Linguistics Trivia
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170 free Linguistics trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Linguistics trivia questions with answers. Linguistics is the science of language, and this quiz tours the whole field. Fifty questions cover the great language families and lonely isolates like Basque, how English vowels moved in the Great Vowel Shift and Grimm's law reshaped Germanic consonants, the writing systems from cuneiform and the Phoenician letters to hangul and Sequoyah's Cherokee script, and the decipherers of the Rosetta Stone and Linear B. There are questions on Chomsky and universal grammar, Saussure, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Wug test, Broca's and Wernicke's areas, pidgins and creoles, sign languages, click consonants, tone, whistled speech and the world's most extreme sound systems. Easy questions ask which country has the most languages and where 'salary' comes from; the hard ones want the Danish linguist behind Grimm's law, the last speaker of Ubykh and the river the Pirahã live on. Made for language nerds, linguistics students and anyone who reads the etymology before the definition. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the languages, scripts and scholars involved, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 170 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly how many living languages does Ethnologue catalogue worldwide?
7,170
Ethnologue catalogues roughly 7,170 living languages; its 2023 edition listed 7,168, and every edition since 2019 has counted between 7,100 and 7,170.
Q 02Ethnologue, the annual catalogue of the world's living languages, is published by which organization?
SIL Global
SIL, formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics, is a Christian organization headquartered in Dallas whose field linguists and Bible translators feed the database.
Q 03Which country, with about 840 known spoken languages, is the most linguistically diverse in the world?
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea, with about 840 living languages for some ten million people, is the most linguistically diverse country; English and Tok Pisin bridge its mostly tiny speech communities.
Q 04Which language of the western Pyrenees is the only one in its continent with no known relatives?
Basque
Basque is Europe's only living language isolate; its roughly 750,000 speakers live on both sides of the western Pyrenees, and its first printed book, Linguae Vasconum Primitiae, appeared in 1545.
Q 05Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are the three most-spoken members of which language family?
Uralic
Uralic takes its name from the Ural Mountains, the family's hypothesised homeland; alongside Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian it includes the Sámi languages of northern Scandinavia.
Q 06Malagasy, Madagascar's language, belongs to which family, which stretches to Easter Island?
Austronesian
Austronesian reaches from Madagascar to Easter Island; its deepest diversity lies among the Formosan languages of Taiwan, which is why Taiwan is regarded as the family's homeland.
Q 07Which language family, second only to Indo-European in speakers, includes Chinese?
Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan, with more than 400 languages, is second only to Indo-European in speakers; its roughly 1.3 billion Sinitic speakers dwarf Burmese (about 33 million) and the Tibetic languages.
Q 08Which proposed African language family, with about 1,540 languages, would be the world's largest if valid?
Niger–Congo
Niger–Congo groups about 1,540 languages and roughly 600 million speakers, third-largest by speakers; its Atlantic–Congo core is famous for elaborate noun-class systems.
Q 09Which two major branches of the Indo-European family are extinct?
Anatolian and Tocharian
Eight branches survive: four spoken by hundreds of millions each and four (Hellenic, Albanoid, Armenian and Celtic) by fewer than fifteen million each.
Q 10Which extinct Bronze Age language of what is now Turkey is the earliest attested Indo-European language?
Hittite
Hittite, written in cuneiform on tablets from about 1650 BC, is the earliest attested Indo-European language; isolated Hittite names appear in Old Assyrian merchant tablets from Kanesh centuries earlier.
Q 11Which judge told the Asiatic Society in 1786 that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin sprang from a common root?
William Jones
He was a prodigy who learned Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew as a boy; his father, also William, introduced the symbol π to mathematics.
Q 12According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the Proto-Indo-European homeland lay in which region?
Pontic–Caspian steppe
The Kurgan hypothesis places the homeland on the Pontic–Caspian steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas, where the ancestral language was probably spoken between about 4500 and 2500 BCE.
Q 13Grimm's law describes the consonant shift that produced which branch of Indo-European?
Germanic
Q 21Two words such as 'tip' and 'dip' that differ in only one sound are called what?
A minimal pair
'Tip' and 'dip' form a minimal pair, the standard test that two sounds such as t and d are separate phonemes; sign languages have minimal pairs too, differing in a single parameter such as handshape.
