Japanese has three writing systems — hiragana, katakana, and kanji — often used together in the same sentence.

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

There are roughly 7,000 languages, but about 23 languages account for over half the world's speakers.

The grammar of most languages encodes social hierarchy — languages like Korean have distinct speech levels for different relationships.

The longest palindrome in English is a sentence: 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.'

Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words still used today including 'bedroom,' 'lonely,' and 'obscene.'

Sanskrit has the most perfect grammatical structure ever analyzed by linguists.

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

The color 'orange' was named after the fruit — before oranges arrived in Europe, the color was simply called 'yellow-red.'