Did you know that there are an estimated 7,000 languages in the world? While being complex, languages are incredibly fascinating that continues to open the horizons of those willing to take a further look at them.
Scientists believe that languages evolved out of a series of grunts and hand gestures. From there, new ones have been born, grown and even died. As a multilingual recruitment agency, we absolutely love languages and learning all about them. We thought we’d share with you some fun facts to help you see why they’re so fantastic!
1. French was the official language of England for over 300 years
2. Italian is the fifth most taught language, after English, French, Spanish and German.
3. German is the most widely spoken native language in Europe
4. English speakers will be able to recognise over 3,000 Spanish words
5. Portuguese has 178 million native speakers
6. Romanian was perhaps the first of the Romance Languages to split from Latin
7. English is spoken by an estimated 1.8 billion
8. Dutch has contributed many words to English including yacht, easel, cookie, and freight.
9. There are two official forms of written Norwegian– bokmål (book language) and nynorsk (new Norwegian).
10. Only during the 20th century did a standardised national language become available to all Swedes
11. Danish is spoken inDenmark, Faroe Islands, Greenland, andGermany
12. Latvian is the mother tongue of only 60% of the country’s population
13. Lithuanian has similarities with Sanskrit
14. Greek has existed from around the 14th century BC
15. Persian hasn’t significantly changed since the 10th century
16. Arabic is the official language of 22 countries
17. Hebrew is the language in which God first spoke to Adam
18. Mandarin has the most native speakers: 845 million
19. Cantonese is the language predominantly used for business around Southeast Asia
20. In Japanese there’s no way of showing whether a word is singular or plural
21. Polish is the 29th most spoken language in the world
22. Most letters in the Bulgarian alphabet stand for just one specific sound
23. Czech is the only language with the letter ‘ř’, a kind of soft r
24. The primary principle of Slovak spelling is “Write as you hear”.
25. Russian is written in the Cyrillic script which is based on the Greek alphabet.
26. Ukrainian only became the official state language of Ukraine in 1989
27. The Alphabet Reform of 1928 abandoned the Arabic script and mandated a phonetic Turkish script based on the Latin alphabet; a crucial factor in the emergence of Modern Turkish.
28. Korean is known as Hangungmal in South Korea, and Chosŏnmal in North Korea
29. Estonian contains about a thousand words that date back to the last ice age.
30. The longest word in the Finnish language is epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhä, which means doubtful
31. Hungarian is not related to any of it’s neighbouring languages
32. Tagalog was chosen as the national language of the Philippines from an estimated 70 different dialects and languages
33. In Thai there are four different ways to write ‘s’ and six for ‘t’
34. Over 300 languages are spoken in London
35. There are 6909 living languages in the world today
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