Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
Paraguay has two official languages: Spanish and Guarani, an indigenous language. About 90% of the population speaks Guarani, making it one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in the Americas.
Natural language processing is one of the hardest problems in computing because human language is full of ambiguity, idioms, and context-dependent meaning that machines find difficult to interpret.
Every language in the world has tongue twisters! They are used to practise tricky sounds and have been found in cultures all around the globe.
Te reo Maori, the Maori language of New Zealand, was in danger of disappearing but has been revitalised through immersion schools called kohanga reo ('language nests') and official government support.
The shortest complete sentence in English is 'Go!' β it has a subject (you, implied), a verb, and makes complete sense on its own.
There are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, which is far more than the number of countries. Many of these languages are spoken by only a handful of people.
Papua New Guinea has more languages than any other country, with over 800 different languages spoken there. That means about 12% of all the world's languages are found in just one country.
Mandarin Chinese has more native speakers than any other language, with around 920 million people speaking it as their first language. It is the official language of China and Taiwan.
Arabic is written from right to left, which means books in Arabic open from what English readers would think of as the back. Over 400 million people around the world speak Arabic.
Linguists estimate that a language dies somewhere in the world roughly every two weeks. When a language disappears, unique knowledge about culture, nature, and history can be lost forever.