Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. Contemporary linguists work under the assumption that spoken language is more fundamental, and thus more important to study, than written language. Theoretical linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields, such as the study of language structure (grammar) and meaning (semantics). The study of grammar encompasses morphology (formation and alteration of words) and syntax (the rules that determine the way words combine into phrases and sentences). Also part of this field are phonology, the study of sound systems and abstract sound units, and phonetics, which is concerned with the actual properties of speech sounds (phones), non-speech sounds, and how they are produced and perceived. Linguistics compares languages (comparative linguistics) and explores their histories to find universal properties of language and to account for its development and origins (historical linguistics). Applied linguistics puts linguistic theories into practice in areas such as foreign language teaching, speech therapy, translation, and speech pathology.

Hindi is the name given to an Indo-Aryan language, or a dialect continuum of languages, spoken in northern and central India (the "Hindi belt"), It is the national language of India. The native speakers of Hindi dialects between them account for 40% of the Indian population (1991 Indian census). Standard Hindi is one of the 22 official languages of India, and is used, along with English, for administration of the central government. Standard Hindi is a Sanskritized register derived from the khari boli dialect. Urdu is a different, Persianized, register of the same dialect. Taken together, these registers are historically also known as Hindustani. The word Hind? is of Persian origin and literally means "Indian", comprising Hind "India", and the adjectival suffix -?. The word was originally used by Muslims in north India to refer to any Indian language: for example the eleventh-century writer Ab? Rayh?n al-B?r?n? used it to refer to Sanskrit. By the 13th century, "Hindi", along with its variant forms "Hindavi" and "Hindui", had acquired a more specific meaning: the "linguistically mixed speech of Delhi, which came into wide use across north India and incorporated a component of Persian vocabulary". It was later used by members of the Mughal court to distinguish the local vernacular of the Delhi region where the court was located from Persian, which was the official language of the court. Evidence from the 17th century indicates that the language then called "Hindi" existed in two differing styles: among Muslims it was liable to contain a larger component of Persian-derived words and would be written down in a script derived from Persian, while among Hindus it used a vocabulary more influenced by Sanskrit and was written in Devanagari script. These styles eventually developed into modern Urdu and modern Hindi respectively. However the word "Urdu" was not used until around 1780: before then the word "Hindi" could be used for both purposes. The use of "Hindi" to designate what would now be called "Urdu" continued as late as the early twentieth century. Nowadays Hind? as taken to mean "Indian" is chiefly obsolete; it has come to specifically refer to the language(s) bearing that name.

Koreanis the official language of both North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 80 million Korean speakers, with large groups in various Post-Soviet states, as well as in other diaspora populations in China, Australia, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, and more recently, the Philippines. The genealogical classification of the Korean language is debated. Many linguists place it in the Altaic language family, but some consider it to be a language isolate. It is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. Like the Japanese and Vietnamese languages, Korean language was influenced by the Chinese language in the form of Sino-Korean words. Native Korean words account for about 35% of the Korean vocabulary, while about 60% of the Korean vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words. The remaining 5% comes from loan words from other languages, 90% of which are from English. Names The Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in North and South Korea. In North Korea and Yanbian in China, the language is most often called Chos?nmal , or more formally, Chos?n?. In the Republic of Korea, the language is most often called Hangukmal , or more formally, Hangugeo or Gugeo . It is sometimes colloquially called Urimal ("our language"; in one word in South Korea, with a space in North Korea). On the other hand, Korean people in the former USSR, who refer to themselves as Koryo-saram call the language Goryeomal .

Persian (Farsi) is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran (Persia), Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is derived from the language of the ancient Persian people. Persian and its varieties have official-language status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. According to CIA World Factbook, there are approximately 64 million native speakers of Persian in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and about the same number of people in other parts of the world speak Persian. UNESCO was asked to select Persian as one of its languages in 2006. Persian has been a medium for literary and scientific contributions to the Islamic world as well as the Western. It has had an influence on certain neighbouring languages, particularly the Turkic languages of Central Asia, Caucasus, and Anatolia. It has had a lesser influence on Arabic and other languages of Mesopotamia. For five centuries prior to the British colonization, Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent; it took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts in India and became the "official language" under the Mughal emperors. Only in 1843 did the subcontinent begin conducting business in English. Evidence of Persian's historical influence in the region can be seen in the extent of its influence on the languages of Hindustani (resulting in Urdu), Kashmiri, Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Bengali and even Telugu, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in the region. Persian, the more widely used name of the language in English, is an Anglicized form derived from Latin *Persianus < Latin Persia < Greek ?????? Pérsis, a Hellenized form of Old Persian Parsa. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term Persian seems to have been first used in English in the mid-16th century. Native Persian speakers call it "F?rsi" (local name) or Parsi. Farsi is the arabicized form of Parsi, due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic. According to Pejman Akbarzadeh, "... In English, however, this language has always been known as "Persian" ('Persane' in French and 'Persisch' in German). But many Persians migrating to the West (particularly to the USA) after the 1979 revolution continued to use 'Farsi' to identify their language in English and the word became commonplace in English-speaking countries." "Farsi" is encountered frequently in the linguistic literature as a name for the language, used both by Iranian and by foreign authors, and is preferred by some.However, The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has declared in an official pronouncement that the name "Persian" is more appropriate, as it has the longer tradition in the western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity.