Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
Turkish is an agglutinative language, meaning you can build very long words by stacking suffixes together. A single Turkish word can sometimes express what would require an entire sentence in English.
Dutch, German, and English are all closely related languages that belong to the Germanic family. Dutch sits somewhere between German and English and shares many words with both.
While many animals communicate using sounds, movements, and signals, scientists generally do not consider animal communication to be true language because it lacks the infinite creativity and grammar of human language. However, great apes have been taught to use simple sign language symbols.
Urdu and Hindi are so similar in their spoken form that speakers can largely understand each other, but they use completely different writing systems — Urdu uses a Persian-Arabic script while Hindi uses Devanagari. They are sometimes described as two varieties of the same language.
The ancient Maya developed one of the most sophisticated writing systems in the Americas, using a combination of symbols representing both sounds and meanings. Most of the Mayan glyphs were not decoded by modern scholars until the second half of the 20th century.
Indonesia uses Bahasa Indonesia as its official language to unite a nation of over 700 local languages and 270 million people spread across thousands of islands. Most Indonesians learn it as their second language.
The Rosetta Stone, discovered in Egypt in 1799, was the key to deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. It showed the same message written in three scripts: hieroglyphics, Demotic script, and ancient Greek.
Arabic, Hebrew, and Amharic — spoken in Ethiopia — all belong to the Afroasiatic language family and share a common ancient ancestor. Many words in these languages are built around three-consonant roots that change meaning depending on vowel patterns.
Many languages have words for feelings and situations that have no direct translation in English. For example, the Portuguese word 'saudade' describes a deep, bittersweet longing for something or someone you love that is far away or lost.
About 70% of African languages are tonal, meaning the pitch of your voice changes the meaning of a word. For example, in Yoruba, spoken in Nigeria, the same word can mean different things depending on whether it is said with a high, mid, or low tone.