Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
Unlike French, Spanish, German, and many other languages, English does not assign grammatical gender to nouns. In French, a chair (chaise) is feminine, while a bed (lit) is masculine. In German, there is even a neuter gender — the word for girl (Mädchen) is grammatically neuter. English lost its grammatical gender system during the Middle Ages, making it unusual among European languages.
Swahili (also called Kiswahili) is spoken by an estimated 200 million people across East Africa and is the most widely spoken African language. It serves as a national or official language in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Swahili developed as a trade language combining elements of Bantu languages with Arabic, Persian, and Portuguese.
Hundreds of everyday English words came from Indigenous American languages. 'Canoe,' 'hammock,' and 'hurricane' came from Caribbean Arawak; 'moose,' 'skunk,' and 'squash' from Algonquian languages; 'tomato,' 'chocolate,' and 'coyote' from Nahuatl; and 'condor' and 'llama' from Quechua. These borrowed words reflect the deep influence of indigenous cultures on American and world vocabulary.
Polish is considered one of the most grammatically complex languages for English speakers to learn. Polish nouns have seven different cases — they change their endings depending on their role in a sentence. Polish also has incredibly complex consonant clusters, like the word for 'always' (zawsze) or the tongue-twisting tongue twister 'W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.'
The language you speak can subtly influence how you perceive colors. Studies show that people distinguish between shades of color more quickly when their language has separate words for those shades. The Pirahã people of Brazil, whose language has no specific color terms, perform differently on color discrimination tasks than speakers of languages with rich color vocabularies.
The Khoisan languages of southern Africa use clicking sounds as regular consonants in speech. There are five distinct click sounds, and words can contain multiple clicks. The famous !Kung language uses clicks, which is why the exclamation mark is used to write some of these language names. Click consonants are found in only about 30 of the world's 7,000 languages.
Google Translate operates using a form of artificial intelligence called neural machine translation, which was introduced in 2016. Rather than translating word-by-word using rules, it processes whole sentences and learns patterns from billions of example translations. It can now translate between over 100 languages and handles about 150 billion words of translation requests per day.
William Shakespeare invented or first recorded over 1,700 words that are still used in English today. These include 'bedroom,' 'lonely,' 'generous,' 'obscene,' 'suspicious,' and 'bedroom.' He also created memorable phrases like 'break the ice,' 'wild goose chase,' 'heart of gold,' and 'all that glitters is not gold.' His works expanded the English vocabulary enormously.
The Braille writing system, invented by Louis Braille in 1824, uses combinations of raised dots that can be read by touch. It has been adapted for almost every written language in the world, from English to Arabic to Chinese. Modern Braille also includes notation systems for music and mathematics, allowing blind people to read and write complex technical material.
Emoji began in Japan in 1999 when NTT DoCoMo employee Shigetaka Kurita designed the first 176 emoji for mobile internet use. Today over 3,600 official emoji are defined by the Unicode Consortium. Linguists and dictionary editors debate whether emoji are a form of language — they can convey emotion and meaning, but lack grammar and cannot fully replace text.