Thanks so much for 100 followers! Here’s a list of 100 language facts for each follower ive gained:
There are 2.7k languages with over 7k dialects spoken around the world.
Over 300 languages are spoken in the United States.
Khmer has the longest alphabet in the world. it’s 74 characters long.
The oldest known languages are Sanskrit, Sumerian, Hebrew, & Basque.
Language is thought to have originated in 100,00 BC.
The bible is the most widely translated book available in 2,454 copies.
Learning a second language can make you smarter.
Onomatopoeias are not shared across languages.
There are over 200 artificial languages
Languages are constantly influencing eachother.
There are about 225 indigenous languages in Europe which makes up 3% of the world’s total.
Most of the world’s languages are spoken in Asia & Africa.
At least half of the world’s population speaks two or more languages.
Many languages have 50k words or more
Being bilingual makes learning additional languages easier.
In Germany rice crispies dont go “snap, crackle, pop”. they go “knisper! knasper! knusper!”
There are 108 words for describing sweet potato in Hawaiian.
Danish for jeans is “cowboybukser”.
The dot above “i” & “j” is called a tittle.
The Tashlhiyt dialect of Berber (North Africa) contains vowelless words like tzgr “she crossed” and tftktstt “you sprained it”.
In Malay cats don’t meow, they go “ngiau”.
Nine languages dont have words for colour. they only differentiate between black & white. For example in Dan (New Guinea) things can be “mili” (darkish) or “mola” (lightish).
In Georgian mama means “father”.
In Albanian there are 27 words for mustache.
In Masai the name of a dead child is not spoken again. If their name is a word that’s used every day then it’s no longer used by the bereaved family.
In Japanese four (shi) & nine (ku) are considered unlucky numbers because the words sound the same as “death” and “pain or worry”.
“Achaplinarse” is a Spanish (Central American Spanish) word which means to hesitate & run away in the style of Charlie Chaplin.
“Así te tragues un pavo y todas las plumas se conviertan en cuchillas de afeitar” is a Spanish curse meaning ‘may all your turkey’s feathers turn into razor blades’.
The Romanian proverb “dacă doi îți spun că ești beat, du-te și te culcă” translates to ‘if two people say you’re drunk, go to sleep’.
When a word spelled backward such as 'pots’ it creates another word 'stop’. this is called a semordnilap which is 'palindromes’ backward.
A pangram is a sentence which has every letter of the alphabet once. For example: 'Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz’ means 'carved symbols in a mountain hollow on the bank of an inlet irritated an eccentric person’.
“Backpfeifengesicht” (German) means a face that cries out for a fist in it.
About 2.4k languages are considered endangered.
Eastern Siberia, Northwest Pacific Plateau of North America, & Northern Australia are hotspots for endangered languages.
231 languages are now completely extinct. these include Alderney French, Soyot, & Togoyo.
In Mexico the language of Ayapaneco is in danger of dying out because the two remaining speakers refuse to talk to each other.
There are 11 official languages in South Africa: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa & Zulu.
There are 13 ways to spell the 'o’ sound in French.
There are 850 languages in Papua New Guinea.
Frisian is supposedly the easiest language for English speakers to learn.
Pinocchio is available in the most languages after the Bible.
Esperanto is an artificial language developed in the 19th century. 500,000 - 2,000,000 people speak it.
There are 50,000 characters in the Chinese language, but you need to know at least 2,000 to read a newspaper.
There are about 2,200 languages in Asia.
54% of living languages have a written form.
11:07pm is the time at which writing was developed if all of human existence were condensed into a 24 hour period.
23 languages have more than 50 million native speakers.
95% of the world’s languages are not represented online.
The language of the Native American Zuni tribe has resemblances to Japanese. Subsequent research has confirmed biological similarities between them.
Basque, a language spoken in the mountains of Spain and France, is the only European language not related to any other known language.
South Africa has more official languages than any other country with eleven.
The pope tweets in 9 languages and his Spanish account has the most followers.
In Archi, a language spoken around the Caspian Sea, each verb can have up to 1.5 million different conjugations.
The Silbo language of La Gomera off the coast of Spain consists entirely of whistles.
There is a language in Botswana that consists of 5 primary click sounds.
Marc Okrand, the linguistics professor responsible for coming up with the fictional language of Klingon, spent 3 years teaching is son when he was little. His son went on to forget everything.
A Japanese man recently sued the National Broadcasting Company for the mental distress they caused him by using too many English words in their programs
Besides Wales, Argentina is the only other country where Welsh is spoken by a significant minority thanks to settlers that inhabited Patagonia nearly 200 years ago.
The smallest number of letters in an alphabet is 11, in the Papuan language known as Rotokas.
Cryptophasia is the name given to secret languages spoken by twins.
Just like people acquiring spoken languages have accents, people acquiring sign languages have accents as well.
In the Vatican City you can use an ATM in Latin.
E is the most commonly used letter in English. it’s in about 11% of every word we say or write.
More words in the English language begin with S than any other letter.
The word “orange” didnt exist until about 450 years ago. The fruit was named first. The color is named after the fruit.
“Swims” is the same word if you read it upside down.
The word for alphabet comes from the first 2 letters of the Greek alphabet A (alpha) & B (beta).
You speak about 4.8k words a day.
Every year about 4k words are added to the English dictionary.
Somalia is the only African country in which the entire population speaks the same language, Somali.
The language in which a government conducts business is the official language of that country.
All pilots on international flights identify themselves in English.
Pinocchio is Italian for “pine head.”
There was only one code during World War II that was never broken by the enemy and was used by the US Army. Navajo soldiers, called Codetalkers, developed a radio code based on their native language. It was the only way US soldiers on the battlefield could be sure that messages were from there own side and not from Japanese imitators.
The word “typewriter” is the longest word in the English language that can be spelled with the the top of the keyboard.
The United States does not have an official language.
The United States has more Spanish speakers than Spain.
Multilingualism helps your awareness become more expanded, thus making you more of a sponge in terms of taking in information.
Becoming bilingual improves your understanding of your native language.
Learning a new language gives you better flexibility when it comes to thinking and participating in conversation.
As early as 4 months babies can distinguish between French & English.
Capacity for language extends throughout life. You can learn any language at any age. This is possible because of the brains plasticity. Plasticity is the brain’s ability to make new neural connections.
12.44% of the world’s population speaks Mandarin as a first language.
50% of a Luxembourgish child’s education is devoted to languages.
¼ of the world’s population has some knowledge of English.
12 fictional languages are mentioned in The Lord Of The Rings.
2 feature films have been made entirely in Esperanto in the 1960s.
Furbish is the official language of the 1990s children’s toy Furby.
The European Union has 24 official working languages.
There are 7,231 combinations of book & language that Agatha Christie’s novels are available in.
Earth Passport by Liquid Blue holds the record for the chart song sung in the most languages.
An Indian man recorded a song in 125 languages released as a double CD in 2009.
Songs sung in English have won more Eurovision Song Contest competitions than any other language.
“Dord” a word meaning density was discovered in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 1939. It’s not a word, but had been there for 5 years due to an error.
German & French were voted the best for graduates to learn to enhance their prospect of getting a job.
The Voynich Book contains a language from the 1400s that despite numerous attempts has yet to be understood.
German is thought to be the language most similar to English.
If babies hear foreign languages in their first few months they’ll find picking up languages later in life easier.
