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Language & World

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How many languages does the world actually have?
Ethnologue counts about 7,100 living languages. The distribution is wildly uneven: roughly 40 percent are endangered …
'Actual' isn't 'aktuell' – but Spanish 'actual' is.
English 'actual' means real, not current. Spanish 'actual', like German 'aktuell', means current; 'actualmente' means …
Arabic runs right to left – its numbers run left to right.
Arabic and Hebrew are written right to left, yet multi-digit numbers inside them run left to right, with the highest …
Argentina is named after a metal it barely has.
'Argentina' comes from Latin 'argentum', silver. In the 16th century Spanish explorers heard rumours of a 'Sierra de la …
At 6 months you could hear more sounds than ever again.
Until about 8 months, babies can tell apart nearly every sound contrast in every language, such as two Hindi consonants …
The world's longest city name starts with 'Krung Thep'.
Thais don't call their capital Bangkok but 'Krung Thep Maha Nakhon', City of Angels. The full ceremonial name runs to …
The European language related to no other language.
Basque (Euskara) is spoken by around 800,000 people in northern Spain and southwestern France. It is a language …
In Bulgaria, shaking your head means 'yes'.
In Bulgaria, a sideways head shake traditionally means 'yes' and a nod means 'no', the exact opposite of most of …
English imported 'Schadenfreude' because it had no word of its own.
English uses dozens of German words unchanged: Schadenfreude, Wanderlust, Zeitgeist, kitsch, doppelgänger, angst …
'Estoy embarazada' does not mean 'I'm embarrassed'.
Spanish 'embarazada' means pregnant, not embarrassed. It's the classic false friend: translate 'I'm embarrassed' …
No, Inuit don't have 100 words for snow.
In 1911 Franz Boas listed four Inuit root words for snow, much like English with snow, sleet, slush and powder. A 1940 …
Why 'Gift' is deadly in German but lovely in English.
Both words share the same Germanic root meaning 'to give'. In German, Gift originally meant a present too, you can …
The German letter that wasn't allowed a capital until 2017.
The ß emerged in the Middle Ages as a fusion of long s and z. No German word starts with it, so there was no capital …
A language with no words for 'left' and 'right'.
Guugu Yimithirr, an Aboriginal language of northern Queensland, has no left, right, in front of or behind you. …
No English speaker understands the German 'Handy'.
'Handy' is a pseudo-anglicism: it sounds English, but English never used it for a mobile phone. Brits say mobile …
An alphabet a king could explain in an afternoon.
Korean Hangul was designed in 1443 under King Sejong and published in 1446 so ordinary people could read. Today it has …
How babies cut words out of a continuous sound stream.
Spoken language has no pauses between words. Babies solve this with statistics: they track which syllables tend to …
How to guess German articles right most of the time.
Look at the ending. Always feminine: -ung, -heit, -keit, -schaft, -tät (die Zeitung, die Qualität), almost always -ion …
How to unmask false friends before they embarrass you.
Three checks for a word that looks familiar: First, is it used in a context where the familiar meaning makes no sense? …
How 'pater' became 'father': Grimm's law.
Jacob Grimm, yes, the fairy-tale Grimm, described a rule in 1822: on the way into Germanic, p became f, t became th, k …
How simultaneous interpreters listen and speak at the same time.
Simultaneous interpreters sit in a soundproof booth, hear the speaker through headphones and speak into a microphone …
How to stress any Spanish word correctly – with two rules.
Rule 1: if the word ends in a vowel, n or s, stress the second-to-last syllable: ca-SA, ha-BLAN, LI-bros. Rule 2: if it …
How linguists reconstruct a language nobody wrote down.
The comparative method: collect words of the same meaning from related languages, such as Latin 'pater', Greek 'patḗr' …
How to find any word's origin in 2 minutes.
Open wiktionary.org, type the word and scroll to the 'Etymology' section. There you'll find the chain: English 'window' …
German, Hindi and Spanish are cousins.
