Keith Law
Lunchtime Quiz: Name the Most Popular Indo-European Languages
by Keith Law - October 6, 2009 - 11:30 AM

pagehead_lunchtimequiz550.jpg

quiz_head_popularlanguage2

Editor’s Note: Baseball expert/food critic/bookworm Keith Law of ESPN is back with another week of quizzes. Make him feel welcome!

One of my hobbies is—or was, before my daughter was born and I had infinite free time—learning foreign languages, usually just to the conversational level for use while traveling. Most of the time I stick to Indo-European languages, since they nearly all have a little bit in common with English. There are 12 languages in the Indo-European family with at least 50 million native speakers. How many can you name in 3 minutes?

Take the Quiz: Name the 12 Most Popular Indo-European Languages

« Previous Post   -   Next Post »
Click here to get a Risk-Free issue of mental_floss magazine
Comments (12)

  1. 7/12. I would never have guessed the remaining 5.

    posted by K on 10-6-2009 at 12:31 pm

  2. 6/12 – Didn’t think of -English- because I was thinking of only Foreign Languages!

    Really should have gotten Russian too, but the others I don’t think I would have gotten. (Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, & Urdu)

    posted by Nerak on 10-6-2009 at 1:13 pm

  3. Didn’t realize Bengali, Marathi, and Punjabi were indo-european.

    I was surprised neither Arabic nor Farsi made the list.

    posted by hummer on 10-6-2009 at 1:25 pm

  4. I speak 4 of these! yippee!

    posted by Pink Coat on 10-6-2009 at 1:59 pm

  5. I got the 7 European languages-I am stunned that Arabic is not on the list.

    posted by Marc in UT on 10-6-2009 at 3:35 pm

  6. I’m kinda surprised Hindi and Punjabi are on there. My friend speaks Hindi, and there’s nothing in it that sounds relatively like English, unlike some of the other languages where you can find lots of cognates.

    Missed Russian, but I guess I was thinking more of Europe than Asia in all of this.

    posted by Megan on 10-6-2009 at 5:52 pm

  7. I was surprised as well about Farsi not making the list. However, Arabic is not an Indo-European language AFAIK.

    posted by Joey Bloggs on 10-6-2009 at 6:17 pm

  8. i knew i couldn’t get those last three. should have gotten one more… darn! 3 remaining!

    posted by c on 10-6-2009 at 8:31 pm

  9. Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi and Urdu are part of what puts the “Indo” in Indo-European. Arabic, like Hebrew (and Amharic, I think) is part of the Semitic family. I’m kind of surprised by the exclusion of Persian or Farsi (not sure how the language politics break down on that one, but Persian comes from the Greek word used to describe the country formerly known as Persia), but it has a kind of complicated situation, as it’s spoken in several different countries and might be called a different language in each.

    Oh, and Hindi has a fair number of cognates, but you have to dig deep, and look for things that would be used by people more than 10,000 years ago. thus the Hindi verb “to cut”, is “kāṭhnā”, and we have the familiar sounding “ek, do, tÄ«n” for one, two and three. I’m sure there’s a lot more, but you’d have to know historical linguistics.

    posted by Greg on 10-6-2009 at 9:34 pm

  10. 9/12 and I was thinking Punjabi, but didn’t have time to come up w/ it. Would have never gotten Bengali or Marathi

    posted by Jonny on 10-6-2009 at 10:00 pm

  11. 10 of 12. I missed Punjabi and Marathi. I made at least twenty wrong guesses!

    posted by Miss Cellania on 10-6-2009 at 10:40 pm

  12. 9/12. Typed “Erdu”. :^( Thanks, Keith. The “x in y” quizzes are my all-time favorites, and yours broaden the scope of what is offered here!

    reCaptcha: Polly 18

    posted by Frank on 10-7-2009 at 12:30 am

Comment

commenting policy