SOCIETY
BIGGEST USER
OF THE POO EMOJI
In Apr 2015, UK
touch-screen
keyboard developer
SwiftKey announced
the results of their
search to find
which nations used
particular emojis the
most. Both the skull
and the birthday
cake emoji were most
popular in the USA,
while the winking
smiley appeared most
frequently among
UK-generated emojis.
Canada proved the
biggest user of the
“smiling pile of poo”
emoji; it accounted
for 0.48% of all emojis
used by Canadians.Je t’aime... France sends four times as many heart emojis
in its messages as any other country.MOST COMMON LANGUAGE ISOLATE
A “language isolate” is one that has no traceable relationships with
any other languages. The third-most common language isolate is
Mapudungun, spoken by the Mapuche people of South America,
who number approximately 300,000. The second-most common is
Basque, with 666,000 speakers concentrated in the Basque region
of northern Spain. Yet neither language isolate comes anywhere
close to Korean, which is spoken by an estimated 78 million people.Most spoken
languages
Ethnologue.com tracks the
world’s languages. Below is
a top 10 of the most widely
spoken languages, based
on the population of first-
language speakers. Each
entry features the primary
country, the number of
countries in which that
language is spoken and the
total number of speakers.- Chinese
China (35 countries):
1.302 billion speakers - Spanish
Spain (31): 427 million - English
UK (106): 339 million - Arabic
Saudi Arabia (58): 267 million - Hindi
India (4): 260 million - Portuguese
Portugal (12): 202 million - Bengali
Bangladesh (4): 189 million - Russian
Russia (17): 171 million - Japanese
Japan (2): 128 million - Lahnda
Pakistan (8): 117 million
First written language
Yangshao culture pottery discovered in 1962
near Xi’an in the Shaanxi Province of China bears
proto-characters for the numbers 5, 7 and 8.
It has been dated to 5,000–4,000 bce.Language with the most sounds
The remarkable language of !Xóõ (also known
as Ta’a) is spoken by a small community of
around 3,000 semi-nomadic people in southern
Botswana and eastern Namibia. Linguists
studying the language have counted 161 distinct
sounds (technically known as “segments” –
roughly equivalent to the sounds associated
with letters or letter pairs in English). By
comparison, English only has around 40.
!Xóõ’s 161 distinct sounds include 130 different
consonants – the most consonants in one
language. Consonant sounds like those found
in English are joined by a wide range of unvoiced
stops and clicks – sounds like the “tsk” noise of
disapproval used in English-speaking countries.Least common language
According to the Ethnologue database of
languages, more than 400 of the world’s
languages are nearly extinct, in the sense that
“only a small number of elderly speakers are
still living”. It is thought that languages are
disappearing at a rate of one every fortnight.
Among these endangered languages there are
some – probably fewer than 10 – that have only
one living native speaker. For example, there
were 10,000 speakers of the South American
Yaghan language in the late 19th century, but
this number had dropped to only 70 by the
1930s. Today, the last remaining native speaker
is Cristina Calderón (CHL, b. 1928).Most official languages for a country
Zimbabwe has 16 official languages codified
into its constitution, as approved by the
country’s parliament on 9 May 2013.
The full list of languages is: Chewa,
Chibarwe, English, Kalanga, Khoisan,
Nambya, Ndau, Ndebele, Shangani,
Shona, sign language, Sotho,
Tonga, Tswana, Venda and
Xhosa. (For the most
unofficial languages
for a country,
see right.)Most common
language sound
No known language
lacks the vowel “a”, as
features in the English
word “father”.Most popular emoji (current)
According to a joint study by the University of
Michigan (USA) and the University of Peking
(China), published in the International Journal
of UbiComp in Sep 2016, the most used emoji
is “Face with Tears of Joy” (aka “LOL Emoji” or
“Laughing Emoji”). Of the 427 million messages
examined – from 212 countries or regions – this
symbol comprised 15.4% of all emoji selected
through the Kika Emoji Keyboard app.Biggest emoji user on Instagram (country)
In a 2015 study, researchers working for
Instagram analysed the content of text
comments on the photo-sharing app and
found that 63% of all comments made by
Finnish users contained one or more emoji.
This put Finland well ahead of France with
50%, the UK with 48% and Germany with 47%.
Bottom of the table was Tanzania, with just 10%.FIRST...
Digital emoticon
The first “smiley” was written on 19 Sep 1982
by Scott Fahlman (USA) of Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh, USA. In a message on a
bulletin board system, he proposed the use of :-)
and :-( in emails to signify the emotional context
of the message and prevent misunderstandings.Emoji password
On 15 Jun 2015, financial software company
Intelligent Environments (UK) launched emoji
passcode software that allowed users to access
bank accounts by entering four characters
from a range of 44 emojis. The code is already
integrated into the company’s digital banking
app for Android mobile phones.Emoji blocked on Instagram
In Apr 2015, an employee at online media
company BuzzFeed noticed that searching for
the eggplant (aubergine) emoji on Instagram
produced zero hits. The offending emoji had
been intentionally blocked because of its use
as a metaphor for male genitalia, which the
social networking site described as content
violating its community guidelines.The Korean
alphabet, known as
Hangul in South Korea,
was created in^ 1443 by
King Sejong the Great.
Before then, Korean texts
had been composed in
classical Chinese.Q: How many languages
are there currently in
existence?
A: There are 7,097 “living” languages,
according to Ethnologue.com