Around 3.4 billion people, about 42 percent of the world's population, speak an Indo-European language natively. The …
Japanese mixes three scripts in a single sentence.
A Japanese sentence combines kanji (Chinese characters for word stems, about 2,100 in the school list), hiragana (46 …
The German word Americans say every school day.
Friedrich Fröbel opened the first 'Kindergarten' in Bad Blankenburg in 1840: children should be tended like plants and …
Cologne is really just the word 'colony'.
In AD 50, Emperor Claudius raised the settlement on the Rhine to city status: 'Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium' …
The 63-letter word a law deleted in 2013.
'Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz' (beef labelling supervision duties delegation law) …
L.A. is short for an entire Spanish dedication.
Los Angeles was founded in 1781 by Spanish settlers as 'El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles', 'The Town …
Why 'das Mädchen' (the girl) is grammatically neuter.
Grammatical gender in German is about word form, not biology. All diminutives ending in -chen and -lein are neuter: das …
Why Mexico is spelled with x but pronounced 'Meh-hee-ko'.
The name comes from Nahuatl 'Mēxihco', the land of the Mexica, the Aztecs. In 16th-century Spanish, 'x' stood for the …
'The word really means …' is usually a fallacy.
The etymological fallacy: believing a word's origin fixes its true meaning. 'Decimate' meant killing every tenth Roman …
Why 'yes' in Japan sometimes means 'no'.
Anthropologist Edward T. Hall in 1976 sorted cultures by how much they rely on context. In low-context cultures such as …
Six sliders for comparing cultures.
From 1967, Geert Hofstede analysed surveys of IBM employees in 50 countries and found dimensions on which cultures …
A look-alike word is a hypothesis, not a translation.
Spanish and English share thousands of cognates: nación/nation, animal/animal, importante/important. That speeds up …
'A language is a dialect with an army and navy.'
Popularised in 1945 by Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, the line sums it up: whether something is called a language or a …
Does your language shape your thinking? Yes, but quietly.
The strong Sapir-Whorf claim, that language determines what you can think, is refuted. The weak version holds: language …
Munich means 'by the monks'.
In 1158, a charter of Emperor Barbarossa mentions the place as 'Munichen', Old High German for 'by the monks'. A …
No European country has as many names as Germany.
'Deutschland' comes from Old High German 'diutisc', 'of the people'. English says Germany after Latin Germania, French …
Spaniards say 'God willing' every day – in Arabic.
Spanish 'ojalá' (hopefully) is a worn-down form of Arabic 'law šāʾ Allāh' or 'in šāʾ Allāh': 'if God wills'. It became …
One country, roughly 840 languages.
Papua New Guinea has about 10 million people and around 840 living languages, more than any other country and roughly …
Your letter A used to be an ox head.
Around 1050 BC, Phoenician traders used an alphabet of 22 consonant signs. The first letter, 'aleph', meant ox and …
About 4,000 Spanish words are actually Arabic.
Nearly 800 years of Muslim rule on the Iberian Peninsula (711 to 1492) left around 4,000 words in Spanish. A tell-tale …
Spain is just a tenth of the Spanish-speaking world.
Around 520 million people speak Spanish natively, more than English; only Mandarin has more. Spanish is official in 20 …
Why Spanish starts questions with '¿'.
The Real Academia Española recommended the inverted question mark at the start of sentences in 1754. The reason …
Venezuela literally means 'Little Venice'.
In 1499, an expedition with Amerigo Vespucci saw indigenous stilt houses standing in the water of Lake Maracaibo. They …
In Argentina nobody says 'tú'.
In Argentina, Uruguay and parts of Central America, 'you' is not 'tú' but 'vos', with its own verb forms: 'vos tenés' …
The made-up creature that proved how kids learn grammar.
