Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
In this article we will present 22 language facts that will surprise you:
1. French has been the official language of England for over 300 years.
2. Italian is the fifth most popular language, after English, French, Spanish, and German.
3. German is the most widespread mother tongue in Europe.
4. English speakers can recognize more than 3,000 Spanish words.
5. Portuguese has 178 million native speakers.
6. Romanian was perhaps the first of the Romance languages that separated from the Latin language.
7. About 1.8 billion people speak English.
8. There are two official forms for Norwegian written language: bokmål (the language used in books) and nynorsk (the new Norwegian).
9. Danish is spoken in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Germany.
10. Arabic is the official language in 22 countries.
11. Hebrew is the language in which God first spoke to Adam.
12. Mandarin has the most native speakers: 845 million.
13. In Japanese, there is no way to show whether a word is singular or plural.
14. Ukrainian became the official state language of Ukraine in 1989.
15. The longest word in Finnish is ″epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhä″, which means ″doubtful″.
16. Over 300 languages are spoken in London.
17. Basque, a language spoken in the mountains of Spain and France, is the only European language that has no connection with any other known language.
18. The Pope posts on Twitter in nine languages and his Spanish account has the most followers.
19. The most translated book is the Bible in 2454 known languages.
20. The second most translated book is Pinocchio.
21. Frisian, a native language in the Netherlands, is considered the easiest foreign language for English speakers.
22. Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese) has about 50,000 characters. To read a newspaper, you should know about 2000 characters.
If you want to find out about the International Translation Day, check out our article on this topic: International Translation Day.
[Photo from Unsplash]
