Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
In tonal languages like Mandarin, the pitch of your voice changes the meaning of a word entirely. The same sound said in four different tones can mean four completely different things.
Sign languages are fully complete languages with their own grammar and vocabulary, not simply hand gestures for spoken words. British Sign Language and American Sign Language are actually quite different from each other.
Esperanto is a language that was deliberately invented in 1887 by a Polish doctor named Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof. He hoped it would become a universal second language to help people around the world communicate peacefully.
English borrows words from hundreds of other languages, including French, Latin, German, Arabic, and Hindi. Words like 'pyjamas', 'jungle', and 'shampoo' all came from languages of the Indian subcontinent.
The Hawaiian alphabet has only 13 letters — five vowels and eight consonants — making it one of the smallest alphabets in the world. Every syllable in Hawaiian ends in a vowel.
The Khmer alphabet, used in Cambodia, has 74 letters and is considered the largest alphabet in the world. It is descended from an ancient Indian script called Brahmi.
Swahili is spoken as a first or second language by over 200 million people across East and Central Africa. It is one of the official languages of the African Union.
Babies are born able to distinguish all the sounds of every human language, but by about six months old they begin to focus only on the sounds they hear around them. This is why children learn accents and sounds so easily.
French is an official language in 29 countries, more than any other language except English. It is spoken on every continent in the world.
Icelandic has changed so little over the past thousand years that Icelanders today can still read medieval Viking sagas written in Old Norse. This makes Icelandic one of the most preserved languages in Europe.