Languages Facts for Kids
Weird and wonderful language facts
The alphabet used to write English, French, Spanish, and dozens of other languages traces its ancestry back to the Phoenician alphabet, which emerged around 1050 BC in the region of modern Lebanon. The Phoenician script influenced the Greek alphabet, which the Romans adapted into the Latin alphabet that we use today. This writing system has been passed from civilization to civilization for over 3,000 years.
The internet is accelerating the spread of English as a global language. Young people across the world are learning English to access social media, games, videos, and websites. However, the internet has also given smaller languages new tools for survival, with minority language communities using social media and online content to keep their languages alive and reach new speakers.
In Polish and many other Slavic languages, verbs change their endings depending on the gender of the subject. A man says 'I went' (poszedłem) differently from a woman (poszłam). There is also a grammatical category for male-personal plural (for groups including at least one man) versus non-male-personal plural. This grammatical complexity makes Polish challenging but very precise.
During World War Two, the US military recruited hundreds of Native American speakers — particularly Navajo Code Talkers — to transmit secret military communications using their native languages as a code. The Navajo language was virtually unknown outside the Navajo people and was never deciphered by Japanese code-breakers. The Code Talkers played a crucial role in several major Pacific campaigns.
Spanish and Japanese speakers deliver information to listeners faster than speakers of English, Mandarin, or other languages — about 7.82 and 7.84 syllables per second respectively compared to English at 6.19. However, Spanish and Japanese also pack less information per syllable than English. Researchers have found that all languages deliver roughly the same amount of information per unit of time.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform around 2100-1200 BC, is considered the world's oldest known work of literature. It tells the story of the king of Uruk and his quest for immortality. Remarkably, the story contains an account of a great flood similar to the Noah's Ark story that predates the biblical version by centuries.
When people who speak different languages must communicate — especially in trading or colonial situations — they sometimes develop a simplified contact language called a pidgin. If children are raised speaking a pidgin as their native language, they naturally add grammar and complexity, transforming it into a fully developed language called a Creole. Haitian Creole, Tok Pisin, and Jamaican Patois are well-known Creole languages.
Hungarian and Finnish are almost completely unrelated to most other European languages. While nearly all other major European languages — English, French, German, Russian, Greek — belong to the Indo-European family, Hungarian and Finnish belong to the Finno-Ugric family. This makes them exceptionally challenging for most Europeans to learn and means their vocabulary shares almost nothing with their neighbors.
The word 'alphabet' comes from combining the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha (α) and beta (β). The Greek alphabet itself is derived from the Phoenician alphabet, with the Greeks adapting the symbols and names. Similarly, the word 'ABC' is simply the names of the first three letters of the Latin alphabet.
Language is processed in specialized regions of the brain, primarily in the left hemisphere for most right-handed people. Broca's area in the frontal lobe is involved in producing language, while Wernicke's area in the temporal lobe is involved in understanding it. Damage to these areas from stroke or injury causes specific types of aphasia — speech disorders where a person may be unable to speak or understand language despite being otherwise mentally intact.