Little quiz on lesser-spoken languages

Just thought I’d share this with you here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18258902 – see how good your knowledge of endangered and lesser-spoken languages is.

In other news, Arabic has become the language of choice for Facebook in the Middle East and North Africa, according to this report. It’s overtaken English in popularity and left French behind.

What language do you use for Facebook?

I usually have it in Welsh.

11 thoughts on “Little quiz on lesser-spoken languages

  1. Why was English ever beating Arabic in the first place? That makes no sense.

    “see how good your knowledge of endangered and lesser-spoken languages is”

    I’ll save myself the trouble and tell you right now: not very good, haha. I know language-learning and Spanish–linguistics and grammar and obscure languages? Not so much.

    Cheers,
    Andrew

  2. Maybe English was beating Arabic at first (and still is, in some countries) because a) the keyboards have Roman letters and b) because English is a prestige language and allows communication with non-Arabs?

  3. I’d just like to note that the Facebook translates the page in a manner that is unsuitable for some languages (for example, Latvian), so that might be another reason

  4. I have Facebook in Danish. I had my iPad in Danish too, until I realized that the helpful automatic text was infiltrating my sent emails. Plus the auto-complete is annoying when writing in English.

  5. I usually have facebook in English. I had it in German for a while and for some reason Facebook thought I should be in English because of my location, and I never changed it back. Funny though, whenever I go to Youtube, it’s in German, and I don’t even have an account set up there!

  6. Mine is in Catalan. I am a Portuguese-speaker and can’t speak any Catalan, but I like it and is quite easy to understand.

  7. I keep it in English because I see no reason to switch it and I’m sure that continuously asking me to translate posts would drive me nuts. I never saw the point of changing the language of formulaic things like that.

  8. Well, though I’m an Arabic-speaker but my FB is all in English. The Ads on the sides however are mixed.

  9. I made the quizz today, and made a score of 5 in 7, mistakes Gibson’s language Greek I said Aramaic, and made a mistake in the Cornish one.


    About Facebook, I can’t answer, I neve use social pages as Facebook, Orkut, Twitter…

  10. The questions in the quiz have very different difficulty. The one about Romansh, for example, is obvious.

  11. Oh, thanks a LOT for pointing out that the answer to the ONE question I got wrong is “obvious,” Lev! LOL…I was thrown off by the fact that I had no idea what “Vepsian” was, and thought maybe it was some very obscure Romance language/dialect that looked MORE like Spanish/Catalan/Portuguese than what I vaguely recall of Romansh!

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