Interesting facts about languages

 Interesting facts about languages

(information from the Internet, developed by a team of students and teachers from Poland)

There are 7,000 languages in the world. About 2,400 are threatened with extinction.

The Chinese language is spoken by the most people in the world - about a billion people. 400 million people speak Hindi, 350 million speak Spanish and 320 million speak English.

There are approximately 50,000 characters in Chinese (Mandarin). To read a newspaper, we need to learn at least 2,000 of them.

150 languages are spoken on the European continent. Most languages are found in Asia, South America and Africa. On the latter continent, scientists distinguish about 1,500 languages.

South Africa has as many as 11 official languages: Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, Ndebele, Pedi, Soto, Swaziland, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Zulu.

April 1st, April Fool's Day, goes by different names in other countries. In English-speaking countries it is called "April Fools' Day or All Fools' Day", in France "Jour du poisson d'avril", in Sweden "Hunt the gowk Day", in Liwa, "Day of the Liar" (Melagio diena), in Portugal "Day of Lies" (Dia da mentira), in Russia "Day of Laughter" (Dien smiecha).

There are 750 languages in Papua New Guinea. This is 12% of the world's languages.

The most translated into other languages books are the Bible and the Koran. The Bible has so far been translated into 500 languages.

In 1960, the Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal developed a language designed to establish communication with hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations by radio communication. It was given the name Lincos. The lincos dictionary is based on natural numbers and the basic operations of the binary system.

There are 13 ways to pronounce the "O" sound in French.

Esperanto does not contain a single irregular verb. This language is spoken by about two million people in the world. The goal of the creator of the language was to create a neutral and easy-to-learn language for international communication.

Manchester in the UK is considered the most multilingual city. According to a study by the University of Manchester, up to 200 languages can be heard in this city.

The Basque Country has its own language - Basque, which is one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. It does not belong to any language group. Basque has numerous loanwords from Latin, Spanish and French.

The longest alphabet consisting of 74 letters belongs to the Khmer language, and the shortest alphabet is found in the Rotokas language (Papua New Guinea) - it consists of 12 letters.

At least half of the world's people are bilingual or multilingual.

The United States does not officially have any official language.

Twelve languages are mentioned in the popular novel The Lord of the Rings.

There are ATMs in the Vatican that display messages in Latin, among other languages.

There are 2,200 different languages in Africa.

Due to the recent massive influx of immigrants and refugees, Europe is becoming more and more multilingual. It is said that in London alone you can hear people speaking about 300 languages.

Most European languages are based on the Latin alphabet. Some Slavic languages are based on the Cyrillic alphabet. Languages such as Greek, Armenian, Georgian and Yiddish have their own alphabet.

The Germanic language family includes Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, German, Dutch, English and Yiddish, among others.

Examples of Romance languages include Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.

The Slavic language family includes, among others, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian.

Multilingualism brings numerous benefits: it facilitates learning new languages, has a positive effect on the thinking process and fosters contacts with other people and cultures.

Many languages have a vocabulary of 50,000 or more words, but individual speakers of a language usually know and use only a small part of it, around 2,000 words.

SILBO - LANGUAGE WITHOUT WORDS

The strangest languages in the world can be whistled (whistle). Silbo is such a language. It is a whistled language spoken by 20,000 inhabitants of one of the Canary Islands, La Gomera. In 2009, it was inscribed on the UNESCO list as intangible heritage.

O!KUNG! - THE LANGUAGE OF CLICKS

O!Kung!, otherwise known as Seekele, is spoken in Angola and Namibia. It belongs to the click language family. It contains as many as 48 sounds that can be compared to munching. Even the exclamation mark is a click! Also in terms of the number of consonants, it is one of the most complicated languages in the world. In addition, it is a tonic language, consisting not only of clicks, but also of nasal vowels. Linguists suspect that the click language was the first form of communication used by man. An outstanding specialist studying click languages in the 1930s was a Pole, Roman Stopa. This language has survived because the life of the !Kung tribe has never been disturbed by the influence of civilization. Today, around 5,600 people speak the language.