World Languages

Question 1: UNESCO created International Mother Language Day to celebrate linguistic diversity and promote multilingual education. Observed every year on February 21, it commemorates the 1952 Language Movement in which students were killed while defending the right to use their mother tongue in Dhaka. Which country’s movement is honored by this observance?

Question 2: In linguistics, what do we call the smallest unit of sound that can distinguish meaning—for example, the contrast between /p/ and /b/ that turns “pat” into “bat”?

Question 3: Many world scripts vary in how they represent sounds. What term describes a writing system—like Devanagari (used for Hindi) or Ethiopic (Geʾez)—in which consonant symbols carry inherent vowels and are modified with diacritics to indicate other vowels?

Question 4: What is the name of the famous ancient artifact inscribed in three scripts—Egyptian hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Ancient Greek—that enabled scholars, notably Jean-François Champollion, to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs?

Question 5: Language families group related tongues across regions. Which language family contains the greatest number of distinct languages—well over 1,000—including Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo, and Zulu?


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