Language Trivia

Country with the most languages spoken: Papua New Guinea has 820 living languages.

Pronunciation Chart of Toki Pona

Language with the most words: English, approximately 600,000 distinct words.

Language with the fewest words: Toki Pona 123 root-words. Toki Pona is a constructed language, first published online in mid-2001. It was designed by translator and linguist Sonja Elen Kisa of Toronto.

Language with the largest alphabet: Khmer with 74 letters. This Austro-Asiatic language is the official language of Cambodia, where approx.12 million people speak it. Minority speakers live in a handful of other countries.

Language with the shortest alphabet: Rotokas with 12 letters. Approximately 4300 people speak this East Papuan language. They live primarily in the Bougainville Province of Papua New Guinea.

The language with the fewest sounds: Rotokas with 11 phonemes.

The language with the most sounds: !Xóõ with 112 phonemes. Approximately 4200 speak !Xóõ, the vast majority of whom live in the African country of Botswana.

Language with the fewest consonant sounds: Rotokas with 6 consonants.

Language with the most vowel sounds: !Xóõ with 31 vowels.

Language with the fewest irregular verbs: Esperanto – none.

Language with the most consonant sounds: Ubyx with 81 consonants. This language of the North Causasian Language family, once spoken in the Haci Osman village near Istanbul, has been extinct since 1992. Among living languages, !Xóõ has the most consonants; 77.

Language with the fewest vowel sounds: Ubyx with 2 vowels. The related language Abkhaz also has 2 vowels in some dialects. There are approximately 106,000 Abkhaz speakers living primarily in Georgia.

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