In 1958, Jean Berko showed children aged 4 to 7 a drawing: 'This is a wug.' Then two of them: 'Now there are two …' …
'Sugar' travelled from India via Persia and Arabia to Europe.
Sanskrit 'śarkarā' meant gravel or grit. Along trade routes the word became Persian 'shakar', Arabic 'sukkar', medieval …
From 1 to 8 billion people in just 220 years.
Around 1800, roughly 1 billion people lived on Earth. The 2 billion mark came around 1927, 4 billion in 1974. In …
Earth's biggest desert is made of ice.
Desert means dry, not hot: deserts receive less than 250 mm of precipitation a year. Antarctica, about 14 million km² …
The biggest merchant fleets belong to countries that barely build ships.
A ship falls under the laws of the country whose flag it flies, whoever owns it. Panama, Liberia and the Marshall …
Everest would vanish into the ocean's deepest point.
The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench lies about 10,900 metres below sea level. Drop Mount Everest (8,849 m) in and …
Everest isn't the point closest to outer space.
Earth is not a sphere: its radius is about 21 km larger at the equator than at the poles. Chimborazo in Ecuador is only …
In western China the sun sometimes rises at 10 a.m.
China spans roughly 5,000 km from east to west, geographically five time zones. Officially, since 1949, only Beijing …
The world's largest annual human migration has a date.
Chinese New Year follows a lunisolar calendar and falls between 21 January and 20 February, on the second new moon …
One country simply moved the International Date Line.
The date line roughly follows the 180th meridian but takes big detours. Until 1994 Kiribati straddled it: the west had …
How large families become two-child families, everywhere.
Almost every country follows the same pattern. Stage 1: high births, high deaths, little growth. Stage 2: medicine and …
A festival where a billion people light lamps.
Diwali, the festival of lights, is celebrated by Hindus, Jains and Sikhs every autumn over about five days, usually in …
Two countries need two border crossings to reach the sea.
Around 44 countries have no coastline. Only two are doubly landlocked, surrounded entirely by other landlocked states …
Why Chicago is ORD and not CHI.
The three letters on your bag tag are assigned by the airline body IATA. Many date from early days: Chicago O'Hare was …
How thousands of aircraft manage not to collide at once.
Airspace is divided into sectors, each handled by one controller. On the ground, the tower directs take-off and …
Which country has the most time zones? Not Russia.
France uses twelve time zones, more than any other country. The reason is its overseas territories: French Polynesia in …
Why nobody may make, enforce and judge laws at once.
Montesquieu described three powers in 1748: the legislature (parliament) passes laws, the executive (government …
The prime meridian isn't where the line in Greenwich is.
Tourists stand on the brass prime-meridian line in Greenwich. Your GPS there reads 0.0015° West, though. The modern …
Why your flight to Tokyo goes over Siberia.
On a sphere, the shortest path is a great circle, a circle centred on Earth's core. On a flat map it looks like an arc …
More lanes don't make the traffic jam smaller.
Widen a road and travel time drops briefly. That very drop attracts new trips: people switch from the train, drive at …
How a verdict is reached and when it becomes final.
A court of first instance hears witnesses, weighs evidence and rules. The losing side can usually appeal: a higher …
Why the flight back from New York is an hour shorter.
At around 10 km altitude, jet streams blow from west to east, often at 150 to over 300 km/h. Flying east, the wind …
The world's longest border is a 6-metre-wide clearing.
The border between Canada and the United States runs roughly 8,900 km, including 2,475 km with Alaska. It is the …
The world's largest lake is called a "sea".
The Caspian Sea has no outlet to the ocean, which makes it a lake, and at about 371,000 km² the largest on Earth …
What happens to your wastewater after you flush.
Sewage flows through pipes to a treatment plant. Stage 1: screens and grit chambers remove coarse material; sludge …
A bleached coral isn't dead, it's starving.
Corals live with tiny algae that give them colour and up to 90% of their food. When the water gets just 1–2 °C too …
In some countries half the population is under 16.
