Q 01/05

Roughly how many living languages does Ethnologue list in its 2026 edition?

A) 1,200

B) 3,500

C) 5,600

D) 7,170

Answer · why

D) 7,170

The count keeps climbing, partly because governments now recognise mutually intelligible varieties as separate languages; the 1984 edition listed just...

Q 02/05

Ethnologue, the annual catalogue of the world's living languages, is published by which organization?

A) UNESCO

B) SIL Global

C) The Linguistic Society of America

D) The Max Planck Institute

Answer · why

B) SIL Global

SIL, formerly the Summer Institute of Linguistics, is a Christian organization headquartered in Dallas whose field linguists and Bible translators fee...

Q 03/05

Which country, with about 840 known spoken languages, is the most linguistically diverse in the world?

A) Papua New Guinea

B) Australia

C) Indonesia

D) Cameroon

Answer · why

A) Papua New Guinea

Most of its language communities are tiny; English and Tok Pisin serve as the common languages that bridge them.

Q 04/05

Which language of the western Pyrenees is the only one in its continent with no known relatives?

A) Breton

B) Basque

C) Catalan

D) Occitan

Answer · why

B) Basque

Under Franco it was even illegal to register newborns with names in the language, and tombstone inscriptions in it were ordered removed.

Q 05/05

Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are the three most-spoken members of which language family?

A) Turkic

B) Baltic

C) Uralic

D) Slavic

Answer · why

C) Uralic

The family is named for the Ural Mountains, the hypothesised homeland proposed by Julius Klaproth in 1823; the Sámi languages of Lapland belong to it ...