98 Fun Facts About Languages

Which is the only Central American country where English is the official language?

Belize's English reflects its history as the British colony of British Honduras, which became independent only in 1981.

Which language has the most native (first-language) speakers in the world?

Mandarin as spoken around Beijing became the basis of the standard language China adopted as its national language in the early 20th century.

At India's 2011 census, which language ranked second by number of speakers?

Bengali speakers' 1952 protests for their language in East Pakistan are why UNESCO made 21 February International Mother Language Day.

Which country, home to hundreds of living languages, is the most linguistically diverse on Earth?

Papua New Guinea's many small language groups often rely on English or Tok Pisin, a pidgin that is one of its official languages, as common tongues.

Which language of the western Pyrenees is Europe's only known language isolate?

Basque was banned from public life and schools in Franco's Spain, yet Basque-medium schools spread across the region once democracy returned after 1975.

To which language family does Hungarian belong?

Uralic grammar survives in Hungarian, though, surrounded by unrelated neighbours, it borrowed many words from Turkic, Slavic, Latin and German.

Esperanto's creator worked in which profession?

An ophthalmologist, Zamenhof grew up amid quarrels between his city's ethnic groups and blamed them on the lack of a common language.

The Korean alphabet, Hangul, was created under which Joseon king in the 15th century?

Sejong the Great backed a new script because Chinese characters were so hard to learn that most commoners could not read.

Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries used to write which language?

Japanese hiragana flourished as a literary script around 1000 among ladies of the imperial court, so it came to be called 'woman's hand'.

Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union in 2007 when which country joined?

Latin and Greek were already in use; the euro banknotes gained a Cyrillic 'ЕВРО' as a result.

The Rosetta Stone's decree appears in hieroglyphs, Demotic and which third script that unlocked the others?

Ancient Greek could still be read, so it gave scholars a key to the Egyptian scripts, which Jean-François Champollion went on to decipher.

Which language is the only one revived from no native speakers into a national language with millions?

Hebrew went from a sacred, mostly written language to the everyday official language of Israel, a revival often credited to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

Silbo Gomero, a whistled form of Spanish taught in schools since 1999, is used on which Canary Island?

Whistles carry across the island's ravines for up to five kilometres; UNESCO listed it as intangible heritage in 2009.

In which South American country is the indigenous Guarani language spoken by most of the population?

Paraguay made Guarani an official language beside Spanish, a rare case where a colonial language did not push out the native one.

Te reo Māori became an official language of which country through a 1987 act?

New Zealand's schools once suppressed te reo Māori, but a revival movement later brought it back into classrooms.

Which country recognises Spanish plus 36 indigenous languages as official?

Bolivia's 2009 constitution made every indigenous language official, so its national and regional governments must work in at least two official languages.

Which of these is one of the United Nations' six official languages?

Russian has been an official UN language since 1946, yet the Security Council made it a working language only in 1969.

Which language was the last to be added as an official language of the United Nations, in 1973?

Arabic was added after the UN's Arab member states promised to meet the costs of using it for the first three years.

Sequoyah completed a syllabary in 1821 for which Native American language?

Cherokee soon had its own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, which from 1828 printed news in Sequoyah's syllabary.

Linguist Marc Okrand built a full alien language for which 1984 Star Trek film?

The Search for Spock's director, Leonard Nimoy, wanted the aliens to speak a structured language rather than gibberish, so Okrand expanded a dozen phrases into a grammar.

ASL is most closely related to which other signed language?

France's LSF came to America with Laurent Clerc, who taught in it at the American School for the Deaf, founded in 1817.

The earliest known writing system, cuneiform, was developed to write which language?

Sumerian was the first language written in cuneiform, and the script was later adapted to write several other languages of the ancient Near East.

The word 'cuneiform' comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning what?

Wedge-shaped marks came from pressing a stylus into wet clay tablets, rather than drawing lines on them.

Which US state's 1978 constitution made an indigenous language official alongside English?