Median age splits a population into two equal halves. In Niger it is around 15 years; in Japan, Italy and Germany it is …
Greenland is 14 times too big on your map.
The Mercator projection from 1569 preserves angles so sailors could draw courses as straight lines. The price: areas …
The great garbage patch isn't an island you could see.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii is not a solid surface but a soup of about 1.8 trillion …
Nepal runs 45 minutes ahead of the rest.
Time zones don't have to be whole hours. Since 1986 Nepal has used UTC+5:45, aligned with the longitude of Mount …
North is only "up" because we're used to it.
There is no up in space. Medieval European maps often put east at the top, and Islamic cartographers like al-Idrisi put …
Why trains used to stop dead at the Spanish border.
About 60% of the world's railways use standard gauge, 1,435 mm, the width of George Stephenson's early lines in …
How the date of Easter is determined.
Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, with spring fixed by the church at 21 March. That …
Almost all the water on Earth is undrinkable.
Oceans cover about 71% of Earth's surface and hold roughly 97% of all its water. Most of the rest is locked in glaciers …
We know the surface of Mars better than our own seafloor.
According to NOAA, more than 80% of the ocean has never been mapped in high resolution or directly observed. Mars and …
Atlantic to Pacific through Panama means sailing southeast.
Panama curves so that the canal from the Caribbean to the Pacific runs roughly northwest to southeast, not east to …
Why country comparisons in absolute numbers almost always mislead.
A country with 1.4 billion people tops nearly every total: cars, emissions, accidents. That says little about any …
Why Ramadan starts eleven days earlier every year.
The Islamic calendar is purely lunar: twelve lunar months add up to about 354 days, eleven fewer than the solar year. …
Why airliners cruise at 11 km instead of 3 km.
At 11 km the air has only about a quarter of its density at ground level. Less air means less drag, so the aircraft …
One country votes on laws up to four times a year.
In Switzerland the people decide directly. With 50,000 signatures citizens can force a referendum on a law passed by …
Why the city is several degrees warmer at night.
Asphalt, concrete and roofs store solar heat during the day and release it at night. Trees that cool by evaporation are …
Why Jewish holidays start the evening before.
In the Hebrew calendar a day begins at sunset, not at midnight. The Sabbath therefore starts on Friday evening and ends …
The EU shares a land border with Brazil.
French Guiana in South America is a full part of France and therefore of the EU, using the euro. Its 730 km border with …
Why "suspect" does not mean "perpetrator".
Article 11 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: everyone is presumed innocent until proved guilty …
Since about 2007, most people live in cities.
In 1950 roughly 30% of the world's population lived in cities. Around 2007 the majority tipped toward urban for the …
The world's smallest state fits inside a city park.
Vatican City covers 0.44 km², roughly 60 football pitches, entirely inside Rome. About 900 people live there. The state …
You sign contracts every day without signing anything.
A contract forms through offer and acceptance: the baker offers the roll, you take it and pay, done. Written form is …
How the same votes produce two completely different parliaments.
Plurality voting: the country is split into districts, and whoever wins the most votes there takes the seat; all other …
How many countries are there? Depends who you ask.
The United Nations has 193 member states plus two observers (Vatican City, Palestine). Kosovo is recognised by around …
In this town, your front door decides which country you live in.
Baarle-Hertog is Belgian but lies entirely inside the Netherlands, made up of 22 exclaves that themselves contain seven …
In 2017 Australia had to shift its map by 1.8 metres.
The Australian Plate creeps about 7 cm a year to the north-northeast. But the coordinate system GDA94 had been pinned …
Iceland's phone book lists you under your first name.
Most Icelanders have no family name. The second name only tells whose child you are: Jón's son is Jónsson, his daughter …
In Ethiopia the year has 13 months and the clock says 2018.
The Ethiopian calendar has twelve 30-day months plus a thirteenth, Pagume, of five or six days. New Year falls on 11 …
A town was invented to catch map copiers. Then it became real.
