Every language and accent in the game, with a fact about its sound, script, or history.
LingoGuessr's voice pool spans 137+ modern languages and regional accents across every inhabited continent, plus 15 ancient and historical languages you can hear reconstructed in the game's Ancient Languages mode. Below is the full list – the same short fact card that appears after each round in the game, collected in one place so you can browse them without playing.
Its own branch of the family tree. Albanian forms its own separate branch of the Indo-European language family, not closely related to any other living language.
A language that survived suppression. Belarusian shares deep roots with Russian and Ukrainian but has its own distinct sound system and a long history of being sidelined in favor of Russian.
The first Slavic language ever written. Bulgarian's ancestor, Old Church Slavonic, was the first Slavic language to be put into writing, using the Glagolitic and later Cyrillic scripts.
Not a dialect, a language. Catalan isn't a dialect of Spanish but an independent Romance language with its own literary tradition, in some ways closer to Occitan and French.
Three alphabets in its history. Croatian has historically been written in Glagolitic, Cyrillic, and Latin scripts, though today it exclusively uses a Latin alphabet with special diacritics.
A dialect apart. Cypriot Greek has been separated from mainland Greek for so long that it kept older grammatical forms and absorbed Turkish, French, and Venetian loanwords – many mainland Greeks find it hard to follow.
Words with no vowels at all. Czech can form words that are almost entirely vowel-free, because "r" and "l" can act as the syllable nucleus themselves – the sentence "Strč prst skrz krk" (stick your finger through your throat) contains not a single classic vowel.
The swallowed language. Danish swallows consonants so heavily and has a glottal stop called "stød" that even Norwegians and Swedes joke it sounds like speaking with a hot potato in your mouth.
The bridge to German. Dutch sits linguistically almost exactly between German and English. Typical is the guttural "g" sound, formed far back in the throat – similar to the Scottish "loch".
Non-rhotic. British English barely pronounces the R after vowels – "car" sounds more like "cah". That's exactly what sets it apart from American English, where every R stays audible.
Musical & rhotic. Irish English pronounces the R after vowels and often replaces "th" with a hard T/D – "thirty three" becomes "tirty tree". The rising and falling melody comes from Irish Gaelic.
Rolled Rs and its own words. Scottish English keeps a rolled or tapped R that most other English accents dropped, plus distinct vocabulary like "aye" (yes), "wee" (small), and "bairn" (child).
A lilting, sing-song rhythm. Welsh English carries the rising-falling melody of the Welsh language into its intonation, plus distinctive words like "cwtch" (a hug or cozy spot) borrowed straight from Welsh.
Fifteen grammatical cases. Estonian, a Finnic language unrelated to its Baltic neighbors, has around 14–15 noun cases – compared to just a handful in most European languages.
Not related to Swedish. Finnish doesn't belong to the Germanic or Romance languages, but to the Uralic family – more closely related to Estonian and distantly to Hungarian. No grammatical gender, but long words and sound lengths that change meaning.
Nasal & in the throat. Nasal vowels (on, an, in) and a throaty rolled "R" are the two sound features that almost always give French away instantly.
Ninety without the gymnastics. Belgian French says "septante" and "nonante" for 70 and 90 instead of France's convoluted "soixante-dix" (sixty-ten) and "quatre-vingt-dix" (four-twenty-ten) – much more logical.
Also skips the tricky numbers. Swiss French shares Belgium's simpler "septante"/"nonante" for 70/90, and in Geneva you might also hear "huitante" for 80 instead of France's "quatre-vingts" (four-twenties).
Cousin of Portuguese. Galician and Portuguese come from the same medieval language, Galician-Portuguese – which is why it often sounds very familiar to Portuguese speakers, though it has its own Spanish-influenced pronunciation and spelling.
Word monsters. German can form endlessly long compounds just by stringing words together – whole sentences can become a single word. Add to that the typical "ch" sounds, as in "ich" and "ach".
Its own words, softer sound. Austrian German has many words of its own ("Servus", "Jänner" instead of "Januar") and overall sounds more melodic than standard German from Germany.
Barely understood. Swiss German has an even more guttural "ch" sound, has no "ß", and in fast conversation is barely understood by many Germans – in writing, it usually shifts back closer to standard German.
Its own alphabet since antiquity. Greek has been written in its own alphabet for about 2,800 years and has lent countless technical terms to other languages – from "democracy" to "telephone".
A linguistic island in Europe. Hungarian isn't related to its Indo-European neighbors at all – it belongs to the Uralic family, distantly related to Finnish and Estonian.
Living Old Norse. Icelandic has changed so little in roughly 1,000 years that Icelanders can still read the medieval Sagas in the original language. The country even coins new native words instead of borrowing foreign ones, like tölva ("number-prophet") for computer.
Verb comes first. Irish word order famously puts the verb before the subject – 'Tá mé' literally means 'Am I' to say 'I am', the reverse of English.
Almost all vowels. Almost every Italian word ends in a vowel, which is what makes the language so melodic. Double consonants (as in "pizza") are also pronounced noticeably longer.
A regional cousin of Latvian. Latgalian is spoken in eastern Latvia and is legally recognized as a historical variant of Latvian, though many consider it a language of its own.
Fixed stress, always on the first syllable. Latvian almost always stresses the first syllable of a word, giving its speech a very steady, driving rhythm.
Genoa's old maritime tongue. Ligurian was once spoken across Mediterranean trading ports thanks to the Republic of Genoa's seafaring reach, from Corsica to Sardinia's Carloforte.
The most conservative living Indo-European language. Lithuanian retains grammatical features, like complex noun cases, that are closer to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European than almost any other living language.
