Linguistics Trivia
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170 free Linguistics trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Linguistics trivia questions with answers. Linguistics is the science of language, and this quiz tours the whole field. Fifty questions cover the great language families and lonely isolates like Basque, how English vowels moved in the Great Vowel Shift and Grimm's law reshaped Germanic consonants, the writing systems from cuneiform and the Phoenician letters to hangul and Sequoyah's Cherokee script, and the decipherers of the Rosetta Stone and Linear B. There are questions on Chomsky and universal grammar, Saussure, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Wug test, Broca's and Wernicke's areas, pidgins and creoles, sign languages, click consonants, tone, whistled speech and the world's most extreme sound systems. Easy questions ask which country has the most languages and where 'salary' comes from; the hard ones want the Danish linguist behind Grimm's law, the last speaker of Ubykh and the river the Pirahã live on. Made for language nerds, linguistics students and anyone who reads the etymology before the definition. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the languages, scripts and scholars involved, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
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Q 01Roughly how many living languages did Ethnologue count worldwide in its 2026 edition?
About 7,000
About 7,000: the 2026 edition lists 7,170. The figure shifts every year as field surveys redraw the line between a language and a dialect, and Ethnologue rates roughly 44% of the total as endangered.
Q 02Ethnologue, the annual catalogue of the world's living languages, is published by which organization?
SIL Global
SIL Global, a Christian nonprofit in Dallas that began as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, builds the catalogue from its field linguists' reports and notes for each language whether the Bible has been translated into it.
Q 03Which country, with about 840 known spoken languages, is the most linguistically diverse in the world?
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea has about 840 living languages, so many that Tok Pisin, an English-based contact language, became the common tongue that lets neighbouring villages talk to each other.
Q 04Which language of the western Pyrenees is the only one in its continent with no known relatives?
Basque
Basque is the only remnant of the languages spoken in south-western Europe before the Romans arrived; its neighbours all adopted the conquerors' tongue, which is why it has no living relatives.
Q 05Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are the three most-spoken members of which language family?
Uralic
Uralic takes its name from the Ural Mountains, the family's hypothesised homeland; alongside Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian it includes the Sámi languages of northern Scandinavia.
Q 06Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, belongs to which family that reaches east as far as Easter Island?
Austronesian
Austronesian reaches from Madagascar to Easter Island; its deepest diversity lies among the Formosan languages of Taiwan, which is why Taiwan is regarded as the family's homeland.
Q 07Burmese and Cantonese both belong to which language family, second only to Indo-European in native speakers?
Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan has hundreds of member languages, yet the Chinese varieties, Cantonese among them, supply the vast majority of its speakers; most of the others are small languages of the Himalayas and nearby highlands.
Q 08Which proposed African language family, home to the Bantu languages, would be the world's largest by number of languages?
Niger–Congo
Niger–Congo would top every family for number of languages, well over a thousand, but linguists still argue over which outlying branches belong; its core, which includes Bantu, is widely accepted.
Q 09Manuscripts found in desert oases of western China revealed which extinct branch of the Indo-European family?
Tocharian
Tocharian surfaced in the early 1900s in manuscripts from oasis towns of the Tarim Basin; finding an Indo-European branch that far east overturned the old picture of a neat east–west split in the family.
Q 10Which extinct Bronze Age language of what is now Turkey is the earliest attested Indo-European language?
Hittite
Hittite stayed unread until 1915, when Bedřich Hrozný met a sentence about bread containing the word 'watar' beside a verb that looked like 'eat'; the echo of 'water' told him the language was Indo-European.
Q 11Which judge told the Asiatic Society in 1786 that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin sprang from a common root?
William Jones
William Jones, a judge on Bengal's supreme court, took up Sanskrit so that he could compile a digest of Hindu law; its likeness to the classical tongues he had learned as a boy prompted his famous remark.
Q 12The widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis places the original Indo-European homeland in which region?
Pontic–Caspian steppe
The Pontic–Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea, was home to herders whose burial mounds, called kurgans, name the theory; ancient-DNA studies have since traced a mass migration from there into Europe.
Q 13Grimm's law describes the consonant shift that produced which branch of Indo-European?
Germanic
Q 21Two words such as 'tip' and 'dip' that differ in only one sound are called what?
A minimal pair
'Tip' and 'dip' form a minimal pair, the standard test that two sounds such as t and d are separate phonemes; sign languages have minimal pairs too, differing in a single parameter such as handshape.
