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

“American” was the official language of Illinois from 1923 to 1969.

Tagalog is the 5th most spoken language in the United States, ranking higher than Vietnamese, Korean, German, Arabic and Russian. Tagalog is spoken by a quarter of the Philippine population.

Phrases like, "Long time no see," and "Chop chop" are grammatically incorrect and originate from Chinese immigrants. These phrases may have been coined by native speakers imitating these immigrants.

The gender-neutral "they" was used as the 3rd person singular in English until about 1800, when "he" and "she" became widespread to make English more like Latin.

The reason so many traditional legal terms come in pairs (aid and abet, null and void, part and parcel, will and testament) is that old English courts used English terms along with Latin or French terms to avoid confusion.

In old English, the possessive (eg. cat's) was marked by -es. This was shortened to -s, which is why there's an apostrophe (as it represents the missing 'e').

Eye's pupil got its name from Latin "Pupilla", which means little doll, because that's what you see when you look into someone's pupil, the little doll version of yourself.

The word Shampoo is derived from the Hindi word 'chāmpo' which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit root 'chapayati' meaning: "to press, knead and soothe".

The English language capitalizes the pronoun 'I' because it looks too small when it's in lowercase.

There's a 300-page book called 'A Void' that was written without ever using the letter "e". The original is in French, but there are over a dozen versions of it in different languages written by translators who also managed to compose it without ever using the most common letter of the alphabet.