Hawaii's Hawaiian language had become critically endangered, but immersion schools have raised a new generation of fluent speakers.

Potti Sriramulu died on hunger strike in 1952 demanding a state for speakers of which language?

Telugu speakers won their state: riots followed his death, and Nehru then announced that a state of Andhra would be created.

Which of these is one of Switzerland's four national languages?

Romansh has lost ground as a main language in Swiss censuses since 1970, as German has spread through its Graubünden heartland.

Latin remains the official language of which sovereign entity?

Pope Benedict XVI of the Holy See announced his resignation to the cardinals in Latin in 2013.

Duolingo, launched to the public in 2012, was created by two computer scientists at which university?

Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn started Duolingo with student Severin Hacker after selling reCAPTCHA, which helped digitise old books, to Google.

In 2023, Moldova's parliament ordered that the national language be called what in all its laws?

Romanian had already been ruled the official name by Moldova's Constitutional Court in 2013, overriding the 1994 constitution's 'Moldovan'.

Louis Braille was blinded at three by an accident in whose workshop?

His father's harness shop was where the boy injured his eye with a tool, and at 15 he adapted Charles Barbier's dot code into his own system.

Speakers of which modern language can still read the original 800-year-old sagas and Eddas?

Icelandic has kept its old grammar and coins new words from native roots, so the sagas stay readable, though its pronunciation has changed a great deal.

Which East African lingua franca takes its name from a word meaning 'of the coasts'?

Swahili is a Bantu language, but centuries of contact with Arab traders on the east African coast filled it with borrowed words, including its own name.

The Rigveda, one of the oldest known sacred texts of India, is written in an early form of which language?

Sanskrit hymns of the Rigveda were memorised and handed down orally, down to their intonation and rhythm, for centuries before being written.

The Khoisan languages of southern Africa are best known for which feature?

Click consonants spread from the Khoisan languages into some neighbouring Bantu languages through long contact between their speakers.

What was the first language of Nelson Mandela, who was born into the Thembu royal family?

Xhosa-speaking parents named him Rolihlahla at birth, and a schoolteacher later added the name Nelson.

The US Marine Corps' World War II code talkers built a code that was never broken on which language?

Navajo had no words for many military terms, so the code talkers coined descriptions such as 'iron fish' for a submarine.

The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799 by soldiers of which army?

French soldiers found it during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt, but it passed to the British when the French surrendered Egypt in 1801.

Tagalog is the basis of the national language of which Asian country?

The Philippines' President Manuel Quezon proclaimed a national language based on Tagalog by executive order in 1937.

American Sign Language began in 1817 at a school for the deaf in which city?

Hartford's school brought together pupils' home signs and local sign languages, which melded over time into ASL.

Which Star Trek alien language has had works such as Hamlet published in it?

Klingon's Hamlet grew out of a line in Star Trek VI claiming Shakespeare is best read 'in the original Klingon'.

Which language do most historians believe Jesus spoke in everyday life?

Aramaic had spread across the Middle East as a lingua franca and became an official language of the Persian empire centuries before Jesus.

Where does the mainstream Kurgan hypothesis place the Proto-Indo-European homeland?

The Pontic-Caspian steppe's Yamnaya herders left ancestry across Europe through a massive migration, supporting a steppe origin for some Indo-European languages.

Which two major branches of the Indo-European family are extinct?

Anatolian and Tocharian are the extinct branches, and Tocharian's discovery in western China upset the idea of an east–west centum–satem divide.

Afrikaans grew out of which European language, spoken by settlers at the Cape from the 1600s?

Dutch settlers' speech grew into Afrikaans, long treated as a mere dialect of Dutch before its campaigners won it official status.

In which Argentine province did Welsh settlers found the colony known as Y Wladfa?

Chubut's Welsh settlers built an irrigation system on the Chubut River that transformed farming in the arid lower valley.

Pirahã, spoken along Brazil's Maici River, is the last surviving dialect of which language?

Mura's other dialects died out as most Mura people switched to Portuguese, leaving Pirahã, spoken by only a few hundred people.

