50 Fun Facts About Languages

Counting native and second-language speakers together, which language has the most speakers in the world?

Ethnologue puts English near 1.5 billion total speakers; Mandarin leads on native speakers alone, with close to a billion.

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

Nearly a billion people grow up speaking it; Spanish is usually second on native speakers, and Hindi third on total speakers.

Roughly how many living languages are there in the world, according to most estimates?

Consensus is grim about their future: between 50 and 90 percent of the languages spoken in 2000 are expected to be extinct by 2100.

Which country, with about 840 living languages, is the most linguistically diverse on Earth?

Its official languages are English, Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu and PNG Sign Language; most of the 840 have only a few thousand speakers.

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

About 806,000 people speak Euskara, more than 90 percent of them on the Spanish side; Hungarian and Maltese have relatives, however distant.

L. L. Zamenhof, the doctor who published Esperanto in 1887, chose a pen name meaning what?

'Doktoro Esperanto' gave the language its name; with up to two million speakers it remains the most widely spoken constructed language.

Esperanto's creator worked in which profession?

Zamenhof grew up in multilingual Białystok, then in the Russian Empire, and self-published the Unua Libro on 26 July 1887.

The Korean alphabet, Hangul, was created under which king, whose scholars shaped the letters after the speech organs that produce them?

Announced around 1443 and published in 1446, it let commoners write without years of Chinese-character study; ㅁ is literally a picture of the mouth.

The Cyrillic script, used for Russian, Ukrainian and Serbian, arose in the 9th century in which state?

Disciples of Cyril and Methodius shaped it at the Preslav Literary School; the name honours Saint Cyril rather than crediting him as author.

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?

Found by a French officer in 1799, it has sat in the British Museum since 1802; Champollion announced his decipherment in 1822.

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

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda is usually credited as the reviver; the process ran from the late 19th century into the 20th.

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.

How far can a message in Silbo Gomero, the whistled language of the Canaries, be carried?

That is farther than any shout, which is why shepherds developed it; it became a mandatory school subject in 1999.

How many letters does the Rotokas alphabet, one of the world's smallest, use?

Its Central dialect also has one of the world's smallest inventories of consonant sounds; Hawaiian, by comparison, uses 13 letters.

Which country recognises Spanish plus 36 indigenous languages as official?

Bolivia's 2009 constitution makes every indigenous language official; South Africa has 12, India 22 'scheduled' languages.

How many official languages does the United Nations have?

English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese were chosen in 1946; Arabic was added in 1973.

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

The other five had been official since 1946; German, Portuguese and Hindi have all lobbied without success since.

In which year did Sequoyah complete his Cherokee syllabary?

Within years the Cherokee Nation had a newspaper; the giant sequoia may or may not be named after him, a claim now questioned.

The warlike aliens' language in Star Trek was commissioned from linguist Marc Okrand for which 1984 film?

Leonard Nimoy wanted structured speech instead of gibberish; Hamlet has since been translated into Klingon and Duolingo opened a course in 2018.

ASL is most closely related to which other signed language?

Laurent Clerc brought it from Paris to the American School for the Deaf in Hartford in 1817; ASL and BSL are not mutually intelligible.

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

Its wedge-shaped signs (Latin cuneus) were pressed into clay with a reed stylus in southern Mesopotamia; the first unequivocal documents date to about 3300 BC.

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

The wedge shapes came from pressing the corner of a stylus into wet clay rather than drawing lines.

Which US state has two official languages, one of them an indigenous Polynesian language?

Hawaiian is written with just 13 letters, including the ʻokina glottal stop.

How many languages are listed in the Eighth Schedule of India's constitution?

Hindi in Devanagari script is the Union's official language, with English alongside; contrary to popular belief, India has no national language.

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

About 0.5 percent of the Swiss speak it, against 62 percent German, 22.7 percent French and 8.2 percent Italian.

Latin remains the official language of which sovereign entity?

Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan are all its direct descendants; the Vatican's cash machines once offered instructions in Latin.

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

Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker built it in Pittsburgh, where the company is still based; the green owl mascot is called Duo.

What is the name of Duolingo's green owl mascot?

He is famous for guilt-tripping learners with push notifications; the app launched publicly on 19 June 2012 with a waiting list of about 500,000.

How old was Louis Braille when he developed his six-dot tactile alphabet in 1824?

He adapted Charles Barbier's military 'night writing' and published the system in 1829; each character sits in a 3-by-2 cell.

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

A language council coins new words from old Icelandic roots rather than borrowing, so 'computer' became tölva, from 'number' and 'prophetess'.

Roughly what share of Swahili's vocabulary consists of loanwords from the language of the Quran?

Even the name comes from Arabic sawāḥil, 'coasts'; it is a Bantu language and the lingua franca of much of East Africa.

The Rigveda, the earliest attested text in Sanskrit, was composed roughly when?

Its 1,028 hymns were passed down orally; Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī later fixed the grammar in about 4,000 rules.

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

Taa (ǃXóõ), spoken in Botswana and Namibia, may have the largest sound inventory of any language, with more than 80 consonants by one count.

Roughly what share of basic vocabulary in the Botswana language Taa (ǃXóõ) begins with a click?

One count found 87 consonants and 20 vowels in the western dialect; the language has only a few thousand speakers.

How many lexical tones does the main Chinese language have, excluding the neutral tone?

Cantonese is usually counted as having six or nine; the classic Mandarin example is 'ma', which can mean mother, hemp, horse or scold depending on tone.

By academic consensus, what proportion of the languages spoken in 2000 will probably be extinct by 2100?

Most of the world's 5,000-7,000 languages have tiny speaker bases and no written form, and children are switching to national languages.

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

Officer Pierre-François Bouchard found it during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt; the British took it as spoils in 1801 and it is the British Museum's most visited object.

Which language ranks third in the world by total speakers, behind the top two?

Ethnologue counts about 611 million Hindi speakers to Spanish's 561 million; Spanish leads Hindi on native speakers.

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

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet founded it with the French teacher Laurent Clerc; about 58 percent of modern ASL signs are cognate with old French signs.

Which science-fiction constructed language got a Duolingo course in 2018 and is supported by Bing Translator?

At least nine works of world literature, Hamlet among them, have been published in it.

Roughly what share of the world's population speaks an Indo-European language natively?

Over 3.4 billion people do, by far the most of any language family.

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

The steppe of present-day Ukraine and southern Russia is linked to the Yamnaya culture.

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

Eight branches survive, four of them with hundreds of millions of native speakers each.

Roughly what share of Afrikaans vocabulary is of Dutch origin?

It was once called 'Cape Dutch' or, derisively, 'kitchen Dutch' (kombuistaal).

In which Argentine province is Y Wladfa, the Welsh-speaking colony founded in 1865?

Patagonian Welsh has developed as a fifth dialect, complete with Spanish loanwords.

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

It has an estimated 250 to 380 speakers and one of the smallest sound inventories of any known language.

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

Its name literally means 'the language of good'; it has only 14 phonemes.

Latin was originally the language of the Latins in which region around Rome?

The region is now known as Lazio; the Latin alphabet itself derives from Etruscan and Greek.

Between which centuries did regional vernacular Latin evolve into distinct Romance languages?

Latin stayed Europe's common language of scholarship into the early 19th century.