You Talk Too Much! Trivia Quiz

Answer: English

The correct answer is English. As a language English is very accommodating to foreign words and has absorbed a huge number of words from other languages. A Germanic language, English is related to both Dutch and German and shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with both of these languages.

It has also adopted a lot of French and Latin leading to almost 700,000 recognized words in the language. That does not include slang.

Answer: That you speak several languages

A polygot is someone who can speak many languages. The term generally connotes that the person can speak four or more languages proficiently. Multilingualism has become increasingly common because of globalization and cultural openness. There are actually more multilingual speakers in the world than there are monolingual.

Answer: Navajo

Navajo is a fascinating language that was used for radio transmissions during World War II because of the difficulty in deciphering it and the relatively few people who spoke it. There is no dictionary of the language nor any type of published grammar. This code, which was simply a Native American language, was never broken by the Japanese despite extensive efforts to do so.

Answer: It can be whistled, hummed, spoken or encoded in music

The Piraha language is very unusual for many reasons. It is unrelated to any other language that is still being used, as all other related languages have gone extinct. It is spoken by the Mura-Piraha peoples of the Maici River area of Brazil. There are less than 400 speakers.

The language does not have words for different colors, only words that connote light and dark. It has phonic sounds not used in any other language. The language can be whistled, hummed and encoded in music as well as spoken.

It is considered to one of the most difficult languages for an outsider to learn. Very few outsiders have been even moderately successful.

Answer: German and Hebrew

Yiddish is a combination of German and Hebrew. It evolved from the large migration of Jews into Central Europe where they adopted parts of the German language into their native Hebrew. Written Yiddish makes use of the Hebrew alphabet.

Answer: Mandarin

These four options are the four most widely spoken languages in the world. But, by a wide margin, Mandarin has the most native speakers. Almost 15% of the world's population speak Mandarin as their first language, compared to Spanish, which comes in second, and is only spoken by 6% of the world's population. Approx. 28-30% of the world's population speaks one of these four languages as their first language.

Answer: Berber

Slavic languages include Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, and Croatian, among others.
Examples of Germanic languages include Dutch, Danish, English, and Swedish. Some of the Romance languages are French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Berber is a family of languages spoken in Morocco, Tunisia and other countries in North Africa.

Answer: He was proficient in 68 languages

Emil Krebs was a savant who mastered 68 different languages and he could speak brokenly another 100 languages. Possibly the most gifted polygot to have ever lived, his skills involved speaking languages from all over the world, that were totally unrelated to each other.

A sinologist is anyone who studies China, including the language and the culture. Upon his death, his personal library, which contained books in over 120 different languages was donated to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

Answer: True

The biggest reason that Japanese is so difficult to learn is that the written code is different from the spoken code. Making the language even more difficult to learn is that there are three different writing systems that must be mastered. There are over 3,000 characters which must be learned by rote memorization and there are no mnemonic devises to help you. Japanese is considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn to speak and/or write.

Answer: True

This is humorous but true. One of the most common ideograms is the depictions of a lit cigarette covered by a red circle with a bar. No matter the language at the bottom of the sign the idea conveyed is 'no smoking' in that area. Many Chinese characters are ideograms rather than symbols for specific phonic sounds.

Many languages make use of ideograms including Egyptian hieroglyphics and ancient Sumerian cuneiform.