FUN FACTS ABOUT LANGUAGES

You must have heard countless times some of the funniest expressions, words used completely wrong or phrases that made you smile.
Naturally, language is a human creation, and as we all know, people are far from perfect. Apart from the fact that for every grammar rule there is an exception, there are plenty more daily used sentence coinages that show how language can be fun.

We give you the list of peculiar and interesting facts about world languages.

  • There are about 7,000 languages in the world.
  • There are 50,000 characters in the Chinese language. You’ll need to know about 2,000 to read a newspaper.
  • The Chinese language does not require using punctuation marks.
  • 12.44% of the world’s population speaks Mandarin as their first language.
  • There are about 2,200 languages in Asia.
  • 50% of educational time in Luxembourg devoted to learning English, German, and French.
  • There are 13 ways to spell the ‘o’ sound in French.
  • There is a language in Botswana that consists of mainly 5 types of clicks.
  • There are 2,400 languages classified as being ‘endangered’.
  • 231 languages are now completely extinct.
  • One language dies about every 14 days.
  • Eastern Siberia, Northwest Pacific Plateau of North America, and Northern Australia are hotspots for endangered languages.
  • Esperanto is an artificial language, but 2 feature films have been done in the language.
  • There are 24 working languages of the EU.
  • There are 6 official UN languages.
  • The bible is available in 2454 languages.
  • The Hebrew language is the only extinct language which has been successfully revived.
  • The oldest written language was believed to be written in about 4500 BC.
  • South Africa has 11 official languages – the most for a single country.
  • The Khmer language in Cambodia has 74 letters, while on the other hand, one language on Papua New Guinea, Rotokas has only 12.
  • The pope tweets in 9 languages.
  • The US has no official language.
  • You can us an ATM in Latin in Vatican City.
  • English is the official language of the sky! It doesn’t matter which country they are from, all pilots speak in English on international flights.
  • Approximately one new word is added to the English language every two hours and around 4,000 new words are added to the English dictionary every year.
  • There is only one word in the world that has three consecutive double letters: BOOKKEEPER!
  • The word „Widow“ is the only  word of feminine gender that is shorter than its masculine gender version, i.e. „Widower“.
  • According to the law of the US state of Illinois, it is illegal to speak English. Namely, the only language that is recognized by the state is “American”.
  • The word “queue“ is the only word in the English language that would be pronounced the same if the last four letters were deleted.
  • Have you ever wondered why the English computer keyboard is set out in the way it is instead of in alphabetical order? The reason for this is on early typewriters, the keys needed to be arranged in a certain way so that the mechanical rods which held the letters did not clash too much and jam. The letters needed to be separated so that the ones which were most commonly used were not next to each other.
  • 11% of the entire English language is just the letter E.
  • There are only about 200,000 words in the Russian language.
  • The Serbian language is the only European language with digraphia, which means it has two writing systems.
  • Some languages have cases, some don’t. The Serbian language has seven cases, while English has none. The Finnish language has 14-15 cases, while the Hungarian has around 18, depending on interpretation.