Although 98% of Brazilians speak Portuguese, the country is also home to 274 indigenous languages
4 day(s) ago
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India is home to 22 'scheduled languages' which are state/regional languages that are recognised by its constitution
11 day(s) ago
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There are about 60 different varieties and dialects of Romani. They can be grouped into Balkan Romani, Northern Romani, Central Romani and Vlax Romani
18 day(s) ago
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There are well over 200 known Indo-Aryan languages
25 day(s) ago
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Swahili is the easiest African language for English speakers to learn. Like English, it lacks lexical tone. It also includes several adopted English words!
32 day(s) ago
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13% of the US population speak Spanish natively - that's around 41 million people
39 day(s) ago
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Africa is home to over 5 million native Portuguese speakers
46 day(s) ago
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The letters k, y and w only became part of the Portuguese alphabet in 2009, after they were added as a result of the influx of English words
53 day(s) ago
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German is the most widely spoken language in the European Union – ahead of Spanish, French and even English
60 day(s) ago
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The earliest form of old Hindi was Apabhramsa
67 day(s) ago
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Pidgin languages tend to develop where two communities need to interact but don't have a common tongue
73 day(s) ago
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The Basque language has seven distinct dialects
81 day(s) ago
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French has only 76 million native speakers, but 235 million daily, fluent speakers (plus another 77-110 million second language speakers)
88 day(s) ago
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Spanish words are longer than English words. Expect text expansion of 15-25% when you translate from English to Spanish
95 day(s) ago
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People who use sign language have regional accents
102 day(s) ago
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Mongolian has at least 8 different writing systems
109 day(s) ago
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The oldest records of the Egyptian language date from around 3400 BC
116 day(s) ago
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Russian is the second most spoken language on the internet
122 day(s) ago
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Europe only accounts for around 3% of the world's indigenous languages
130 day(s) ago
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Japanese verbs aren't conjugated, making them much easier to learn
138 day(s) ago
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Despite not being one of the country's 22 official scheduled languages, English is the second most spoken language in India
144 day(s) ago
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The French language has around 130,000 words; English has just over 170,000
151 day(s) ago
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The literal translation of China is 'Middle Kingdom'
158 day(s) ago
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There are seven different honorifics in the Korean language, each of which uses a different verb ending. In North Korea, the Great Leader has a verb ending all of his own
165 day(s) ago
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The Korean language has two counting systems - one for numbers up to 99 and the other for numbers up to 99 and beyond
172 day(s) ago
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New Collins Dictionary words in 2019 included: double down, influencer, hopepunk, non-binary and deepfake
179 day(s) ago
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Collins Dictionary's 'word of the year' for 2019 was "climate strike"
186 day(s) ago
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World Bank: "Gendered languages are associated with worse labor market participation rates for women and more regressive gender norms"
195 day(s) ago
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Written Spanish has been traced as far back as 9th century medieval documents called the Cartularies of Valpuesta
208 day(s) ago
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Spanish is descended from Latin, but with significant Arabic influences
214 day(s) ago
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The Royal Spanish Academy is the official custodian of the Spanish language
221 day(s) ago
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Research has shown that gendered language may limit women's opportunities, according to the World Bank
228 day(s) ago
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Spanish is considered fairly easy to learn, as it is a phonetic language with a vast global supply of books, films and other resources to aid learning
235 day(s) ago
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38% of the world's population speaks a gendered language
242 day(s) ago
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Spanish is an official language in 21 countries
249 day(s) ago
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Canada derives its name from the St Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, which means village or settlement
256 day(s) ago
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The world's second largest French speaking city is Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo
263 day(s) ago
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The Florentine dialect has become Italy's national language, beating many other regional dialects
270 day(s) ago
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In 2018, Chinese overtook German as the third most studied language in the UK
277 day(s) ago
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Despite the fact that people all over the world do ballet, the terminology is mainly in French
284 day(s) ago
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Books, movies and TV shows have led to the creation of more than 200 artificial languages
291 day(s) ago
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The word 'alphabet' originates from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet - 'alpha' and 'beta'
298 day(s) ago
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Russian was the first language ever spoken in outer space
305 day(s) ago
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Most people agree that the thousands of languages we use today are all descended from one initial language
312 day(s) ago
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The origins of language are lost to time: some believe it was a divine gift, while others believe that humans began to imitate the sounds animals make
320 day(s) ago
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The country name 'Mexico' means 'Navel of the Moon' in Nahuatl: "mexitli" is made up of "metztli" (moon) and "xictli" (navel)
326 day(s) ago
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The Pope's most followed Twitter account is his Spanish language one (he tweets in 9 languages in total)
340 day(s) ago
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Learning another language has benefits for your memory and can help stave off dementia for up to five years
347 day(s) ago
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21 countries speak Spanish as one of their official languages
354 day(s) ago
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Spanish has incorporated around 4,000 Arabic words into the modern version of its language
361 day(s) ago
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More than 300 languages are now spoken in London
1 year(s) ago
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Chinese speakers use both sides of the brain when talking, while English speakers use only the left
