FACTS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT LANGUAGES

Did you know that: 

1 .  There are about 7,000 languages in the world.

2.  Out of all the spoken languages in the world most of them originate from Asia and Africa.

3.  The most widely spoken languages are Chinese, Spanish, English, and Hindi, in that order.

4.  44% of the world’s population speaks Mandarin as their first language.

5.  There are about 2,200 languages in Asia.

6.  Chinese is the most spoken language with the largest alphabet in the world. It belongs to the Cambodian language, Khmer and has over 50,000 characters. On the other hand, you only need to know 2,000 of those characters to be able to read the newspaper.

7.  50% of educational time in Luxembourg is devoted to learning English, German, and French.

8.  There are 13 ways to spell the ‘o’ sound in French.

9.  There is a language in Botswana that consists of mainly 5 types of clicks.

10.  There are 2,400 languages classified as being ‘endangered’.

11.  231 languages are now completely extinct.

12.  One language dies about every 14 days.

13.  Eastern Siberia, Northwest Pacific Plateau of North America, And Northern Australia are hotspots for endangered languages.

14.  Esperanto is an artificial language, but is spoken by about 500,000 to 2,000,000 people, and at least 2 feature films have been done in the language.

15.  There are 24 working languages of the EU.

16.  There are 6 official UN languages.

17.   The oldest written language was believed to be written in about 4500 BC.

18.  The Bible is available in 2454 languages.

19.  South Africa has 11 official languages – the most for a single country.

20.  The pope tweets in 9 languages.

21.  The US has no official language.

22.  Learning a second language can make you smarter. A number of scientists agree that becoming polyglot can boost your brainpower. Other studies also suggest that speaking more than one language can help to slow down the aging process of the mind.

23.  Most European languages use the Latin alphabet. Some Slavic languages use the Cyrillic alphabet.Greek, Armenian, Georgian and Yiddish have their own alphabet.