speakers, we have to start almost from scratch when learning a new language.
For example, I have one source claiming the Nepali language originated in northwestern Nepal, but Wikipedia claims it was first institutionalised by the Gorkha Kingdom which is where the dot is placed on my map.
It is a little subjective, but I prefer this method to placing the dot over the largest city that speaks X language. The placements are not exact. Best of luck with your Wikipedia quiz and I hope I was able to help :D