The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog Quiz

Answer: Georgian

Georgian is a language that forms part of the Kartvelian family of languages, which are indigenous to the region of the Southern Caucasus. Georgian itself has approximately 4 million native speakers worldwide, while it has a unique writing system known as the Georgian scripts, which are in fact three different scripts - Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli. Of these, Mkhedruli, which was the script used for royal charters in the days of the Kingdom of Georgia, is now the standard form of written Georgian, while the other two forms are used primarily by the Georgian Orthodox Church in producing their religious texts and iconography.

Answer: Russian

Russian is an East Slavic language, which forms part of the Indo-European language family. Russian has approximately 150 million native speakers worldwide, with around 100 million more having it as a second language. The most widespread language in Eurasia, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Written Russian is based on the Cyrillic script that was originally developed under the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon I in the 9th century.

The use of Cyrillic script spread throughout the Slavic languages, as well as non-Slavic languages that were influenced by Russian.

Modern written Russian can be traced the the early 18th century, when Tsar Peter the Great, who had recently returned from a long diplomatic tour of Western Europe, ordered a reform of the Russian alphabet to make it more Latin in feel and design, with several letters removed, others redesigned, and upper and lower case introduced.

Answer: Irish

Irish is a Celtic language, which is part of the Indo-European family. It has around 170,000 native speakers, with another 2 million or so around the world having it as another language. Originating on the island of Ireland, Irish was the first language of the majority of the Irish population until the 18th century, when English began to subsume it. Irish has traditionally used the Latin alphabet since it was first written down in the 8th century, although the modern Irish alphabet does not include eight letters from the Latin alphabet. Until the mid-20th century, Gaelic script, a form of typeface designed for printing Gaelic languages, was widely used in Ireland, until superseded by modern typefaces. Today, it is largely used for decorative typesetting.

Answer: Turkmen

Turkmen is one of the Turkic family of languages, a group whose distribution stretches from Eastern Europe to the Far East. Turkmen has around 7 million native speakers, with the vast majority being in Turkmenistan itself, with large groups of native Turkmen speakers also found in Northern Iran and Afghanistan. Written Turkmen has undergone a great many changes since it was first committed to the page in the 13th or 14th century.

Initially, Turkmen was written using Arabic script, but it was found that there were certain sounds in Turkmen not present in the Arabic alphabet, while likewise Arabic script had letters to indicate sounds that were not present in Turkmen. Following the establishment of the Soviet Union, of which Turkmenistan became part, revision of written Turkmen was begun.

Although a plan was discussed to convert the language to the Latin alphabet, which was approved in 1928, during the 1930s the wider Soviet government instituted plans to utilise Cyrillic script throughout the USSR, with Cyrillic Turkmen instituted in 1940.

However, upon the dissolution of the USSR and independence of Turkmenistan, in 1993 written Turkmen was ordered to be reverted back to the Latin alphabet.

Answer: Samoan

Samoan is a Polynesian language, part of the Austronesian family, and is closely related to a number of other Polynesian languages. There are approximately 500,000 native speakers of Samoan worldwide, with around half of them living on the Samoan islands, of which the main two form respectively the independent nation of Samoa and the US territory of American Samoa. Samoan was written down for the first time in the early 19th century, when Christian missionaries began to document the spoken language as a way of distributing religious texts.

As a result, Samoan has utilised the Latin Alphabet since it was first committed to paper. The difficulty faced was adapting the Latin alphabet to incorporate the various sounds in spoken Samoan that were not otherwise present.

The first book of grammar and dictionary of the Samoan language, "A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language, with English and Samoan Vocabulary", was written by Reverend George Pratt and published in 1862.

Answer: Burmese

Burmese, which is officially referred to as the Myanmar language by the government of Myanmar, is a Lolo-Burmese language that forms part of the Sino-Tibetan family. Spoken as the native language by around 33 million people, with another 10 million having it as a second language, Burmese is largely spoken within the confines of the modern country of Myanmar, which was previously known as Burma. Written Burmese is formed using a Brahmic script adapted from written languages of South India.

The earliest evidence of the use of the Burmese alphabet comes from 1035. Written Burmese originally utilised a square block format, similar to other East Asian languages, but from the 17th century it began to move to a cursive format following the increased production of Burmese literature as a result of increased literacy among the population.

Answer: Hindi

Hindi is an indo-Aryan language largely native to the Indian subcontinent. One of the two official languages of India, along with English, Hindi is spoken by around 320 million people as their first language, while another 270 million use it as a second language.

Modern Hindi, alongside modern Urdu, developed from Hindustani, although these two languages went on to use vastly different writing systems, with written Hindi utilising Devanagari, a Brahmic script that was developed between the 1st and 4th centuries - written Hindi utilises a total of 44 characters, with 33 consonants and 11 vowels.

However, the Devanagari script does not include all of the relevant sounds from spoken Hindi.

Answer: Catalan

Catalan is a Western Romance language, part of the Indo-European family. Around 4 million people are native speakers of Catalan, with approximately 6 million having it as a second language. Catalan is the official language of Andorra, and has co-official status, alongside Spanish, in three autonomous communities of Spain.

Although Catalan shares many traits, both spoken and written, with its neighbouring Romance languages, it is closer to the languages of southern France and northern Italy, such as Occitan and Franco-Provençal, than it is to the Iberian languages of Spanish and Portuguese.

As with the other Romance languages, Catalan utilises the Latin alphabet, with symbols added to indicate different sounds. In 1906, the First International Congress of the Catalan Language discussed standardising the written forms of Catalan, with a set of standards published in 1911.

Answer: Czech

Czech is a West Slavic language, part of the Czech-Slovak group, which forms part of the Indo-European language family. As a language, Czech is closely related to Slovak, to a degree where native speakers of each can understand the other. Around 10 million people worldwide have Czech as their native language, the vast majority being in the Czech Republic - around 98% of the population of the Czech Republic use Czech as their first language, a proportion that is the third-highest in the European Union. Written Czech utilises the Latin alphabet, and is seen as the model for many other Slavic languages that use the same script. Written Czech was first developed in the 9th century using a Glagolitic script, before converting to Latin in the 11th century. One of the major elements of written Czech is the addition of a caron, also known as a haček, and sometimes called an 'inverted circumflex', to letters to express sounds present in spoken Czech that are not in the Latin alphabet.

Answer: Afrikaans

Afrikaans is a West-Germanic language, part of the Indo-European family, which is predominantly spoken in South Africa and Namibia. Afrikaans is the first language of around 7 million people, with approximately 10 million having it as a second language. Afrikaans developed from the vernacular spoken by Dutch settlers who moved to South Africa during the 18th century.

Although Afrikaans has adopted words from other languages, around 95% of Afrikaans vocabulary is shared with modern Dutch, to the point where, particularly in written form, there is a degree of mutual intelligibility.

The differences between written Afrikaans and written Dutch come largely from variations in spelling, while certain letters are only used in words that have come from other languages.