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

There's a German word 'schadenfreude' meaning pleasure derived from others' misfortune, with no English equivalent.

Children raised bilingually from birth process both languages in the same brain regions — unlike adults who learn a second language.

The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters — all consonants — and became the ancestor of most Western alphabets.

The human voice is the only musical instrument capable of producing language and music simultaneously.

The concept of the 'avant-garde' in art — being ahead of its time — came from French military language.

The average educated English speaker knows about 40,000–50,000 words but uses only 5,000–10,000 in everyday speech.

The word 'set' has over 430 definitions in some English dictionaries — the most of any word.

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