Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
Braille is a reading and writing system used by people who are blind or visually impaired, where letters are represented by patterns of raised dots that can be felt with the fingertips. It was invented by Louis Braille in France when he was just 15 years old.
Xhosa, the native language of Nelson Mandela, is famous for its use of click consonants, which give it a distinctive sound. It is one of South Africa's 11 official languages.
During the Second World War, the Navajo language was used as an unbreakable military code by the US Army because it was so complex and little-known outside the Navajo nation. The Navajo Code Talkers helped the Allies win several crucial battles.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that can change the meaning of a word. English has around 44 phonemes, even though the alphabet only has 26 letters.
Rotokas, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, uses only 11 phonemes and has one of the smallest sound systems of any known language. Its alphabet has just 12 letters.
Languages regularly borrow words from one another — these are called 'loanwords'. The word 'karate' is borrowed from Japanese, 'chocolate' from the Aztec Nahuatl language, and 'robot' from Czech.
Māori is one of New Zealand's three official languages alongside English and New Zealand Sign Language. After decades of decline, it is now being revived through immersion schools called kura kaupapa Māori.
Spanish and Portuguese are so closely related that speakers of each language can often understand each other to some degree, especially in writing. Both languages evolved from Latin after the Romans conquered the Iberian Peninsula.
All living languages change constantly — new words are added, old words fall out of use, and pronunciation shifts over time. The English spoken 500 years ago would be very difficult for most people today to understand.
Chinese writing uses characters called hanzi that represent meanings rather than sounds, which is why people who speak very different Chinese dialects can all read the same written text. There are over 50,000 hanzi characters, though most educated people only know around 8,000.