Toki Pona, a minimalist constructed language with about 120 words, was created by whom?

Sonja Lang designed Toki Pona to simplify her own thoughts, posting first drafts online in 2001 and publishing the complete book in 2014.

Which language is the sole official language of Andorra?

Catalan is Andorra's sole official language, and its 1993 constitution moved most power from two co-princes, one a Catalan bishop, to parliament.

David J. Peterson beat dozens of rival language creators to build Dothraki for which HBO series?

Game of Thrones needed a working language for its horse lords, so Peterson delivered more than 1,700 words before filming began. The novels had supplied only a few words and phrases.

Paul Frommer, a business school professor, created the Na'vi language for which James Cameron film?

Avatar's aliens had to sound like nothing on Earth, so Frommer drafted three test versions. Cameron liked the one full of ejectives, sharp popping sounds, and Na'vi was built around them.

In Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', which official language of Oceania is built to make rebellion unthinkable?

Newspeak keeps most of the grammar of ordinary speech but its vocabulary shrinks with every edition of the dictionary, until there are no words left in which to frame a forbidden idea.

Which country is home to the most native Spanish speakers, roughly 130 million people?

Mexico has about a quarter of the world's native speakers, far more than Spain, where the language grew up in the medieval Kingdom of Castile.

Koko, taught signs adapted from American Sign Language by Francine Patterson, was which kind of animal?

A gorilla born at San Francisco Zoo, Koko made National Geographic's cover twice: in 1978 with a photo she took of herself in a mirror, and in 1985 cradling her pet kitten, All-Ball.

The Romani language, carried across Europe by the Roma people, traces its origins to which region?

South Asia is where the ancestors of the Roma set out from more than a thousand years ago. Medieval Europeans guessed Egypt instead, a mistake preserved in the word 'Gypsy'.

Which letter, given the shortest Morse code signal of a single dot, appears most often in written English?

E turns up so often that Alfred Vail, working out the code with Samuel Morse, counted the metal type in a local newspaper's cases to see which letters deserved the quickest signals.

Which language supplies most of classical music's tempo markings, such as allegro, andante and presto?

Italian stuck because it was the language of most composers when the markings became standard. Allegro, now read as 'fast', literally means 'cheerful'.

Roughly how many living languages does the reference catalogue Ethnologue count across the whole world?

About 7,000 is the usual figure, and Ethnologue's tally has crept up from 5,445 in 1984 as varieties once lumped together are recognised as separate languages.

Whose 1828 dictionary popularised American spellings such as 'color' and added words like 'skunk'?

Noah Webster believed the British aristocracy had corrupted English by setting its own rules, so he picked simpler existing spellings such as 'defense' and 'traveler'.

Which thinker's theory of 'universal grammar' holds that children are born with the basic rules of language built in?

Noam Chomsky shot to fame with a review attacking B. F. Skinner, who treated language as entirely learned behaviour. Chomsky countered that part of grammar must be inborn.

Which collector of fairy tales also gave his name to a law of sound shifts in the Germanic languages?

Jacob Grimm set out the pattern in 1822: an ancient 'p' turned into a Germanic 'f', which is why English says 'father'. The Danish scholar Rasmus Rask had spotted it first.

Whose translation of the Bible, completed in 1534, helped to create a standard written German?

Martin Luther started the work while shut away in Wartburg Castle, and the newly invented printing press carried his wording so far that it shaped modern High German.

'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog', long used to test typewriters, is which kind of sentence?

A pangram uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. This one was already a favourite of handwriting teachers in 1885, when a Boston newspaper recommended it to pupils.

Which verbal slip, such as saying 'blushing crow' for 'crushing blow', is named after an Oxford clergyman?

Spoonerism honours William Spooner, warden of New College, though he probably never said most of the famous ones: the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations accepts only one as genuine.

Which symbol, born as a ligature of the Latin word 'et', was once taught as the 27th letter of the alphabet?

