Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
Mandarin Chinese is the language with the most native speakers in the world, with about 920 million people speaking it as their first language. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Chinese writing uses thousands of characters rather than an alphabet, with educated adults knowing around 8,000 characters.
Babies all over the world babble in very similar ways before they learn to speak a specific language. Around 7-10 months, they begin favoring the sounds of their native language. By about 12 months, babies have already tuned out sounds that are not used in the language spoken around them.
Esperanto is the world's most successful constructed (invented) language, created in 1887 by Polish eye doctor Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof. He designed it to be easy to learn and to serve as a neutral international language. Today an estimated 1-2 million people speak Esperanto worldwide, with about 1,000 people raised from birth as native speakers.
English has borrowed words from hundreds of other languages. 'Pajama' comes from Urdu-Persian, 'algebra' from Arabic, 'kindergarten' from German, 'chocolate' from Nahuatl (Aztec), and 'tattoo' from Polynesian. This borrowing of vocabulary makes English extraordinarily rich but also makes its spelling notoriously difficult and irregular.
In tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, and Yoruba, the pitch or tone you use when saying a word completely changes its meaning. Mandarin has four tones — the syllable 'ma' can mean mother, hemp, horse, or scold depending on which tone is used. About 70% of the world's languages are tonal to some degree.
Sign languages are fully independent, complete languages, not simplified codes or visual versions of spoken languages. American Sign Language (ASL) has its own grammar, syntax, and vocabulary completely different from English. ASL is more closely related to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language, reflecting the history of how it was introduced to America.
The Hawaiian language has the smallest alphabet of any language in the world, with just 13 letters — five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and eight consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p, w, and the glottal stop mark ʻokina). Despite having so few letters, Hawaiian is capable of expressing rich concepts through long compound words. The state of Hawaii uses Hawaiian in official documents.
Latin is often called a 'dead language' because it is no longer anyone's native language, but it is still actively used today. Vatican City uses Latin as its official language, Latin phrases appear in legal and scientific contexts worldwide, and all biological species names are given in Latin. Latin also lives on through the Romance languages — French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian — which all evolved from it.
Spanish is the world's second most spoken language by native speakers, with over 485 million people speaking it as their first language. It is the official language of 21 countries across Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The Spanish spoken in Spain and the Spanish spoken in Latin America have many differences in vocabulary and pronunciation, similar to British and American English.
The Pirahã language, spoken by a small tribe in the Amazon rainforest, famously has no words for numbers, no specific color terms, and no grammatical tenses for past or future. The tribe appears to communicate almost entirely about the present and immediate experience. Pirahã has been studied extensively and challenges some fundamental theories about the universal properties of human language.