With an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, the Asian continent is the largest on earth. About 4.5 billion people live in the 47 internationally recognised states in Asia and they speak over 2,000 different languages. The development and maintenance of the languages has been completely different from that on the European continent, where short distances between countries have encouraged mixing of vocabularies. On the huge continent of Asia, on the other hand, some languages have been able to develop and remain free of major outside influences over the centuries.