Languages Trivia
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This languages trivia quiz has 98 free questions with answers and covers the world's tongues from every angle: which has the most speakers and which the most native speakers, how many languages exist and how fast they are dying, the country with 840 of them and the ones with 16 or 37 official languages. It takes in scripts and alphabets (cuneiform, the Rosetta Stone, Cyrillic, Hangul, the Cherokee syllabary, Braille, the 12-letter Rotokas alphabet), the oddities (Basque with no relatives, Icelandic that has barely changed in 800 years, the whistled Spanish of La Gomera, the click-heavy Taa of Botswana) and the invented ones, from Esperanto to Klingon. The easy questions ask which language has the most speakers, how many tones Mandarin has and what Duolingo's mascot is. The medium ones cover the UN's six languages, Switzerland's four, India's 22 and who revived Hebrew. The hard ones want the year Sequoyah finished his syllabary, how far a Gomeran whistle carries and which country beats Zimbabwe for official languages. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which is the only Central American country where English is the official language?
Belize
Belize's English reflects its history as the British colony of British Honduras, which became independent only in 1981.
Q 02Which language has the most native (first-language) speakers in the world?
Mandarin
Mandarin as spoken around Beijing became the basis of the standard language China adopted as its national language in the early 20th century.
Q 03At India's 2011 census, which language ranked second by number of speakers?
Bengali
Bengali speakers' 1952 protests for their language in East Pakistan are why UNESCO made 21 February International Mother Language Day.
Q 04Which country, home to hundreds of living languages, is the most linguistically diverse on Earth?
Papua New Guinea
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.
Q 05Which language of the western Pyrenees is Europe's only known language isolate?
Basque
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.
Q 06To which language family does Hungarian belong?
Uralic
Uralic grammar survives in Hungarian, though, surrounded by unrelated neighbours, it borrowed many words from Turkic, Slavic, Latin and German.
Q 07Esperanto's creator worked in which profession?
An ophthalmologist
An ophthalmologist, Zamenhof grew up amid quarrels between his city's ethnic groups and blamed them on the lack of a common language.
Q 08The Korean alphabet, Hangul, was created under which Joseon king in the 15th century?
Sejong the Great
Sejong the Great backed a new script because Chinese characters were so hard to learn that most commoners could not read.
Q 09Hiragana and katakana are syllabaries used to write which language?
Japanese
Japanese hiragana flourished as a literary script around 1000 among ladies of the imperial court, so it came to be called 'woman's hand'.
Q 10Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union in 2007 when which country joined?
Bulgaria
Latin and Greek were already in use; the euro banknotes gained a Cyrillic 'ЕВРО' as a result.
Q 11The Rosetta Stone's decree appears in hieroglyphs, Demotic and which third script that unlocked the others?
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek could still be read, so it gave scholars a key to the Egyptian scripts, which Jean-François Champollion went on to decipher.
Q 12Which language is the only one revived from no native speakers into a national language with millions?
Hebrew
Hebrew went from a sacred, mostly written language to the everyday official language of Israel, a revival often credited to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.
Q 13Silbo Gomero, a whistled form of Spanish taught in schools since 1999, is used on which Canary Island?
La Gomera
Whistles carry across the island's ravines for up to five kilometres; UNESCO listed it as intangible heritage in 2009.
Q 21ASL is most closely related to which other signed language?
France's LSF
France's LSF came to America with Laurent Clerc, who taught in it at the American School for the Deaf, founded in 1817.
Q 22The earliest known writing system, cuneiform, was developed to write which language?
Sumerian
Sumerian was the first language written in cuneiform, and the script was later adapted to write several other languages of the ancient Near East.
Q 23The word 'cuneiform' comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning what?
Wedge
Wedge-shaped marks came from pressing a stylus into wet clay tablets, rather than drawing lines on them.
Q 14In which South American country is the indigenous Guarani language spoken by most of the population?
Paraguay
Paraguay made Guarani an official language beside Spanish, a rare case where a colonial language did not push out the native one.
Q 15Te reo Māori became an official language of which country through a 1987 act?
New Zealand
New Zealand's schools once suppressed te reo Māori, but a revival movement later brought it back into classrooms.
Q 16Which country recognises Spanish plus 36 indigenous languages as official?
Bolivia
Bolivia's 2009 constitution made every indigenous language official, so its national and regional governments must work in at least two official languages.
Q 17Which of these is one of the United Nations' six official languages?
Russian
Russian has been an official UN language since 1946, yet the Security Council made it a working language only in 1969.
Q 18Which language was the last to be added as an official language of the United Nations, in 1973?
Arabic
Arabic was added after the UN's Arab member states promised to meet the costs of using it for the first three years.
Q 19Sequoyah completed a syllabary in 1821 for which Native American language?
Cherokee
Cherokee soon had its own newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, which from 1828 printed news in Sequoyah's syllabary.
Q 20Linguist Marc Okrand built a full alien language for which 1984 Star Trek film?
The Search for Spock
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.
Q 24Which US state's 1978 constitution made an indigenous language official alongside English?
Hawaii
Hawaii's Hawaiian language had become critically endangered, but immersion schools have raised a new generation of fluent speakers.
Q 25Potti Sriramulu died on hunger strike in 1952 demanding a state for speakers of which language?
Telugu
Telugu speakers won their state: riots followed his death, and Nehru then announced that a state of Andhra would be created.
Q 26Which of these is one of Switzerland's four national languages?
Romansh
Romansh has lost ground as a main language in Swiss censuses since 1970, as German has spread through its Graubünden heartland.
Q 27Latin remains the official language of which sovereign entity?
The Holy See
Pope Benedict XVI of the Holy See announced his resignation to the cardinals in Latin in 2013.
Q 28Duolingo, launched to the public in 2012, was created by two computer scientists at which university?
Carnegie Mellon
Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn started Duolingo with student Severin Hacker after selling reCAPTCHA, which helped digitise old books, to Google.
Q 29In 2023, Moldova's parliament ordered that the national language be called what in all its laws?
Romanian
Romanian had already been ruled the official name by Moldova's Constitutional Court in 2013, overriding the 1994 constitution's 'Moldovan'.
Q 30Louis Braille was blinded at three by an accident in whose workshop?
His father's
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.