10 fun facts about the English language

Whether you are a beginner or a more advanced speaker, it is easily noticeable that English is truly fascinating. It has become a universal language and has brought millions and millions of people closer, but that is just the beginning. Here are some interesting facts about English that will make you love it even more!

Thanks to Shakespeare,  the English language is richer for 1000 words!

It is widely known that Shakespeare influenced the English literature and shaped it in the most delicate ways. However, not everyone knows that he is the one responsible for many words which English speakers use on a daily basis. Here are a few examples which could give you the idea of his importance: addiction, break the ice, cold-blooded, bedazzled, and at least a 1000 more!

English no longer has grammatical gender, but it used to

Some people say that English is among the easiest languages to learn because it is logical and doesn’t require memorizing dozens of grammatical suffixes as Russian and Spanish do. But, it wasn’t always like this. Thanks to this change, there’s no need to waste time in remembering the gender of a particular noun, which makes learning much easier.

English uses the Latin alphabet

Due to this fact, English is one of the easiest languages to learn for many people since the Latin alphabet is actually the most used alphabet in the entire world. 

The English language used to have 29 letters

It seems like 21st century English is much easier than the previous versions of it since we only used 26 letters at the moment. What a time to be alive!

English is the official language of airplanes

With so many people speaking it, it comes as no surprise that English is the official language of aircraft. If you have noticed that every pilot on every airplane you have been spoke English, this is exactly the reason why.

There are at least 1.5 billion English speakers in the world

We have already mentioned that English is the universal language of the globe, but did you know that 20% of today’s population has the ability to speak English? Around 700 million of those people are non-native speakers, and the number continues to increase daily.

English has more words than an average language

This should not be surprising to you because new words are added every day thanks to technology, and only Shakespeare added 1000 of them. There are approximately one million words in the English language. The number is big but don’t get intimidated yet because there is some good news in our next fact.

The average English speaker knows less than 30,000 words

What a relief! It can be of great help and motivation to find out that you do not actually need to memorize all those words in order to be understood and get your message across. Just keep learning every day and you are good to go.

There is a new word every 2 hours

No wonder there are more than one million words in the English language. Every 2 hours, a new word is added to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is around 4000 words a year. However, those are mainly words related to technology and the Internet world so no need to worry about that.

The longest word in English is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

Crazy, right? This is just one of the reasons why English is so fascinating. The term refers to a lung disease, and unless you are into quizzes, there’s no need to remember it.