Q 22The Wug test, in which children pluralize a made-up creature, was created by which psycholinguist?
Jean Berko Gleason
Jean Berko Gleason's 1958 paper introduced the Wug test, showing that small children apply the plural rule to words they have never heard, saying 'wugs' with a voiced z.
Q 23Paul Broca's 1861 patient 'Tan' had a lesion in which lobe of the brain?
Frontal
Grimm's law is the First Germanic Sound Shift: inherited p became f in Germanic, so Sanskrit pitā and Greek patḗr correspond to English father.
Q 14Which Danish linguist first discovered the sound correspondences later named after Jacob Grimm?
Rasmus Rask
Rasmus Rask set out the correspondences in his 1818 prize essay on the origin of Old Norse; Jacob Grimm systematised them four years later and got the naming rights.
Q 15The Great Vowel Shift in English took place primarily between which years?
1400–1700
The Great Vowel Shift spans roughly 1400–1700: it began after Chaucer's death and was largely complete by the 18th century, leaving spellings fixed by early printers out of step with pronunciation.
Q 16Which 1957 book by Noam Chomsky is credited with revolutionizing the scientific study of language?
Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures (1957) launched generative grammar and contained the sentence 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously', built to show that a sentence can be grammatical yet meaningless.
Q 17Which argument holds that children hear far too little input to learn language from data alone?
Poverty of the stimulus
The poverty of the stimulus argument holds that children's input underdetermines the grammar they acquire, so innate constraints must limit what a possible human grammar can look like.
Q 18How did Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) come to be published?
Posthumously, from students' lecture notes
He died in 1913 and had only taught the course three times; his pupils reconstructed it into the book that founded structural linguistics.
Q 19Benjamin Lee Whorf of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis made his living in which profession?
Fire prevention engineer
Whorf worked as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company throughout his career, studying under Edward Sapir on the side and writing a grammar sketch of Hopi.
Q 20The International Phonetic Association was formed in 1886 under which linguist?
Paul Passy
Paul Passy, a French phonetician, founded the association in Paris in 1886 as a teachers' group promoting phonetic notation; its first standard alphabet was published in 1888.
Tan's lesion lay in the left frontal lobe, in the inferior frontal gyrus now called Broca's area; Leborgne died days after Broca examined him, and a 2007 MRI of his preserved brain confirmed the damage.
Q 24Damage to which brain region in the superior temporal gyrus produces fluent but meaningless speech?
Wernicke's area
Wernicke's area, in the posterior superior temporal gyrus, was linked to comprehension by Carl Wernicke in 1874; damage causes fluent but meaningless speech, and the region sits in the left hemisphere in about 95% of right-handers.
Q 25How old was Genie, the feral child, when Los Angeles authorities discovered her in 1970?
13
Genie was 13 when found in 1970, having been kept isolated since infancy; she never fully acquired grammar, and scientists compared her to Victor of Aveyron, the 'wild boy' studied by Itard from 1801.
Q 26Nicaraguan Sign Language emerged among deaf schoolchildren in which city from 1977?
Managua
The language emerged in Managua after a special-education centre opened there in 1977, bringing about 50 deaf children together; before that, deaf Nicaraguans were isolated and used home signs.
Q 27The sign language of the United States is most closely related to that of which country?
France
France: about 58% of signs used by deaf Americans are cognates of Old French Sign Language, which Laurent Clerc brought to Hartford in 1817; British signing is mutually unintelligible with it.
Q 28What term describes a stable contact language that has acquired native speakers?
Creole
A creole is a pidgin that has become a community's mother tongue; the children of pidgin-speaking adults expand it into a full language through a process called nativization.
Q 29L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, practised which profession?
Ophthalmologist
Zamenhof was an ophthalmologist practising in Warsaw; growing up in multi-ethnic Białystok, where Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews each spoke their own language, convinced him a neutral tongue was needed.
Q 30The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphic, Greek and which third script?
Demotic
Demotic, the cursive everyday script of later Egypt, fills the middle register; the priestly decree of 196 BC differs only slightly across all its versions, which made the stone the key to reading Egyptian.