In the 1920s Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers of General Drafting put an anagram of their initials at a Catskills …
The English alphabet once had 27 letters.
The & sign is a ligature of e and t, Latin "et", attested since the 1st century. In 19th-century America schoolchildren …
Switzerland has no capital city by law.
Bern has been the "federal city" since 28 November 1848, seat of parliament and government. But the constitution names …
A patch of land no country wants.
Bir Tawil, 2,060 km² of desert between Egypt and Sudan, is claimed by nobody. The reason: two boundary lines from 1899 …
The Chevrolet Nova didn't flop because "no va" means "doesn't go".
The story is told in every marketing class and it's false. The Nova sold well in Mexico and across Central and South …
Sweden switched from left- to right-hand traffic overnight.
At 5 a.m. on 3 September 1967, every Swede suddenly drove on the right. In 1955, 83% had voted to keep left, but Norway …
Two islands, 3.8 km apart, 21 hours of time difference.
The Diomede Islands sit in the Bering Strait: Big Diomede belongs to Russia, Little Diomede to the USA, 3.8 km apart at …
Only three countries never made the metric system mandatory.
The USA, Liberia and Myanmar are the only states without a law requiring metric units. As early as 2011, 95% of the …
The "first floor" is downstairs in New York and upstairs in London.
In Europe, most Commonwealth countries and much of Latin America the ground floor is 0 and the "first floor" is one …
An island changes country every six months.
Pheasant Island in the border river Bidasoa covers 0.68 hectares, about 200 by 40 metres. Since the 1659 Treaty of the …
ABC News counted 112 spellings of Gaddafi's name.
There is no universally accepted authority for transliterating Arabic names into Latin letters. So AP wrote "Moammar …
A jet ran dry because someone mixed up pounds and kilos.
On 23 July 1983 the crew of Air Canada Flight 143 used 1.77 pounds per litre instead of 0.803 kg per litre; the new …
How six dots make a whole alphabet.
A braille cell has six dots; each is raised or not, giving 64 combinations including the space. Letters a to j use only …
How to turn coordinates into kilometres in your head.
A degree of latitude is always about 111 km, 110.6 km at the equator to 111.7 km at the poles; one arc minute is 1.853 …
How to measure distance with your thumb.
Stretch out your arm, thumb up, and sight a target with one eye. Now switch eyes: the thumb jumps sideways. Estimate …
How to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius without a calculator.
Exactly: Celsius equals (Fahrenheit minus 32) times 5/9; water freezes at 32 °F, boils at 212 °F. In your head …
How to read hills, valleys and cliffs from contour lines.
Each contour joins points of equal height; the gap between two lines, the contour interval, is in the legend. Lines …
How to find an address in Japan when streets have no names.
Japanese addresses run from large to small: prefecture, municipality, district (chōme), block (banchi), building (gō). …
How country codes work and why Switzerland is CH.
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 from 1974 gives every country two letters; 249 codes live in internet domains and IBANs. The codes …
How to type tens of thousands of Chinese characters with 26 keys.
You type the romanisation pinyin, say "ma", and the system lists every character with that pronunciation; you pick one …
How an analogue watch becomes a compass.
Northern Hemisphere: hold the watch flat, point the hour hand at the sun. Halfway between the hour hand and 12 is …
How to derive a place's time zone from its longitude.
Earth turns 360° in 24 hours, so 15° per hour. Ideal time zones are 15° wide, 7.5° either side of a central meridian …
Istanbul is probably just Greek for "in the city".
To Greeks, Constantinople was simply "the City", i Polis. The most likely origin of "Istanbul" is the everyday phrase …
In India, a million is written 10,00,000.
The Indian numbering system has its own words: 1 lakh = 100,000, 1 crore = 10,000,000. Digits are grouped in twos after …
Why the Swiss speak one language and write another.