1 year(s) ago
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Asia and Africa combined account for around 2/3 of all languages
1 year(s) ago
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There are more than 200 different Hawaiian words for 'rain'
1 year(s) ago
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Over 1.5 million Americans are native French speakers
1 year(s) ago
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Different languages and cultures use different degrees of physical contact as part of their communication
1 year(s) ago
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The first ever printed book was written in German
1 year(s) ago
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Spain (España) takes its name from Ispania, which the Carthaginians named it around 300 BC - literally meaning 'land of rabbits'
1 year(s) ago
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In Indonesian, “air” means “water”
1 year(s) ago
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Japanese uses three different writing systems: Kanji, Katakana, and Hiragana
1 year(s) ago
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Mexico has more Spanish-speakers than any other country, followed by the US
1 year(s) ago
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Speaking Mandarin Chinese enables you to speak to 13% of the world’s population
1 year(s) ago
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Hindi didn’t become the official language of India until 1965
1 year(s) ago
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The word - or rather, sound - 'mmhmm' doesn't appear in the dictionary yet is used daily by English speakers to mean 'yes'
1 year(s) ago
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To read novels in another language, you need to learn around 8,000 to 9,000 lemmas (root words and all their inflections)
1 year(s) ago
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A trigraph is the use of 3 letters to make the sound of 1, such as 'igh' making the same sound as 'i' in English, or 'tea' making the same sound as 't'
1 year(s) ago
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To understand TV/film dialogue sufficiently in another language, you need to learn around 3,000 lemmas
1 year(s) ago
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The letter 'e' is the most commonly used letter in English, whether considered as the most frequently used in text or in the vocabulary as a whole
1 year(s) ago
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Learning 800 of the most frequently used lemmas and their inflections (word families) in English means you will understand 75% of daily conversation
1 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Learning 800 of the most frequently used lemmas (word families) in English means you will understand 75% of daily conversation
1 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Studies have shown that native speakers typically know 15,000 to 20,000 lemmas (word families) in their first language
1 year(s) ago
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A word family - or lemma - is a root word and all its inflections, e.g.: swim, swam, swimming; or red, reddish, reddest, etc.
1 year(s) ago
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The English language has some 47,156 obsolete words
1 year(s) ago
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There are estimated to be 171,146 words currently in use in the English language
1 year(s) ago
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The largest language by number of words is Korean, with more than 1.1 million words. Turkish, in second place, has just over 616,000
1 year(s) ago
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A digraph is the use of two letters to make a single sound, e.g. ph
1 year(s) ago
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Tautology refers to the saying of the same thing twice over in different words, and is generally considered to be a fault of style (e.g. they arrived one after the other in succession)
1 year(s) ago
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In the Nigerian village of Ubang, the men and women speak different languages, yet can understand each other perfectly
1 year(s) ago
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The oldest known written language dates back to Yangshao culture pottery from China, dated around 4500 BC
1 year(s) ago
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The smallest alphabet is that of Rotokas, which has just 11-12 letters
1 year(s) ago
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Welsh is still spoken in Patagonia, Argentina, after Welsh settlers travelled there in 1865
1 year(s) ago
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Basque is the only language in Europe not known to be related to any other language
1 year(s) ago
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In Japan, a man sued national broadcaster NHK for 'mental distress' due to its use of loan words borrowed from English
1 year(s) ago
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The easiest language for English speakers to learn is Frisian, which is native to part of the Netherlands, as it sounds similar and has a shared history
1 year(s) ago
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Esperanto was created in 1887 by Dr L Zamenhof as a language that would allow people who speak different native languages to communicate while retaining their own languages and cultural identities
1 year(s) ago
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Tolkien referred to 12 artificial languages in Lord of the Rings, but only two were well developed - Quenya and Sindarin
1 year(s) ago
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Eastern Siberia, Northern Australia and the Northwest Pacific Plateau in the US are hotspots for endangered languages
1 year(s) ago
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Languages are dying at a rate of one per fortnight
1 year(s) ago
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25% of the world's population has at least some knowledge of English
1 year(s) ago
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There are 2,200 languages in Asia
1 year(s) ago
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12.4% of the world's population speaks Mandarin as a first language
1 year(s) ago
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The artificial Esperanto language has up to 2 million speakers, but only 1,000-2,000 people speak it natively from birth
2 year(s) ago
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There are only two living Baltic languages: Latvian and Lithuanian
2 year(s) ago
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The word pulveratricious means three very different things: 1. (of birds) nesting on the ground; 2. dust-colored; and 3. covered with dust
2 year(s) ago
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90% of communication occurs using just 500 words
2 year(s) ago
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Most countries in Europe have several regional or minority languages, some of which have official status
2 year(s) ago
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The most widely used non-European languages in Europe are Arabic, Chinese and Hindi
2 year(s) ago
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90% of communication occurs using just 500 words
2 year(s) ago
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Russia has the highest number of languages spoken on its territory: from 130 to 200 depending on the criteria
2 year(s) ago
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The separation of the Korean nations in 1953 has resulted in increasing differences among the several dialects of the Korean language, with North Koreans borrowing Russian terms while South Koreans borrow extensively from English
2 year(s) ago
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"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence in American English. It is an example of homonyms and homophones creating complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity.
