1. The longest alphabet in the world is Cambodian. In boats 74 letters.
2. The ampersand (&) was once regarded as the 27th letter of the English alphabet.
3. In some parts of French Guinea, people speak the language which consists of only 340 words.
4. In America, people typically greet each other by saying “How are you?”. Since nobody really cares, the answer is typically “great”. In Malaysia, people greet each other by saying “Where are you going?”. But because nobody really cares, the typical answer is “Just taking a walk.”
5. “E” is the most common letter of the alphabet, “Q” – the least.
6. In the Eskimo language, there are more than 20 words which mean “snow”. These words are used to describe different colors of snow.
7. Papua New Guinea has more than 700 languages. This is roughly 15 percent of all world languages. These 700 languages are mostly local dialects which are used for communication between people and villages.
8. “Almost” is the longest word in English, in which all letters are placed in alphabetical order.
9. «I am.» is the shortest complete sentence in English.
10. American president Benjamin Franklin collected more than 200 synonyms of the word “drunk”, including such masterpieces as «cherry-merry», «nimptopsical» and «soaked».
11. In English, there is only one 15-letter word where each letter is unique – uncopyrightable.
12. Chinese dialect Mandarin is the largest spoken language in the world. It is spoken by more than 885 million people. Spanish is the second largest (330 million) language, English – the third (320 million). Bengali is the fourth (190 million).
13. On the African continent, people use more than 1,000 different languages. Berber people have no written form of their language.
14. Mandarin language uses no alphabet. Instead, it uses a system of 40,000 different characters. The character meaning “difficulty, trouble” is depicted as two women under one roof.
15. There used to be only two official languages in South Africa. Now there are twelve.
16. On average, priests, lawyers and doctors use 15,000 words in their professional life. Skilled workers without higher education use 5,000 words. Farmers – 1,500.
17. Almost in all languages of the world, the word “mother” begins with the letter “M”.