The ampersand got its name from pupils ending the alphabet with 'and per se and', meaning the sign that by itself stands for 'and'. Slurred together, the phrase became one word.

The word 'language' descends from the Latin 'lingua', which literally names which part of the body?

The tongue was the Romans' ordinary word for speech too, and the same root gives English 'linguist', 'bilingual' and even the pasta linguine.

Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo are the three most widely spoken native languages of which African country?

Nigeria has more than 520 native languages, so the everyday bridge between them is often Nigerian Pidgin, a creole spoken by over 60 million people.

Which Latin phrase, taken from an ode by the Roman poet Horace, is usually translated as 'seize the day'?

Carpe diem is really a gardening image: 'carpe' means to pick or pluck, so Horace was telling his reader to gather the day like ripe fruit.

The word 'orangutan' comes from two words meaning 'person' and 'forest' in which Southeast Asian language?

Malay 'orang hutan' at first described people who lived in the forest, and the earliest Malay text to use it for the ape treats that as a Western habit.

Which language gave English the words 'shampoo', 'loot' and 'jungle' in the days of the East India Company?

Hindi 'champo' was an order to press and knead, so to English speakers of the 1760s a shampoo was a massage of the body, not a way of washing hair.

The word 'robot' was introduced by the 1920 play 'R.U.R.', which was written in which language?

Czech 'robota' means the forced labour that serfs owed their masters. The playwright, Karel Čapek, said the word was really the invention of his brother Josef.

Which language of the Aztec Empire gave English the words 'chocolate', 'tomato' and 'avocado'?

Nahuatl also supplied 'chili' and 'coyote', and it is far from dead: about 1.7 million people still speak its modern varieties.

Which language of the Inca Empire gave English the animal names 'llama', 'puma' and 'condor'?

Quechua outlasted the empire that used it: its varieties still have roughly seven million speakers, more than any other indigenous language family in the Americas.

Which language, brought by settlers to northern and eastern England, gave English 'egg', 'knife', 'sky' and 'window'?

Old Norse came over with the Vikings. 'Window' is its 'vindauga', literally a 'wind eye', the opening that let air into a house.

Which language did J.R.R. Tolkien discover through the epic 'Kalevala' and use as a major inspiration for Elvish Quenya?

Finnish gave Quenya much of its sound, while Welsh was the main inspiration for Sindarin, the other great Elvish language of Middle-earth.

Which tonal language of Southeast Asia is written in a Latin alphabet devised by 17th-century Jesuit missionaries?

Vietnamese marks its tones with accents stacked on the vowels, a spelling worked out in the early 1600s by Francisco de Pina and other Jesuits who were trying to learn the language.

Dari in Afghanistan and Tajik in Tajikistan are both varieties of which language, known in Iran as Farsi?

Persian speakers in all three countries can understand one another. 'Dari' is thought to mean 'of the court', a memory of the royal court of the ancient Sasanian Empire.

Which alphabet, two letters of which form the Bluetooth logo, is known as the futhark after its first six letters?

Runic letters H and B, the initials of the tenth-century Danish king Harald Bluetooth, are merged in the logo, while 'futhark' just strings together the sounds of the first six runes.

Which seafaring people's 22-letter script, spread by their merchants, is the ancestor of many alphabets used today?

The Phoenicians left vowels unwritten, for readers to supply. Their traders took the letters to North Africa and southern Europe, where other peoples adapted them.

Which official language of the European Union is the only one that belongs to the Semitic family?

Maltese is also the only Semitic language officially written in the Latin script. It descends from a dialect once spoken in medieval Sicily, where it has long since died out.

Zulu, Shona and Lingala belong to which African language family, named after a shared word for 'people'?

Bantu echoes 'abantu', the word for 'people' in Zulu. Counts of its member languages run from 440 to 680, depending on where a dialect ends and a language begins.

Which language swapped its old script for a new 29-letter Latin alphabet in a sweeping reform of 1928?

