Lingua Lore: 49 Eye-Opening Facts About Languages Around the World

A common English-speaker has roughly 50,000 words in their mind and generally finds the correct one in approximately 600 milliseconds.

'&' was originally the 27th letter of the English alphabet. Until early 1800s, school children reciting their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the &. The students said, "And per se and." "Per se" means "By itself," so the students were essentially saying, "X, Y, Z, and by itself and."

In addition to being fluent in English, Greek, Latin, French, Italian and Spanish, Thomas Jefferson also studied Arabic, Gaelic, and Welsh, and remains the most multilingual President of the United States.

In the extinct Australian language Mbabaram, the word for dog is ‘dog’ and it is pronounced almost identically to the English word. This is purely a coincidence and there is no relation between English and Mbabaram.

The Chinese word for "contradiction", 矛盾, consisting of the characters for "spear" and "shield" respectively, is said to derive from an old tale in which a Chinese merchant proclaimed to sell "spears that could pierce any shield" and "shields that could defend from all spear attacks".

Hebrew became extinct as a spoken native language around 200 A.D. It was revived in Paris on 13 October 1881, when a man named Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (Hebrew lexicographer) and his friends agreed to speak exclusively in Hebrew during their conversations.

Elephants can tell the difference between human languages and know which languages belong to their enemies, i.e., people with a history of hurting elephants.

In Mandarin Chinese, the word for "kangaroo" translates literally to "bag rat".

In Spanish, "Esposas" has two meanings: "handcuffs" and "wives". Esposas is the feminine plural of esposo, which comes from the Latin sponsus, which comes from the Latin spondere, which means "To bind."

A greater percentage of Dutch people speak English than Canadians. About 90% of Dutch speak English, while only 85% of the Canadians speak English.