Language Facts

English is the most spoken language worldwide when combining native and non-native speakers, with over 1.5 billion speakers.

However, Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers at around 920 million.

There are approximately 7,000 languages in the world, but only about 140 different scripts/alphabets.

The Latin alphabet (used for English) is the most widely used writing system globally.

Papua New Guinea has the most languages of any country - over 840 languages!

This represents about 12% of the world's languages in a country with only 0.1% of the world's population.

Rotokas, spoken in Papua New Guinea, has the smallest alphabet with only 12 letters.

In contrast, Khmer (Cambodian) has 74 letters, making it one of the longest alphabets.

More than half of the world's languages have no written form.

Many indigenous and tribal languages exist only in spoken form.

A language dies approximately every 14 days.

By 2100, it's estimated that half of the world's languages will be extinct.

More than half the world's population is bilingual or multilingual.

Being bilingual has been shown to improve cognitive abilities and delay dementia.

The longest word in any language is the chemical name for titin, with 189,819 letters.

It would take over 3 hours to pronounce it fully!

There are over 300 different sign languages in the world.

They are not universal - British Sign Language and American Sign Language are completely different!

Children can learn multiple languages simultaneously without confusion.

The critical period for language acquisition is believed to be before puberty.

Japanese is considered the fastest spoken language, with an average of 7.84 syllables per second.

However, Spanish speakers speak nearly as fast. English averages 6.19 syllables per second.

English has about 60% of words containing silent letters.

This is due to English preserving old spellings while pronunciation evolved.