Interesting linguistic facts

25. In Mexico, there is a language that can disappear forever, because native speakers there are only two.





24. Language of Native American Zuni tribe is somewhat reminiscent of the Japanese language. Recent studies have confirmed the biological similarities between the two groups.



23. Basque - the language spoken by the Basque people, inhabiting northern regions of Spain and southern France. It is the only European language that does not belong to any known family of languages ​​and is a pseudo-isolated languages.



22. In South Africa there are 11 official languages ​​- more than in any other state.



20. The Bible - the book is translatable in the world. It has been translated into 2 454 languages ​​of the world.



19. The second largest number of translations takes "Pinocchio».



18. Archi, spoken only in one mountain village - Archie in Charodinsky District of Dagestan, the amount of each verb conjugations can be up to 1, 5 million.



17. Language silbo spoken people from the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands Spain), composed entirely of whistles.



16. In Botswana, there is a language that consists of 5 main clicking sounds.



15. Total the planet has up to 7 thousand languages.
14. Approximately 2, 400 of them could disappear forever.
13. According to approximate calculations, every 14 days a language dies.



12. In the State of Papua - New Guinea speak 840 languages. This represents 1/7 of all the languages ​​spoken on the planet



11. There are 13 different ways to write the sound [0] in French.



10. Professor of Linguistics Marc Okrand, who invented the artificial language Klingon for the cult TV series "Star Trek", three years teaching his young son to talk to him. When the son grew up, he happily forgot his father invented language.



9. Frisian - the official language for nearly 400 thousand inhabitants of the Netherlands, is considered the easiest language to learn English speaking people.



8. Recently, a Japanese man sued NBC for mental suffering caused to him, because in their programs television company uses too many English words.



7. As it turned out, in Welsh (aka - Welsh) spoken not only in Wales. Argentina - the only country where Welsh said a small group of people, because 200 years ago in the region of Patagonia Welsh colony settled immigrants.



6. Alphabet Rotokas language spoken by 4000 people living on the island of Bougainville (Papua - New Guinea), has only 11 letters and is the shortest alphabet in the world.



5. But most of all the letters in the alphabet is present Khmer - Cambodia's main language. They number as many as 72 letters.



4. Kriptofaziya - secret speech with which to communicate very close to each other people, such as twins.



3. Just like people speaking different languages, have different accents, deaf sign language also includes the accents.



2. The Vatican ATMs provide instructions in Latin.



1. In the Chinese language (Mandarin / Cantonese) contains about 50 thousand characters. To read the free press, you need to learn the order of 2 million characters.



Source: list25.com

Tags

See also

New and interesting