Babies can distinguish phonemes (sounds) from any language at birth but lose this ability by 12 months, retaining only their native language's sounds.
Fact #5602
👍 0 · 👎 0
More Language Facts
The longest palindrome in English is a sentence: 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.'
Fact #8449 · Language
The Sumerian language, one of the earliest written, died as a spoken language around 2000 BC but continued as a liturgical language for centuries.
Fact #5630 · Language
Languages evolve continuously — Shakespeare's English is dramatically different from today's just 400 years later.
Fact #5633 · Language
Languages with no future tense have speakers who statistically save more money.
Fact #6201 · Language
The language with the most native speakers is Mandarin Chinese, followed by Spanish and English.
Fact #6192 · Language
Wikipedia has over 60 million articles across 300 languages — and is mostly maintained by volunteers.
Fact #7356 · Language
Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words still used in English today, including 'bedroom,' 'lonely,' and 'generous.'
Fact #4406 · Language
The world's shortest alphabet, Rotokas of Papua New Guinea, has only 12 letters.
Fact #5635 · Language
Want more facts?
We have over 11,491 facts across 16 categories.