Q 22The Wug test, in which children pluralize a made-up creature, was created by which psycholinguist?
Jean Berko Gleason
Jean Berko Gleason's 1958 paper introduced the Wug test, showing that small children apply the plural rule to words they have never heard, saying 'wugs' with a voiced z.
Q 23Paul Broca's 1861 patient 'Tan' had a lesion in which lobe of the brain?
Frontal
Grimm's law is the First Germanic Sound Shift: inherited p became f in Germanic, so Sanskrit pitā and Greek patḗr correspond to English father.
Q 14Which linguist set out the sound correspondences now called Grimm's law in 1818, four years before Jacob Grimm?
Rasmus Rask
Rasmus Rask, a Dane, set out the correspondences in a prize essay on the origin of Old Norse; Jacob Grimm, who turned them into a system in 1822, got the naming rights.
Q 15The Great Vowel Shift began changing English pronunciation around the time of which poet's death?
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, just as the shift was getting under way; English spelling was then standardised while pronunciation kept moving, which is why the two so often disagree.
Q 16Which 1957 book by Noam Chomsky is credited with revolutionizing the scientific study of language?
Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures (1957) launched generative grammar and contained the sentence 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously', built to show that a sentence can be grammatical yet meaningless.
Q 17Which argument holds that children hear far too little input to learn language from data alone?
Poverty of the stimulus
The poverty of the stimulus argument holds that children's input underdetermines the grammar they acquire, so innate constraints must limit what a possible human grammar can look like.
Q 18How did Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) come to be published?
Posthumously, from students' lecture notes
Posthumously, from students' lecture notes: Saussure died in 1913 without writing the course down, so two colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, pieced the book together from what his pupils had taken down in class.
Q 19Benjamin Lee Whorf of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis made his living in which profession?
Fire prevention engineer
Whorf was a fire prevention engineer for a Hartford insurer; on inspections he saw workers grow careless around 'empty' gasoline drums still full of explosive vapour, which convinced him that words steer behaviour.
Q 20The International Phonetic Association was formed in 1886 under which linguist?
Paul Passy
Paul Passy, a French phonetician, founded the association in Paris in 1886 as a teachers' group promoting phonetic notation; its first standard alphabet was published in 1888.
Frontal: Tan's surface lesion lay in the left inferior frontal gyrus, the spot later named Broca's area, but a 2007 MRI of his preserved brain found the damage ran far deeper than Broca had been able to see.
Q 24Damage to which brain region in the superior temporal gyrus produces fluent but meaningless speech?
Wernicke's area
Wernicke's area, tied to comprehension by Carl Wernicke in 1874, lets us make sense of words; when it is damaged, people keep talking fluently in jumbled sentences and are often unaware that anything is wrong.
Q 25Swapping the first sounds of two words, as in 'blushing crow' for 'crushing blow', is called what?
A spoonerism
A spoonerism takes its name from William Spooner, an Oxford clergyman and don so noted for such slips that the word was in print by 1900, three decades before he died.
Q 26Deaf schoolchildren in which Central American country created a brand-new sign language among themselves from the late 1970s?
Nicaragua
Nicaragua opened a special-education centre in Managua in 1977; its deaf pupils, taught only lip-reading and Spanish, pooled their home gestures in the schoolyard and on the bus until a full language of their own emerged.
Q 27The sign language of the United States is unintelligible to British signers and descends mainly from that of which country?
France
France: Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher trained in Paris, sailed to America with Thomas Gallaudet and co-founded the first permanent American school for the deaf at Hartford in 1817, where his signing mixed with local sign languages.
Q 28What term describes a stable contact language that has acquired native speakers?
Creole
A creole, in the classic account, is a pidgin that became a community's mother tongue as the children of its speakers expanded it into a full language; some scholars now doubt that every creole began as a pidgin.
Q 29L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, practised which profession?
Ophthalmologist
Zamenhof was an ophthalmologist; growing up in multi-ethnic Białystok, where Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews each spoke their own language and quarrelled, convinced him that a neutral tongue was needed.
Q 30The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphic, Greek and which third script?
Demotic
Demotic, the cursive everyday script of later Egypt, fills the middle register; the priestly decree of 196 BC differs only slightly across all its versions, which made the stone the key to reading Egyptian.