Languages and their Families Trivia Quiz

Answer: India

They are also spoken in Sri Lanka. The Dravidian languages include Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. They have alphabets with rounded letters. One fascinating fact about India is that these languages of the south are as baffling for the northerners (who speak Indo-European languages) as they are for Europeans.

Answer: Basque

Basque is a very interesting language from this point of view. It is thought that its speakers have lived in north-western Spain since the Stone Age (unlike the Indo-Europeans). All of the other three languages are Indo-European. Frisian is a Germanic language spoken in Friesenland (Germany) and Friesland (Netherlands). Gaelic (I meant by this Irish Gaelic, but I did not want to give a hint) is closely related to Scottish Gaelic and Manx. Armenian forms its own branch of Indo-European.

Answer: Albanian

Albanian is the only descendant of the Illyric branch of IE languages. It is spoken in two main dialects, Gheg and Tosk, which are very different. Gheg is spoken in northern Albania, north of the Shkumbin River, while Tosk is spoken in southern Albania, and is also the basis of the Albanian literary language. Croatian is Slavic, sometimes referred to together with Serbian as Serbo-Croatian. Hungarian is not Indo-European, but a Uralic language, while Greek is part of the, well... Greek branch of the IE languages.

Answer: Sorbian

Sorbian is a West Slavic language similar to Czech and Polish, spoken currently by about 150,000 people. The Sorbs are descendants of the Wends, a Slavic people conquered and Christianised by Germanic tribes between the 6th and 12th centuries. Serbian is spoken in Serbia, and is a South Slavic language. Old Church Slavonic is now only a religious tongue spoken in some Eastern Orthodox churches. Swabian is a dialect of German, spoken in the region of Baden-Wurttemberg and throughout the Danube Basin.

Answer: Tajik

Tajik is an Indo-Iranian language, closely related to Persian. All the other languages are Turkic.

Answer: Cushitic

Somali is spoken, as you have probably guessed, in Somalia. The Cushitic languages are spoken in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya and include, besides Somali, Orominga. Semitic is the most important branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages, and includes Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic (the official language of Ethiopia), but also the extinct Biblical tongue Aramaic, Assyro-Babylonian, Akkadian and Phoenician. Egyptian includes Ancient Egyptian and the modern language Coptic.

The Chadic languages are spoken in central and western Africa, the most important representative being Hausa.

Answer: Xhosa

There are 11 official languages spoken in South Africa: Afrikaans, English, Zulu, Xhosa, Sesotho sa Leboa, Tswana, Sesotho, Tsonga, Venda, Ndebele and siSwati.

Answer: Caucasian - Kartvelian

Georgian is part of the Caucasian family, which comprises 36 languages. It has its own alphabet, and forms part of the Kartvelian, or Southern Caucasian group. There is no link established whatsoever between the Kartvelian and the North Caucasian language groups.

Answer: Guarani

Only 75% of Paraguayans speak Spanish. Aymara has 1.5 million speakers in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. Quechua is, along with Spanish, the official language of Peru. Baniva is spoken mainly in Venezuela.

Answer: Estonian

Hungarian is loosely related to Estonian and Finnish, but they belong to different branches of the Finno-Ugric language family. Some claim that Yukaghir, spoken by a small number of people (about 1,000) in the Arctic areas of Russia, is even more closely related to Hungarian. Inuit is a branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family.