Diglossia, described by Charles Ferguson in 1959, means one community uses two varieties with fixed roles. The H …
English didn't lose its formal "you", it lost its informal one.
Linguists call the choice between familiar and polite pronouns the T–V distinction, after Latin tu and vos; the term …
Why every polite word eventually turns rude.
Steven Pinker called it the euphemism treadmill in 1994: a new, mild word gradually absorbs the flavour of the thing it …
Deutschland, Germany, Allemagne, Niemcy, Saksa: one country, five names.
An endonym is the name a group gives itself: Deutschland. An exonym is the name from outside: Germany in English …
How long is Britain's coast? Depends on your ruler.
Measure the coast in 100 km steps and you get about 2,800 km; in 50 km steps, 3,400 km. The shorter the ruler, the more …
How a new language is born in a single generation.
Where people without a shared language must cooperate, a pidgin emerges: tiny vocabulary, little grammar. When children …
The first law of geography fits in one sentence.
Waldo Tobler wrote in a 1970 paper on Detroit's growth: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are …
A language's most common word appears twice as often as the second.
Zipf's law: rank words by frequency and the n-th is about 1/n as common as the first. In the Brown Corpus of English …
Tomato, chili, avocado and coyote are words you say in Aztec.
Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, is still spoken by over a million people in Mexico and hides in your kitchen …
Only one national flag in the world isn't a rectangle.
Nepal's flag is two stacked pennants, red with a blue border, and the only one taller than it is wide. The current form …
The world's most visited island doesn't exist.
At 0° N, 0° E, where the equator and prime meridian cross in the Gulf of Guinea, sits "Null Island". Only a weather …
The colour orange has only existed since oranges arrived.
In English, "orange" as a colour name is first recorded in 1502, in a list of clothes bought for Margaret Tudor. Before …
The place where the nearest humans are in space.
Point Nemo in the South Pacific lies about 2,688 km from any land, equidistant from the three nearest islands. Because …
In Portuguese, Monday is called "second day".
Almost every European language names weekdays after planets and gods: mardi after Mars, Thursday after Thor. Not …
Never order jam "without préservatif" in France.
French "préservatif" is not a preservative but a condom: a thin sheath of latex or polyurethane. Food preservatives are …
The word "robot" was invented in Prague in 1920.
Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. ("Rossum's Universal Robots") gave the world the word; it premiered on 2 January 1921 in …
"Sahara Desert" literally means "Desert Desert".
Sahara is Arabic for "deserts", Gobi is Mongolian for "desert". Such doublings arise when a name is borrowed from one …
In 1712, Sweden had a 30th of February.
From 1700 Sweden tried to ease from Julian to Gregorian by skipping every leap day for 40 years. Then the Great …
A man who couldn't read invented a writing system.
Sequoyah, a Cherokee, knew neither English nor how to read. From around 1809 he nonetheless developed a syllabary for …
Spain has lived in the wrong time zone since 1940.
Geographically, mainland Spain belongs to Greenwich time like Portugal and Britain. On 16 March 1940 Franco moved the …
Whether you say "tea" or "chai" reveals the trade route.
Almost every language has one of two words for tea. "Cha" from Cantonese and Mandarin travelled overland: Persian chay …
Thai writes whole sentences without a single space.
Thai script has 44 consonant symbols with vowels attached as marks, making it an abugida. There are no spaces between …
Since 2022, Turkey is no longer called Turkey at the UN.
On 4 December 2021 President Erdoğan issued a circular ordering exports to be labelled "Made in Türkiye" instead of …
Vietnamese is written in Latin letters, thanks to Jesuits.
For centuries Vietnam wrote in Chinese characters and the derived chữ Nôm. From 1620 Portuguese and Italian Jesuits …
Wales, Wallonia and Wallachia share one name: "foreigners".
Germanic peoples called their Romance- or Celtic-speaking neighbours *walhaz, derived from the Celtic tribe of the …