100+ Facts About Languages That You Might Not Know

Turkish used to be written in the Arabic script until 1928.
The word jeans comes from the French word for the city of Genoa (Gênes) in the Italian region of Liguria, home to the Ligurian language.
Luxembourg is officially trilingual (French , German, Luxembourgish).
Llanito is the autochthonous language of Gibraltar.
Hebrew became extinct as a spoken language in the first few centuries of the CE until its revival in the late 1800s.
Modern Standard Arabic is a written language; people speak local/regional varieties of Arabic: Egyptian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic and Lebanese Arabic.
Italian is a widely spoken language in Albania.
Mirandese is one of the official languages of Miranda do Douro in Portugal.
Ñ is not exclusive to Spanish. You can find it in languages such as Galician, Aymara or Quechua.
The native language of Jersey is not English but Jèrriais, a variant of Norman spoken in Normandy in France, a closely related language to French .
The Berber language is official in both Morocco and Algeria.
There are still some speakers of a variant of Ligurian in the Corsican town of Bonifacio.
People speak a variant of Ligurian (Tabarchin) in Carloforte and Calasetta in Sardinia.
Switzerland has four official languages: German, French , Italian and Romansh.
Swedish is the only official language of the Åland Islands, an autonomous region of Finland.
Andorra is the only country where Catalan is the only official language.
After Catalan and Spanish, Portuguese is the third most spoken language in Andorra.
The world-famous song "'O sole mio" is not in Italian but Neapolitan.
The only country where Latin is an official language is the Vatican State.
If you speak a Romance language such as Spanish, Portuguese, French , Italian, Romanian, Ligurian, Corsican , Catalan or Galician, you are technically speaking an evolution of Latin.
Chipileño is the language of Chipilo in Mexico. Chipileño is a variant of the Venetian language originally spoken in the region of Veneto in Italy.
The United States does not have an official language.
Welsh is not only spoken in Wales but also spoken in Y Wladfa in Argentina.
Two municipalities in Brazil have Ukrainian as a co-official language along with Portuguese.
Curaçao, a constituent country of the Netherlands, has three official languages: Papiamentu, Dutch and English.
Belgium has three official languages: French , Dutch and German.
The United Kingdom does not have an official language.
Hosts for the Eurovision Song Contest speak English and French .
Thirty-five winning Eurovision songs have been in English.
The second most-viewed-ever music video on YouTube is in Spanish, Despacito by Luis Fonsi.
Italian is one of the official languages in Istria County in Croatia.
Italian is an official language in Slovene Istria in Slovenia.
Italian used to be one of the official languages of Malta until 1934.
Maltese only became an official language of Malta in 1934.
The top five languages with the most articles on Wikipedia are English, Cebuano, German, Swedish and French .
The five most spoken Romance languages are Spanish, Portuguese, French , Italian and Romanian.
The three most spoken Germanic languages are English, German and Dutch.
The Basque language is not related to any other living language.
The European Union has 24 official languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French , German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.
The United Nations has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French , Russian and Spanish.
Fifteen winning Eurovision songs have been in French .
Catalan is the traditional language of the city of Alghero in Sardinia.
There are Greek speakers in Syria, especially in the coastal town of Al-Hamidiyah.
Most of the remaining speakers of Western Aramaic are in Maaloula in Syria.
Finland has two official languages: Swedish and Finnish.
The only place where a variant of the Occitan language is official is in Catalunya under the name Aranese.
The national language of Monaco is Munegascu, a variant of Ligurian.
There are Griko/Greko-speaking towns in Calabria and Puglia in Italy. The Griko/Greko language descends from Greek.
Na-našu is a language descended from Croatian which has speakers in a few towns in Molise, Italy,
Arbëresh, a variant of Albanian, is spoken in several towns in Southern Italy.
Greek was widely spoken in Cargèse in Corsica before the mid-20th century.
According to the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2018, 81.2% of the population of Catalonia can speak Catalan.
The only Celtic language in mainland Europe is Breton, one of the languages of Brittany, France.
The only official Semitic language of the European Union is Maltese.
A variant of Arabic strongly influenced by Cypriot Greek has historically been spoken in Cyprus by Cypriot Maronites.
Chinese is the third most spoken language in the United States after English and Spanish.
The royal motto of the United Kingdom is in French : "Dieu et mon droit".
The first Eurovision Song Contest took place in 1956. The first winning song was Refrain by Lys Assia. The song was in French .
ABBA's first number-one single in Sweden was in Swedish.
Céline Dion's native language is French .
Despite being geographically apart, Hungarian and Finnish are related.
Frisian, a West Germanic language spoken in the Netherlands, is closely related to English.
The oldest Creole language is Kabuverdianu, spoken in Cape Verde.
South Africa has twelve official languages.
Italian is the official language of San Marino; the autochthonous language is Sammarinese, a variant of the Emilian-Romagnol language.
The most widely spoken French Creole language is Haitian Creole, spoken in Haiti.
Punjabi is not one of the official languages of Pakistan - despite being the most spoken first language in the country.
According to the 2020 census, over 60% of households in the Philippines speak another language other than Tagalog.
Alongside Chinese (Cantonese), Portuguese is an official language in Macau.
The internationally well-known island of Ibiza is called Eivissa in Catalan, the autochthonous language of the island.
Hungarian is one of the official languages of the region of Vojvodina in Serbia.
Albanian is the second official language of North Macedonia.
According to the American Community Survey, 70% of the population of Miami, Florida, speaks Spanish at home.
According to the American Community Survey, around 30% of the population of California speaks Spanish at home.
The Taíno name for Puerto Rico is Borinquen. Taíno is an extinct Arawakan language.
Ligurian and Haketia (Moroccan Judeao-Spanish) were 2 of the main languages spoken in Gibraltar during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Maltese derives most of its vocabulary from Arabic, Italian, Sicilian, English and French .
Despite being a Germanic language, English has incorporated a lot of vocabulary from Norman and French (Romance Languages).
Hindi, Bengali and Marathi are the most spoken first languages in India.
Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where most of the population can speak a Native American language: Guaraní.
Cornish, the language of Cornwall in the United Kingdom, became extinct in the 18th century. However, there are efforts to revive the language. According to the latest census figures, over 500 people speak it as a second language.
The most spoken Native American language in the United States is Navajo.
People in Southern Spain once spoke Mozarabic, a now-extinct language.
The country with the most Spanish speakers is Mexico.
The majority of French speakers are in Africa.
The majority of Portuguese speakers are in Brazil.
The native language of the Isle of Man, Manx, became extinct in the early 1970s, but now it is being revived.
Welsh is the Celtic language with the most native speakers.
The country with the most English speakers is the United States.
Canada has two official languages: English and French .
Singapore has four official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil.
According to the Welsh Annual Population Survey, 29.7% of the population of Wales people can speak Welsh.
66% of Maltese people can speak Italian, according to the 2012 Eurobarometer
According to the American Community Survey, the three most spoken languages of the State of New York (United States) after English and Spanish are Chinese, Russian and Yiddish.
The most spoken Native American language in Mexico is Nahuatl.
The original languages of the Bible are Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek.
Serbian can be written either in the Latin or Cyrillic script
French is one of the official languages of the Aosta Valley region in Italy.
Over 10% of the population of Türkiye speaks Kurdish.
Mandarin Chinese is the language with the most native speakers.
According to the 2021 census, after English, the three most spoken languages in London are Romanian, Spanish and Polish.

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