2 year(s) ago
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The verb 'to table' has opposite meanings in the UK and US. In the UK, it means to begin considering a proposal. In the US, it means to suspend a motion.
2 year(s) ago
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I.e. - meaning 'in other words' - is an abbreviation of the Latin 'id est'
2 year(s) ago
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E.g. - meaning 'for example' - is an abbreviation of the Latin 'exempli gratia'
2 year(s) ago
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The town name “Scheveningen” was used as a code word by Dutch resistance fighters because Germans could not pronounce it correctly
2 year(s) ago
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Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia refers to an irrational fear of the number 666
2 year(s) ago
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Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia refers to an irrational fear of the number 666
2 year(s) ago
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Triskaidekaphobia is a fear of the number 13
2 year(s) ago
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Paraskavedekatriaphobia is the word used to describe a fear of Friday the 13th (which some consider to be extremely unlucky)
2 year(s) ago
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The most translated document: Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, written by the United Nations in 1948, has been translated into 321 languages and dialects
2 year(s) ago
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Portuguese is the 5th most spoken native language in the world and the 3rd in Europe
2 year(s) ago
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Portuguese is the 2nd most spoken language in Latin America (after Spanish)
2 year(s) ago
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English is the official language of 27 non-sovereign entities including the UN, the EU, the IOC, NATO, ASEAN, NAFTA, and the Commonwealth of Nations
2 year(s) ago
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French is the official or preferred language of many international organizations, since France is one of the four largest industrial economies in the world and the second largest agricultural producer
2 year(s) ago
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1 in every 10 books published worldwide is in German
2 year(s) ago
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Career-wise, bilingualism is a strong asset and it is said that in certain fields, bilingual candidates can earn up to 20% more than monolinguals
2 year(s) ago
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Career-wise, bilingualism is a strong asset and it is said that in certain fields, bilingual candidates can earn up to 20% more than monolinguals
2 year(s) ago
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Wendy kalman
When Ben Yehuda brought back Hebrew and modernized it, he had to switch up how tenses were used biblically in order to standardize them.
2 year(s) ago
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Learning a foreign language has been shown to have benefits from an academic as well as an information retention point of view. Improvements include critical thinking skills, creativity and flexibility of the mind
2 year(s) ago
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South Africa holds a Guinness World record for having the most official languages in the world, with 11
2 year(s) ago
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Nearly every African country was at one time a colony, therefore many of the population speak English, French or Portuguese as their first or second language
2 year(s) ago
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Danish was the official language of Norway until about 1830 and of Iceland until 1944
2 year(s) ago
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In Albania, shaking your head means ‘yes’ whilst nodding means ‘no’
2 year(s) ago
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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 battlefiel
2 year(s) ago
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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
2 year(s) ago
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840 (almost 1/7) of all the languages on Earth are spoken in 1 country…Papua New Guinea
2 year(s) ago
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The Silbo language of La Gomera off the coast of Spain consists entirely of whistles
2 year(s) ago
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There are 2,400 languages classified as being ‘endangered’
2 year(s) ago
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Q is the only letter that does not occur in any of the US state names
2 year(s) ago
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At 45 letters, "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis," a lung disease, is the longest word in English
2 year(s) ago
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"Euouae," a medieval music term, is the longest word in English that contains only vowels. It’s also the word with the most consecutive vowels
2 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
"Euouae," a medieval music term, is the longest word in English that contains only vowels. It’s also the word with the most consecutive vowels
2 year(s) ago
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Irish has no words for "yes" and "no" - the answer to a question contains a repetition of the verb, either with or without a negative particle
2 year(s) ago
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1 out of every 8 letters written in English is an E
2 year(s) ago
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Somalia is the only African country in which the entire population speaks the same language - Somali
2 year(s) ago
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The shortest -ology is oology, the scientific study of eggs
2 year(s) ago
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In written English, only one letter in every 510 is a Q
2 year(s) ago
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Schoolmaster is an anagram of “the classroom"
2 year(s) ago
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If you were to write out every number in full (one, two, three, four...), you wouldn’t use a single letter B until you reached one billion
2 year(s) ago
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Only two modern English words end in “-gry”: “angry” and “hungry" - unless you count the addition of "hangry"
2 year(s) ago
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The dot above the letters “i” and “j” is called a superscript dot
2 year(s) ago
