Ten questions on how the world writes and how its languages are related to each other. A couple of the answers are the reason linguists argue at conferences.
Languages are sorted into families the way species are: by shared inheritance rather than by geography. That is why Hungarian sits awkwardly in the middle of Europe, and why the closest relatives of the language spoken on Madagascar are found thousands of kilometres away in Borneo. Writing systems follow a separate logic entirely. A script can be borrowed by a language it suits badly, invented from scratch by committee, or kept for centuries out of pure attachment. These ten questions cover both halves of the story, and the classifications used here are the ones that are broadly settled rather than the ones still being fought over.
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
Play it insteadAnswer: B. Devanagari
Why: Devanagari is an abugida: each consonant carries a built-in vowel that other marks can change. Its most recognisable feature is the horizontal line running along the top of the words, called the shirorekha.
Answer: A. Hiragana and katakana
Why: Hiragana handles grammatical endings while katakana mostly carries foreign borrowings and emphasis, with kanji doing the heavy lifting for content words. Both syllabaries were developed from simplified Chinese characters.
Answer: D. Deliberately designed and introduced by royal decree
Why: It was promulgated in the fifteenth century under King Sejong, replacing the use of Chinese characters that few Koreans could learn. The consonant shapes are traditionally explained as diagrams of the mouth and tongue making each sound.
Answer: C. Uralic
Why: They are Uralic, which is why they sit apart from the Indo-European languages that surround them. Finnish and Hungarian are only distantly related within that family, and speakers of one cannot understand the other.
Answer: B. A language isolate with no demonstrated relatives
Why: No convincing link between Basque and any other language family has ever been established. It is spoken on both sides of the western Pyrenees and survived the spread of Latin that replaced its neighbours.
Answer: A. The script records consonants, with vowels largely left unmarked
Why: An abjad writes consonants and long vowels, leaving short vowels to optional marks used mainly in the Quran, dictionaries and books for children. Hebrew works on the same principle.
Answer: D. Sino-Tibetan
Why: Sino-Tibetan covers the Chinese languages along with Burmese, Tibetan and hundreds of smaller languages across the Himalayas. Mandarin and Cantonese are related but not mutually intelligible when spoken.
Answer: C. Austronesian
Why: Malagasy is Austronesian, and its closest relatives are spoken in Borneo, on the other side of the Indian Ocean. That relationship is the main linguistic evidence for a long sea migration to Madagascar.
Answer: B. A Bantu language with heavy Arabic borrowing
Why: Its grammar is thoroughly Bantu, while centuries of trade along the East African coast left a large layer of Arabic vocabulary. It serves as a common language across a region where hundreds of others are spoken.
Answer: A. Tamil
Why: Tamil is Dravidian, along with Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, and those languages dominate southern India while the north is largely Indo-European. Tamil also has one of the longest unbroken literary records of any living language.
A Germanic language wearing a French coat and carrying a Latin dictionary. Why English spelling is a mess with reasons.
7 min readEach correct answer awards 10 XP. There is zero point penalty for incorrect guesses, encouraging learning through exploration.
Yes! You can retake any quiz as many times as you like, or use the Practice Mistakes mode at the end to review questions you missed.
Absolutely. As soon as you select an option, QuizKite displays a detailed explanation card explaining why the answer is correct.
Every quiz on QuizKite is researched, written and fact-checked by hand against reliable references, with an explanation for each answer. Read our full Editorial Policy to learn more about our content standards.
Roots, scripts and the names for things you already do with language.
Which language has the most native speakers worldwide?
Nouns, adverbs, semicolons and the Oxford comma, without the schoolroom dread.
A word that names a person, place or thing is which part of speech?
Abjads, syllabaries and alphabets, and the very different ways writing can encode speech.
Which writing system uses characters that mostly stand for units of meaning rather than…