Languages Facts for Kids

The Korean alphabet, Hangul, was invented by King Sejong the Great in 1443 so ordinary people could learn to read.

Basque, spoken in Spain and France, is not related to any other known language on Earth.

Papua New Guinea has over 840 languages, more than any other country in the world.

Chinese doesn't use an alphabet — instead it uses over 50,000 characters, though you only need about 3,000 to read a newspaper.

Spanish is one of the fastest spoken languages in the world, with speakers averaging about 7.82 syllables per second.

Sign languages are different around the world — American Sign Language is completely different from British Sign Language.

Finnish has no future tense — speakers use the present tense and context to talk about the future.

The letter "e" is the most commonly used letter in the English language.

Japanese uses three different writing systems at the same time: hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

The longest word in English is "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" — a lung disease caused by volcanic dust. It has 45 letters!