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Afrikaans
Afrikaans
The youngest of the Germanic languages, it grew out of 17th-century Dutch and dropped almost all the verb conjugations along the way.
One voice.
Talk in any of them and Glacey hands back clean, ready-to-send text. You can even switch languages mid-sentence. Every one comes with a little something to know about it.
Afrikaans
The youngest of the Germanic languages, it grew out of 17th-century Dutch and dropped almost all the verb conjugations along the way.
Shqip
A lone branch of the Indo-European family with no close living relatives, so it sits entirely on its own.
አማርኛ
Written in the Ge'ez script, an abugida where each of its 200-plus characters bakes a consonant and vowel into one symbol.
العربية
Written right to left, and its root system spins a handful of consonants into dozens of related words.
Հայերեն
Its alphabet was invented by a single monk, Mesrop Mashtots, around 405 AD and is still used unchanged today.
অসমীয়া
The easternmost Indo-European language, spoken in India's Brahmaputra Valley by over 15 million people.
Azərbaycan dili
A Turkic language so close to Turkish that speakers of each can largely follow the other without study.
Башҡортса
A Turkic language of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, famous for its distinctive interdental 'th' sounds.
Euskara
Europe's great mystery: a language isolate older than the Indo-European tongues that surround it, related to nothing else alive.
Беларуская
Spelled phonetically, it writes words almost exactly as they sound, including the unstressed vowels.
বাংলা
The world's sixth most-spoken language, and the only one with a national holiday, Language Martyrs' Day, honouring people who died for it.
Bosanski
Can be written in either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet, a legacy of its crossroads history.
Brezhoneg
A Celtic language of Brittany, closer to Welsh and Cornish than to the French spoken all around it.
Български
The first language ever written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which was created here in the 9th century.
Català
The only official language of a sovereign country, Andorra, though most of its speakers live in Spain.
中文
A tonal language where the same syllable can mean four or more different things depending on the pitch you use.
Hrvatski
Coins its own words instead of borrowing: a computer is 'računalo', literally 'the thing that counts'.
Čeština
Home to 'zmrzl', a real word with no vowels, and a yearly contest for the trickiest tongue-twister.
Dansk
Has roughly 20 vowel sounds, one of the largest inventories of any language, which makes it famously hard to pronounce.
Nederlands
The closest major language to English, sitting right between English and German on the family tree.
English
Borrows from over 350 languages, so more than half its everyday vocabulary is technically imported.
Eesti
Has 14 grammatical cases and no future tense, no grammatical gender, and no word for the pronoun 'he' or 'she'.
Føroyskt
Spoken by only about 70,000 people on a windswept North Atlantic archipelago, it keeps grammar Old Norse lost elsewhere.
Suomi
Builds words by stacking endings, so a single noun can take on 15 different cases.
Français
Counts in twenties past sixty: ninety-nine is 'quatre-vingt-dix-neuf', literally 'four-twenties-ten-nine'.
Galego
Shares a common medieval ancestor with Portuguese, so the two still feel like close cousins today.
ქართული
Uses its own unique alphabet and happily strings consonants together, as in 'gvprtskvni', eight in a row.
Deutsch
Famous for stacking nouns into single giant words, with no theoretical limit to how long they can get.
Ελληνικά
Has been written continuously for over 3,400 years, the longest documented history of any Indo-European language.
ગુજરાતી
The mother tongue of Mahatma Gandhi, written in a flowing script that drops the horizontal line above the letters.
Kreyòl ayisyen
Born from French and West African languages, it became an official language only in 1987 and is spelled fully phonetically.
Harshen Hausa
One of Africa's largest languages and a major trade tongue across the Sahel, with two grammatical genders and tones.
ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi
Uses only 13 letters, and the ʻokina glottal stop counts as one of them.
עברית
The only language ever revived from purely liturgical use back into an everyday spoken tongue.
हिन्दी
Written in Devanagari, where a horizontal line strung along the top visually ties each word together.
Magyar
Unrelated to its neighbours, it has 18 cases and is a distant cousin of Finnish from far to the east.
Íslenska
Changed so little in 1,000 years that Icelanders can still read medieval Viking sagas in the original.
Bahasa Indonesia
Has no verb tenses and no plurals, you just double a word, so 'orang-orang' means 'people'.
Italiano
The language of music: 'piano', 'forte', 'allegro' and 'tempo' are all everyday Italian words.
日本語
Juggles three writing systems at once: hiragana, katakana and thousands of kanji characters.
ꦧꦱꦗꦮ
Spoken by over 80 million people, it has elaborate politeness levels with entirely different vocabulary for each.
ಕನ್ನಡ
Its rounded script comes from writing on palm leaves, where straight strokes would have split the leaf.
Қазақ тілі
Is mid-switch from Cyrillic to a brand-new Latin alphabet, a transition planned to complete by 2031.
ខ្មែរ
Has the world's largest alphabet by the Guinness record, with 74 letters.
한국어
Its alphabet, Hangul, was deliberately designed in 1443 to be so logical that a wise person learns it in a morning.
ລາວ
A tonal language whose graceful curved script has no spaces between words, only between sentences.
Latina
Officially dead, yet still the working language of Vatican City and the root of every Romance language.
Latviešu
One of only two surviving Baltic languages, keeping ancient Indo-European features long lost elsewhere.
Lingála
The language of Congolese rumba, it spread along the Congo River and now carries African music worldwide.
Lietuvių
The most archaic living Indo-European language, preserving forms close to ancient Sanskrit.
Lëtzebuergesch
Became an official national language only in 1984, sitting comfortably between German and French.
Македонски
One of the few Slavic languages with definite articles, which it tacks onto the end of the noun.
Malagasy
Spoken on Madagascar off Africa, yet its closest relatives are 7,000 km away in Borneo.
Bahasa Melayu
Forms plurals by simply repeating the word, so 'buku-buku' means 'books'.
മലയാളം
One of the longest palindromes of a language name, it reads the same forwards and backwards in English.
Malti
The only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet and the only one that is an official EU language.
Te Reo Māori
New Zealand's revived indigenous tongue, where 'Aotearoa', the land of the long white cloud, is the country's own name.
मराठी
One of the oldest of the Indo-Aryan languages, with a literary tradition stretching back over 1,000 years.
Монгол
Its traditional script is written vertically in columns running from left to right, unique among living scripts.
မြန်မာ
Burmese is written in beautifully round letters, a shape that came from once writing on fragile palm leaves.
नेपाली
The language of the Himalayas and the lingua franca for climbers tackling Everest from the Nepalese side.
Norsk
Has two official written standards, and Norwegians read both Danish and Swedish with little trouble.
Nynorsk
One of Norway's two written forms, built in the 1800s from rural dialects to break free of Danish influence.
Occitan
The language of the medieval troubadours, whose love poetry shaped Romantic literature across Europe.
پښتو
An official language of Afghanistan with a rich oral tradition of two-line folk poems called landays.
فارسی
Words like 'pyjama', 'bazaar' and 'paradise' all entered English from Persian.
Polski
Loves consonant clusters, as in 'chrząszcz' (beetle), and has seven grammatical cases.
Português
The most spoken language in the Southern Hemisphere, thanks to Brazil's 200 million speakers.
ਪੰਜਾਬੀ
A tonal Indo-European language, a rarity, where pitch can flip a word's meaning entirely.
Română
A Romance language marooned among Slavic neighbours, still recognisably descended from the Latin of Roman Dacia.
Русский
Has no word for 'the' or 'a', and the most spoken language in Europe by native speakers.
संस्कृतम्
Its grammar was described so precisely 2,500 years ago that some call it a natural language fit for computers.
Српски
The only European language in active everyday use of two alphabets, Cyrillic and Latin, side by side.
ChiShona
Zimbabwe's most spoken language, whose name lives on in the Great Zimbabwe ruins that gave the country its name.
سنڌي
Has one of the largest alphabets of any Perso-Arabic script, with 52 letters to capture its many sounds.
සිංහල
Sri Lanka's rounded script is considered one of the world's most beautiful, with almost no straight lines.
Slovenčina
Often called the Esperanto of Slavic languages because its speakers understand most other Slavic tongues.
Slovenščina
One of the few languages that kept the dual number, a special grammatical form for exactly two of something.
Soomaali
Got its official Latin alphabet only in 1972, and within a year the whole country ran a literacy campaign.
Español
The only major language with upside-down ¿ and ¡ marks that warn you a question or exclamation is coming.
Basa Sunda
Spoken by over 30 million on Java, it has its own elegant script and layered levels of politeness.
Kiswahili
Africa's most widely spoken language and the source of 'safari', 'simba' and 'hakuna matata'.
Svenska
A pitch-accent language where 'anden' can mean either 'the duck' or 'the spirit' depending on the melody.
Tagalog
The basis of Filipino, it freely mixes with English into the playful hybrid known as Taglish.
Тоҷикӣ
Essentially Persian written in the Cyrillic alphabet, a souvenir of its Soviet history.
தமிழ்
One of the oldest living languages on Earth, with literature dating back more than 2,000 years.
Татарча
A Turkic language of the Volga region, written today in Cyrillic but historically in Arabic and Latin too.
తెలుగు
Nicknamed 'the Italian of the East' because almost every word ends in a vowel, giving it a musical lilt.
ไทย
Has five tones and writes with no spaces between words, only between sentences and phrases.
བོད་སྐད་
Its spelling froze over a thousand years ago, so words are full of silent letters that hint at older pronunciations.
Türkçe
Uses vowel harmony, so the vowels in a word's endings shift to match the vowels in its root.
Türkmençe
A Turkic language that switched from Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet after independence in 1991.
Українська
Often called one of Europe's most melodic languages, it once placed second in a global beauty contest behind Italian.
اردو
Shares its spoken grammar with Hindi but is written right to left in a flowing Perso-Arabic calligraphic script.
Oʻzbekcha
The most spoken Turkic language after Turkish, now written in a Latin alphabet adopted after 1991.
Tiếng Việt
Has six tones and stacks diacritics, so a single vowel can wear two marks at once.
Cymraeg
Home to a 58-letter village name, and where 'w' and 'y' count as full vowels.
Wolof
Senegal's main lingua franca, and the likely source of English 'hip', 'hep' and even 'banana'.
ייִדיש
Written in the Hebrew alphabet but rooted in German, it gave English 'glitch', 'klutz' and 'chutzpah'.
Yorùbá
A tonal language of West Africa with three tones, spoken by over 40 million people.
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