Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
Hindi is written in a script called Devanagari, which has a horizontal line running along the top of each word, connecting the letters together. It is spoken natively by more than 600 million people in India.
Spanish is the second most spoken native language in the world, with around 485 million native speakers. It is the official language of 20 countries, mostly in Latin America.
Some African languages, such as those in the Khoisan family, use clicking sounds as consonants. There are different types of clicks β dental, alveolar, palatal, and lateral β each with a distinct meaning.
The Greek alphabet, developed around 800 BCE, was one of the first true alphabets and became the basis for the Latin alphabet used by English and many other European languages today. The word 'alphabet' itself comes from the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta.
English has one of the largest vocabularies of any language, with over 170,000 words currently in use according to the Oxford English Dictionary. New words are added every year as language keeps evolving.
Welsh, spoken in Wales, was once in serious decline but has been successfully revived through education programmes and television channels broadcast entirely in Welsh. Today around 900,000 people can speak Welsh.
The PirahΓ£ language, spoken by a small community in the Amazon rainforest, has no words for specific numbers β only words roughly meaning 'a few' or 'many'. It has fascinated linguists because it challenges ideas about how language and the mind work together.
The numerals we call 'Arabic numerals' (1, 2, 3β¦) were actually invented in India and later spread to Europe through Arab scholars. The word 'zero' also comes from the Arabic word 'sifr'.
UNESCO estimates that around half of the world's 7,000 languages could disappear by the end of this century. Most endangered languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers remaining.
Finnish has no gendered pronouns β there is only one word, 'hΓ€n', meaning both 'he' and 'she'. Finnish is also notable for having no articles like 'the' or 'a'.