Turkish changed alphabets under Atatürk, and the switch was strict: until 2013 the letters Q, W and X, which the new alphabet leaves out, were banned from official documents and street signs.

Which script, known for the horizontal line along the top of its letters, is used to write Marathi and Nepali?

Devanagari hangs its letters from that top line, and it is one of the most widely adopted writing systems in the world, serving more than 120 languages.

Which language's script, adapted from a script of southern India, holds the Guinness record for the most letters?

Khmer, the language of Cambodia, has 74 letters on Guinness's count, although some of them no longer have any use.

Which scholar beat Britain's Thomas Young to announce the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822?

Jean-François Champollion had an edge over his rival: he had learned Coptic from a priest in Paris, rightly believing it was the last stage of the pharaohs' language and the key to the signs.

The original 'lingua franca' was a trade pidgin used for centuries by merchants and sailors around which sea?

The Mediterranean version, also called Sabir, blended Venetian and Genoese with Spanish and other languages, and stayed in use from the 11th century to the 19th.

Which classical language of southern India is also an official language of both Sri Lanka and Singapore?

Tamil is one of the longest-surviving classical languages in the world, and in 2004 it became the first that India's government formally recognised as classical.

Amharic, written in a script inherited from ancient Ge'ez, is a working language of which country's federal government?

Ethiopia has used Amharic at court, in trade and in the army for centuries, which is how it earned the old title 'language of the king'.

The idea that the language a person speaks shapes how they think is popularly named after which pair of scholars?

Sapir and Whorf never formally put the hypothesis forward together; a student coined the label later. The idea is the premise of the 2016 film Arrival.

Malagasy, the national language of Madagascar, is most closely related to a language still spoken on which island?

Borneo lies more than 7,000 kilometres away across the ocean, yet Malagasy shares much of its basic vocabulary with Ma'anyan, a language of the island's Barito River region.

In which Central American country did deaf schoolchildren invent a brand-new sign language in the 1980s?

Nicaragua's new schools for deaf pupils taught lip-reading and spoken Spanish, so the children built a language of their own in the schoolyard and on the bus, to the delight of linguists.

On which New England island was hereditary deafness once so common that hearing neighbours used sign language too?

Martha's Vineyard had one deaf resident in every 155 by 1854, against about one in 5,730 across the United States, and hearing islanders sometimes signed even with no deaf person present.

International Mother Language Day, 21 February, commemorates student protesters shot by police in 1952 in which city?

Dhaka's students wanted the language of the majority recognised alongside Urdu, which Pakistan had declared its sole national language in 1948. UNESCO adopted the date in 1999.

The monk Mesrop Mashtots is revered for inventing which alphabet around AD 405, a script still in daily use?

Armenian letters were taught in schools that Mashtots himself founded around the country, and the alphabet became a cornerstone of national identity that has lasted some 1,600 years.

Rongorongo, a script of carved glyphs that has never been deciphered, was found in the 1800s where in the Pacific?

Easter Island's glyphs survive on only about two dozen wooden objects, now scattered among museums and private collections. None is left on the island itself.

Apart from Scots, which language is the closest living relative of English, as a rhyme about 'green cheese' shows?

Frisian has about 400,000 native speakers in the province of Friesland. 'Butter, bread and green cheese is good English and good Frisian' sounds almost the same in both languages.

Who deciphered the Bronze Age script Linear B in 1952, despite being an architect rather than a professional scholar?

Michael Ventris first met the puzzle at 14, on a school visit to an exhibition where Arthur Evans, the 85-year-old excavator of Knossos, showed the boys around himself.

Which alphabet, the oldest known Slavic script, was created in the 9th century by the missionary monk Saint Cyril?

Glagolitic, not Cyrillic, was the monk's own invention. The alphabet that carries his name was developed later by scribes who worked some of his letters into another script.

Dolly Pentreath, a Mousehole fishwife who died in 1777, is often called the last native speaker of which language?

Cornish probably did not die with her, since younger speakers are recorded, but a memorial naming her as the last person to converse in it made the story stick.