Babies can distinguish phonemes from any language at birth but lose this ability by 12 months.

The language with the most native speakers is Mandarin Chinese, followed by Spanish and English.

The word 'nice' originally meant foolish or stupid in 13th-century English — its meaning has almost fully reversed.

Constructed languages (conlangs) like Tolkien's Elvish are linguistically complete — with grammar, vocabulary, and literature.

English has the largest vocabulary of any language — the Oxford English Dictionary contains over 600,000 words.

Inuit languages do not have unusually many words for snow — this is a persistent linguistic myth.

Linguistic relativity experiments show speakers of languages with more color words distinguish shades faster.

Latin gave birth to French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian — the Romance languages.

The @ symbol is called 'arroba' in Spanish and Portuguese, meaning a unit of weight.