English language masters! I bet you did not know some of these...

According to Infoplease, there are roughly 6,500 spoken languages in the world today. However, about 2,000 of those languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers. The most popular language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. There are 1,213,000,000 people in the world that speak that language.

English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and eventually became a global lingua franca. It is named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to the area of Great Britain that later took their name, as England. Both names derive from Anglia, a peninsula in the Baltic Sea. The language is closely related to Frisian and Low Saxon, and its vocabulary has been significantly influenced by other Germanic languages, particularly Norse (a North Germanic language), and to a greater extent by Latin and French.

• The English language is the only language in the world that capitalises the word ‘I’. Importance of self is very prominent in the English language.
• The longest word in the English language is “Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” and the second longest is “hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia”.
• “I am/go” is the shortest complete sentence in the English Language.
• The word “Uncopyrightable” is the longest English word in normal use that contains no letter more than once.
• Only 3 words in the English language end in ‘ceed’: proceed, succeed and exceed.
• The dot on the top of the letter ‘i’ is called a “tittle”.
• There are more English words beginning with the letter ‘S’ than with any other letter.
• The word “Bookkeeper” and “Bookkeeping” are the only 2 words in the English language with 3 consecutive sets of double letters.
• ‘Sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick’ is said to be the toughest tongue twister in English.
• Of all the words in the English language, the word “set” has the most definitions.
• Approximately, one new word is added to the English language every two hours.
• “Underground” is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters ‘Und’.
• In numbers, there are no “Bs” until “billion”. It’s hard to believe, but if you wrote out every single number in order, you wouldn’t use the letter “B” until you reached the word “billion”. There isn’t a single “B” in the first 999,999,999 numbers in English. Also, there is no letter A in any number until 1,000 (one thousand).
• English is the language of the air. This means that all pilots have to identify themselves and speak in English while flying, regardless of their origin.
• The English language has been developing for more than 1,400 years.

Source: Quora

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