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"Typewriter” is one of the longest common words you can type on the top row of a typewriter
2 year(s) ago
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The oldest English word that is still in use is ‘town’
2 year(s) ago
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The first English dictionary was written in 1755
2 year(s) ago
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The word ‘lol’ was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011
2 year(s) ago
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The most commonly used noun in English is ‘time’
2 year(s) ago
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The most common adjective used in English is ‘good’
2 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
A text that deliberately excludes a particular letter of the alphabet is called a lipogram
2 year(s) ago
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About 100 languages rely on the Roman alphabet. Used by roughly two billion people, it's the world's most popular script
2 year(s) ago
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Goddessship is the only word in the English language with a triple letter
2 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. By the 27th century BC Egyptian writing had a set of some 24 hieroglyphs which are called uniliterals, to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (o
2 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Famous pangrams include: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs."
2 year(s) ago
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A sentence which contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet is called a pangram
2 year(s) ago
1
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Tomedes
The longest word in English which doesn't use the letter E is floccinaucinihilipilification
2 year(s) ago
1
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Tomedes
1 out of every 8 letters written is an E
2 year(s) ago
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The word "rhythm" is the longest English word without a vowel
2 year(s) ago
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1
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Tomedes
If you try to say the alphabet without moving your lips or tongue every letter will sound the same
3 year(s) ago
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2
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The 26 letters of the English alphabet make up more than 40 distinct sounds
3 year(s) ago
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Despite no discernible relationship between English and Mbabaram, the word for 'dog' is the same in both languages
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Irish has no words for "yes" and "no" - the answer to a question contains a repetition of the verb, either with or without a negative particle
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Semantic satiation (semantic saturation) refers to the repetition of a word or phrase until it temporarily loses meaning for the listener/reader
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Elephants have voices that are different for each individual, in just the same way that humans do
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Koko the gorilla, born in 1971 at San Francisco Zoo, learned to sign over 1,000 words and was able to competently communicate with her trainers
3 year(s) ago
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Cats only ‘meow’ when communicating with humans - they purr and hiss to communicate with other cats
3 year(s) ago
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Baby chickens can cheep before they hatch: about 24 hours before hatching they cheep in response to the mother hen's clucks
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Whales and dolphins have regional accents, just as humans do
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Whales and dolphins have regional accents, just as humans do
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Bilinguals recover faster from strokes than monolinguals
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
“Go!” is the shortest grammatically correct sentence in English
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
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
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
A polyglot is a person who can write and speak several different languages
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
German and French were voted the best languages for graduates to learn to help enhance their job prospects
3 year(s) ago
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Agatha Christie is the world’s most translated author
3 year(s) ago
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80% of African languages have no written form
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of long words
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
You speak about 4,800 words a day
3 year(s) ago
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The language which has won the most Oscars for Best Foreign Film is Italian (there have been 12 winning films in Italian)
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
Languages have existed since about 100,000BC
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
There is a language in Mexico called Ayapaneco that is in danger of dying out because its last two remaining speakers refused to talk to one another (though they are now on speaking terms and have even opened a school to try and teach the language t
3 year(s) ago
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Tomedes
The United Nations has 6 official languages – Arabic, Manadarin, Russian, English, French and Spanish
3 year(s) ago
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The European Union has 24 official languages
3 year(s) ago
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More than 70% of all the home pages on the Internet are in English
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Silbo is a variation of Spanish used to communicate over long distances in the mountains, it consists entirely of whistles
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Tolstoy’s original text for War And Peace in Russian and French contains about 460,000 words. The English translation has about 560,000.
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After The Bible, the most translated books are ‘The Little Prince’ and ‘Pinocchio’
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The Khumer language from Cambodia has the longest alphabet, with 74 letters
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Cryptophasias is the private language developed between twins
3 year(s) ago
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There is a language in Botswana that consists mainly of five types of clicks
