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This languages trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the world's tongues from every angle: which has the most speakers and which the most native speakers, how many languages exist and how fast they are dying, the country with 840 of them and the ones with 16 or 37 official languages. It takes in scripts and alphabets (cuneiform, the Rosetta Stone, Cyrillic, Hangul, the Cherokee syllabary, Braille, the 12-letter Rotokas alphabet), the oddities (Basque with no relatives, Icelandic that has barely changed in 800 years, the whistled Spanish of La Gomera, the click-heavy Taa of Botswana) and the invented ones, from Esperanto to Klingon. The easy questions ask which language has the most speakers, how many tones Mandarin has and what Duolingo's mascot is. The medium ones cover the UN's six languages, Switzerland's four, India's 22 and who revived Hebrew. The hard ones want the year Sequoyah finished his syllabary, how far a Gomeran whistle carries and which country beats Zimbabwe for official languages. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
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Q 01Counting native and second-language speakers together, which language has the most speakers in the world?
English
Ethnologue puts English near 1.5 billion total speakers; Mandarin leads on native speakers alone, with close to a billion.
Q 02Which language has the most native (first-language) speakers in the world?
Mandarin
Nearly a billion people grow up speaking it; Spanish is usually second on native speakers, and Hindi third on total speakers.
Q 03Roughly how many living languages are there in the world, according to most estimates?
5,000 to 7,000
Consensus is grim about their future: between 50 and 90 percent of the languages spoken in 2000 are expected to be extinct by 2100.
Q 04Which country, with about 840 living languages, is the most linguistically diverse on Earth?
Papua New Guinea
Its official languages are English, Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu and PNG Sign Language; most of the 840 have only a few thousand speakers.
Q 05Which language of the western Pyrenees is Europe's only known language isolate?
Basque
About 806,000 people speak Euskara, more than 90 percent of them on the Spanish side; Hungarian and Maltese have relatives, however distant.
Q 06L. L. Zamenhof, the doctor who published Esperanto in 1887, chose a pen name meaning what?
One who hopes
'Doktoro Esperanto' gave the language its name; with up to two million speakers it remains the most widely spoken constructed language.
Q 07Esperanto's creator worked in which profession?
An ophthalmologist
Zamenhof grew up in multilingual Białystok, then in the Russian Empire, and self-published the Unua Libro on 26 July 1887.
Q 08The Korean alphabet, Hangul, was created under which king, whose scholars shaped the letters after the speech organs that produce them?
Sejong the Great
Announced around 1443 and published in 1446, it let commoners write without years of Chinese-character study; ㅁ is literally a picture of the mouth.
Q 09The Cyrillic script, used for Russian, Ukrainian and Serbian, arose in the 9th century in which state?
The First Bulgarian Empire
Disciples of Cyril and Methodius shaped it at the Preslav Literary School; the name honours Saint Cyril rather than crediting him as author.
Q 10Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union in 2007 when which country joined?
Bulgaria
Latin and Greek were already in use; the euro banknotes gained a Cyrillic 'ЕВРО' as a result.
Q 11The Rosetta Stone's decree appears in hieroglyphs, Demotic and which third script that unlocked the others?
Ancient Greek
Found by a French officer in 1799, it has sat in the British Museum since 1802; Champollion announced his decipherment in 1822.
Q 12Which language is the only one revived from no native speakers into a national language with millions?
Hebrew
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda is usually credited as the reviver; the process ran from the late 19th century into the 20th.
Q 13Silbo Gomero, a whistled form of Spanish taught in schools since 1999, is used on which Canary Island?
La Gomera
Whistles carry across the island's ravines for up to five kilometres; UNESCO listed it as intangible heritage in 2009.
Q 21ASL is most closely related to which other signed language?
France's LSF
Laurent Clerc brought it from Paris to the American School for the Deaf in Hartford in 1817; ASL and BSL are not mutually intelligible.
Q 22The earliest known writing system, cuneiform, was developed to write which language?
Sumerian
Its wedge-shaped signs (Latin cuneus) were pressed into clay with a reed stylus in southern Mesopotamia; the first unequivocal documents date to about 3300 BC.
Q 23The word 'cuneiform' comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning what?
Wedge
The wedge shapes came from pressing the corner of a stylus into wet clay rather than drawing lines.
Q 14How far can a message in Silbo Gomero, the whistled language of the Canaries, be carried?
About 5 km
That is farther than any shout, which is why shepherds developed it; it became a mandatory school subject in 1999.
Q 15How many letters does the Rotokas alphabet, one of the world's smallest, use?
12
Its Central dialect also has one of the world's smallest inventories of consonant sounds; Hawaiian, by comparison, uses 13 letters.
Q 16Which country recognises Spanish plus 36 indigenous languages as official?
Bolivia
Bolivia's 2009 constitution makes every indigenous language official; South Africa has 12, India 22 'scheduled' languages.
Q 17How many official languages does the United Nations have?
Six
English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese were chosen in 1946; Arabic was added in 1973.
Q 18Which language was the last to be added as an official language of the United Nations, in 1973?
Arabic
The other five had been official since 1946; German, Portuguese and Hindi have all lobbied without success since.
Q 19In which year did Sequoyah complete his Cherokee syllabary?
1821
Within years the Cherokee Nation had a newspaper; the giant sequoia may or may not be named after him, a claim now questioned.
Q 20The warlike aliens' language in Star Trek was commissioned from linguist Marc Okrand for which 1984 film?
The Search for Spock
Leonard Nimoy wanted structured speech instead of gibberish; Hamlet has since been translated into Klingon and Duolingo opened a course in 2018.
Q 24Which US state has two official languages, one of them an indigenous Polynesian language?
Hawaii
Hawaiian is written with just 13 letters, including the ʻokina glottal stop.
Q 25How many languages are listed in the Eighth Schedule of India's constitution?
22
Hindi in Devanagari script is the Union's official language, with English alongside; contrary to popular belief, India has no national language.
Q 26Which of these is one of Switzerland's four national languages?
Romansh
About 0.5 percent of the Swiss speak it, against 62 percent German, 22.7 percent French and 8.2 percent Italian.
Q 27Latin remains the official language of which sovereign entity?
The Holy See
Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan are all its direct descendants; the Vatican's cash machines once offered instructions in Latin.
Q 28Duolingo, launched to the public in 2012, was created by two computer scientists at which university?
Carnegie Mellon
Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker built it in Pittsburgh, where the company is still based; the green owl mascot is called Duo.
Q 29What is the name of Duolingo's green owl mascot?
Duo
He is famous for guilt-tripping learners with push notifications; the app launched publicly on 19 June 2012 with a waiting list of about 500,000.
Q 30How old was Louis Braille when he developed his six-dot tactile alphabet in 1824?
Fifteen
He adapted Charles Barbier's military 'night writing' and published the system in 1829; each character sits in a 3-by-2 cell.