World Book Trivia Challenge--10/22-language

Scientists and linguists (scholars who study language) think people have an innate (inborn) ability to learn and use language.

Latin has not been a spoken language since the early 1500's. However, many Latin words helped shape modern scientific and legal terms.

Signed languages are just as expressive as spoken language, and thoughts can be expressed just as quickly by signing as speaking. There are many distinct signed languages used all over the world.

Written Chinese has no alphabet. Instead, it consists of about 50,000 characters. The Chinese writing system is logographic, meaning that each character stands for a word or part of a word.

The Swiss Constitution provides for three official languages: German, French, and Italian.

The six official languages of the United Nations are Russian, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, and Spanish.

English has a larger vocabulary than any other language. There are more than 600,000 words in the largest dictionaries of the English language.

The Altaic family includes Turkish and Mongolian, which are largely limited to Turkey and Mongolia. Some linguists also include Japanese and Korean in the Altaic family, but their inclusion is controversial.

Linguists call sounds that distinguish one word from another phonemes. In English, for example, the sounds of the letters d and g are phonemes. Most dialects of English have about 40 phonemes, which is about average for a language. Some languages, however, have more than 100 phonemes.

During the early 1900's, Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss scholar, introduced several important concepts to linguistics, such as the distinction between what people know about their language and how people use that knowledge when speaking. Saussure also focused on the systematic nature of languages. He is widely considered to be the father of modern linguistics.