Sign languages have their own grammar and syntax that differ entirely from spoken languages.

The word 'set' has the most definitions in the English language — over 430 in the Oxford English Dictionary.

There are approximately 7,000 languages spoken in the world — about half are expected to disappear by the end of the century.

The world's shortest alphabet, Rotokas, has only 12 letters.

The apostrophe was introduced into English in the 16th century — its rules have never been consistently applied.

Loanwords are borrowed from other languages — 'kindergarten,' 'safari,' 'pajama,' and 'robot' are all loanwords in English.

The word 'assassin' derives from the Arabic 'hashishin' — a medieval Islamic sect's name.

The concept of a 'dead language' is complex — Latin died as a spoken tongue but gave birth to French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.

Esperanto has around 2 million speakers and was invented in 1887 by Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof.