How do you figure out "place of origin?" Looks like you kind of just picked out capital cities from countries associated with that language. Like... Turkish originated in central Asia, didn't it?
Apparently, the earliest Turkic runes can be found in Mongolia. But I would guess that the earliest version of Turkish that is mutually intelligible with today's Turkish originated in Turkey.
apparently according to Wikipedia, speeches by Ataturk have had to be translated multiple times for newer generations to understand. If that is the case then the ancient Turkic you're talking about will almost certainly be unintelligible.
That amount of divergence is quite surprising, Ataturk lived only about 100 years ago. Think of your grandparents in their youth speaking with their parents in a dialect almost entirely different from the one they speak to their grandchildren now.
The origin is more to do with having the European languages being placed in places where they came from rarer than where they are most commonly spoken, like English in England not the United States, and Portuguese in Portugal and not Brazil. It's not supposed to be the exact origin of where the language came from. Besides, I'm no linguistic expert, how do you draw the line between one language and it's predecessor?
The same way you draw a line between a language and a dialect. Can't be done from a linguistic viewpoint, but still done, usually because of political (and sometimes even practical) reasons. - Love the quiz by the way, great to be able to place those Asian and African languages. For instance I used to associate Kannada with Canada.
Missed a ton of super obvious (to me) ones like Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Hmong, Uyghur, Oriya, Balochi... but they all have super low guess rates so I don't feel as bad. Or I didn't until I realized I also missed KHMER -_-
I think animals should make a bit more effort to be multilingual and not just stick to their own language (admittedly there are a few species that do that, or at least try..)
Only Awadhi is linguistically Hindi out of those, but they are all politically Hindi. Bhojpuri is closer to Bengali than to Hindi and Marwari is mostly considered closer to Gujarati. The linguistic group called Hindi includes many varieties of Central India, including Kauravi, which contains Hindustani, which is standardized as Standard Hindi in Devanagari script and Standard Urdu in Arabic script, so Standard Hindi is still different from Awadhi.
If you have Malay/Indonesian and Serbo-Croatian listed as one, it only makes sense to do the same for Hindi-Urdu. In all of these cases, the main difference is the alphabet (or script in general) used.
What the heck is Hiligaynon?? I've spent a lot of time in the Philippines.. learned phrases in dialects from Luzon, Davao, Zamboanga, Cebu, Leyte.. never heard of this one though.
Very few people have Swahili as a mother tongue. It's mostly a "lingua franca" - used to communicate among people who may have different mother tongues.
Hmm I don't think that's really true - a lot of people in Tanzania have it as a first language, especially in cities including in Dar-es-Salaam. I suppose the main point is that it's unknown how many that is, and it may be below the 7.4 million required to get on this list.
The problem is that Ethnologue has some very odd beliefs about languages. They believe that everybody has a single native language and that all the other languages that a person speaks cannot be their native language, even if they learned those languages at the same time as their designated "native" language.
So even though there's a large number of people who grow up speaking Swahili, they won't count them as native speakers.
Such a cool quiz!! Seriously, this is one of my favorite ones that I've done on this site. I love languages and have been waiting for something like this. Great job!!
As is usual on these language quizzes, I got all the European languages, a decent smattering of the Asian ones, and then I looked at India and my brain just exploded.
I missed 55, of which 5 I really knew. Most i didnt get were in india (well most were there anyway.. wow..those dots..) africa, and china
only hakka and sundanese ring a bell for the under 10% ones. Others I missed but definately recognise are amharic, punjabi, kurdish (i had tried kurdic among other things) and persian.
Tried ten times to enter Baluchi and it never worked. What else do they speak in Baluchistan? Turns out that all those years I've just known an alternate spelling.
Shouldn't Min Nan be Southern Min, considering that there's a Northern and an Eastern Min, and that Nan means south, and it's right south from Northern Min... everything points that way :D
Can you accept Twi (and also maybe Fante) for Akan? I know that Akan is technically the larger, more inclusive grouping, and I know there isn't a clear distinction between a "language" and a "dialect," but this tripped me up as most of the folks I encountered in Ghana tended to refer to their language as either Twi or Fante. Thanks.
The numbers on Belarusian are highly questionable. Belarus has only 9.5 million inhabitants and only around 23% of them speak Belarusian at home. Russian is more commonly spoken than Belarusian in Belarus.
I honestly do not understand why this quiz is so popular. It seems completely arbitrary to me - even when I consult the source, I cannot complete the quiz. I guess I'm just too nitpicky or something.
Sylheti & Chittagonian are not separate language. These are dialect of Bengali. Yes some words are spoken differently but it is still the same language. Deccani is basically Urdu. They just out some accent and words from South India.
Maybe a linguistics expert can weigh in.
So even though there's a large number of people who grow up speaking Swahili, they won't count them as native speakers.
only hakka and sundanese ring a bell for the under 10% ones. Others I missed but definately recognise are amharic, punjabi, kurdish (i had tried kurdic among other things) and persian.
And I wonder which word triggered kinyarwanda. I got it right but sure didnt type that. Actually same with pastho and hmong,
Edit: looked it up, that would be afghani, I guess mong(olian) though that is not what it refers to. And rwandese
And never knew Sylheti and Chittagonian are that distinguished from bengali.
I think all "national" languages are on the location of the capitals of the countries.