Celebrating languages and diversity

Worth celebrated the European Day of Languages with a number of activities and initiatives taking place for students in classes and a special lunchtime menu prepared by our chefs featuring dishes from across Europe.

At Worth, we are fortunate to study, work and live alongside people whose native language is not English. Each member of the Worth community brings a life of different experiences and perspectives from which we can all learn.

The European Day of Languages is an annual event celebrated each year on 26 September which provides an opportunity to celebrate diversity and to highlight the importance of learning languages in today’s world.

Our Modern Foreign Languages department organised a number of fun activities, quizzes and initiatives to celebrate this important day.

Here are a few interesting facts about languages:

• Papua New Guinea has the most languages in use.
• There are about 300 sign languages in use.
• The Cambodian alphabet has 74 letters.
• E is the most common letter in English.
• Japanese is the fastest language in the world (7.84 syllables spoken per second).
• The most languages spoken by one person is 59.
• Korean has more words in the dictionary than any other language.
• There are about 7,000 languages spoken globally.