Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
Studies have shown that bilingual people may subtly shift their personality and emotional responses depending on which language they are speaking at the time.
The shortest complete sentence in English is 'Go.' β it has a subject (the implied 'you') and a verb.
In Japanese, the word you use for counting changes depending on what you are counting. Flat things, long things, small animals, and machines all use different counter words.
Languages naturally change with every generation. The English spoken 500 years ago by Shakespeare would sound almost foreign to a modern English speaker.
Mandarin Chinese uses four main tones (plus a neutral tone). The syllable 'ma' can mean mother, hemp, horse, or scold, depending on the tone used.
Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, uses a beautiful script called Ge'ez that has 231 characters. Each one represents a consonant-vowel combination.
The word 'the' is the most common word in written English. It appears about once in every 16 words!
Vietnamese has six different tones, meaning the same combination of letters can have six completely different meanings depending on the pitch and contour of your voice.
Children absorb the grammar of their native language naturally, without formal instruction. By the age of five, most children have mastered the core grammatical rules of their mother tongue.
A pangram is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. The most famous English pangram is 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'