Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
The English word 'goodbye' started as 'God be with ye', which was gradually shortened over hundreds of years.
In Mandarin Chinese, the syllable 'ma' can mean mother, hemp, horse, or scold depending on whether your voice goes up, down, stays flat, or dips and rises.
On the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, people use a whistled language called Silbo Gomero that can be heard up to five kilometres away across the deep valleys.
English has roughly 170,000 words currently in use, plus another 47,000 obsolete words, making it one of the richest vocabularies of any language.
Some languages only have two basic colour words β one for light and one for dark. Others have dozens of specific colour terms.
Children naturally work out the grammar of their language by about age five without ever being formally taught the rules, a process that still amazes linguists.
The name 'Ada' exists in over 30 languages, from Turkish to Igbo to German, each with a slightly different meaning.
Spanish is the only major language that uses an upside-down question mark at the start of a question, so readers know it is a question from the very beginning.
On average, a language dies roughly every two weeks. When the last speaker passes away and no recordings exist, the language is lost forever.
The PirahΓ£ language of the Amazon has no words for exact numbers, no colour terms, and no way to talk about the distant past, challenging many theories about how language works.