The only official language with this name. Macedonian is a South Slavic language, closely related to Bulgarian, and uses a Cyrillic alphabet with a few letters unique to it.
Europe's only official Semitic language. Maltese descends from Siculo-Arabic but is written in the Latin alphabet and has absorbed heavy Italian and English influence.
Many dialects, one sound. Norwegian has a singsong pitch accent like Swedish, but no single binding spoken standard – on the radio you'll deliberately hear different dialects side by side.
Consonant clusters. Polish loves stringing many consonants together, as in "Szczecin". Add to that nasal vowels (ą, ę), which English doesn't have, and a fixed stress on the second-to-last syllable.
Swallowed vowels. European Portuguese swallows unstressed vowels so heavily that it can sound almost Slavic to untrained ears – quite different from the open, vowel-rich Brazilian Portuguese.
Latin in the East. Romanian is the only Romance language of Eastern Europe – surrounded by Slavic-speaking neighbors. It has absorbed a lot of Slavic vocabulary as a result, but as the only Romance language it preserved remnants of the Latin case system.
Soft consonants. Russian distinguishes "soft" and "hard" consonants – almost every consonant has a palatalized variant. Unstressed vowels get strongly swallowed or altered as a result.
Two scripts, one language. Serbian is unusual in officially using both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets side by side, with speakers moving fluidly between the two.
Nearly mutually intelligible with Czech. Slovak and Czech are close enough that speakers of each can generally understand the other without ever having studied it.
A rare surviving dual form. Slovenian is one of the few Indo-European languages that still actively uses the grammatical dual number, for talking about exactly two of something.
The lisping C. In Spain, c (before e/i) and z are pronounced like an English "th" – "gracias" sounds like "gra-thias". In Latin America this usually becomes a regular "s".
A singsong tone. Swedish has a musical word accent where the pitch rises and falls within a single word – hence the often-described "singsong" sound, which Norwegian shares too.
Related, but distinct. Ukrainian is related to Russian but sounds noticeably softer and has its own sounds like "ї". A "г" is pronounced as a breathy H instead of a hard G, unlike in Russian.
On the edge of extinction. Votic is spoken natively by only a couple dozen people in a few villages near St. Petersburg, making it one of Europe's most endangered languages.
German written in Hebrew letters. Yiddish grew from medieval German dialects blended with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic vocabulary, and is traditionally written using the Hebrew alphabet.
Extreme consonant count. Abkhaz has one of the largest consonant inventories of any language – around 58 consonants – but only two or three vowels.
Sounds from the throat. Arabic has several sounds formed deep in the throat that don't occur in English at all. The script runs right to left, and most words are built on a root of three consonants.
Its own branch of Indo-European. Armenian forms its own independent branch of the Indo-European language family and has used a unique 39-letter alphabet since the 5th century.
Vowel harmony like Turkish. Azerbaijani is a Turkic language closely related to Turkish, sharing the same vowel harmony rules that make its suffixes flow smoothly.
One of the world's most spoken languages. Bengali has around 230 million native speakers, making it one of the most widely spoken languages on Earth, yet it's rarely heard outside South Asia.
Up to nine tones. Cantonese has six to nine tones depending on how you count – noticeably more than Mandarin's four. It also preserves old final consonants (-p, -t, -k) that have disappeared in Mandarin.
Written right to left, from the bottom. Dhivehi, spoken in the Maldives, is written in the Thaana script – unusually, some say its letters originated partly from Arabic numerals.
A unique alphabet with no capital letters. Georgian is written in its own script, Mkhedruli, which has no distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters at all.
A revived language. For almost 1,700 years Hebrew was barely spoken day-to-day, serving mainly as a language of scripture and prayer – only from the late 19th century was it deliberately revived. It's written right to left, built from three-consonant roots like Arabic.
Retroflex sounds. Hindi distinguishes consonants where the tongue tip curls backward (retroflex) from "normal" ones – a feature many South Asian languages share that European languages don't have.
Doubling instead of inflecting. Indonesian gets by entirely without verb conjugation or tenses. The plural is often formed simply by doubling: "orang" (person) becomes "orang-orang" (people).
Even rhythm. Japanese doesn't count stressed syllables but equally long "morae" – which makes the speech rhythm feel very even, almost like Morse code without big stress jumps.
Switching alphabets. Kazakh has traditionally been written in Cyrillic, but Kazakhstan is in the process of transitioning the language to a Latin-based alphabet.
Its own ancient script. Khmer has one of the largest alphabets in the world (74 letters) and no relation to Thai or Vietnamese, despite sitting geographically between them – it belongs to the Austroasiatic family and traces back to 7th-century inscriptions.
An invented alphabet. Korean is written with Hangeul – an alphabet deliberately designed at the royal court in the 15th century to be easy to learn. The letters are grouped into syllable-shaped blocks.
Millions of speakers, no official status. Kurmanji is the most widely spoken Kurdish variety, written in the Latin alphabet, and is the mother tongue of tens of millions of people across Turkey, Syria, and the Caucasus – yet it has no official status in Turkey, where most of its speakers live.
Written right to left. Sorani (Central Kurdish) is written in a modified Arabic script, right to left, and is one of Iraq's two official languages alongside Arabic – used in schools, courts, and media across the Kurdistan Region.
An epic in spoken word. Kyrgyz culture is famous for the Epic of Manas, one of the longest oral epic poems in the world, traditionally recited entirely from memory.
Tones without capital letters. Lao is a tonal language with no uppercase or lowercase distinction, and traditionally no spaces between words within a sentence.
Almost like Indonesian. Malay and Indonesian are closely related and largely mutually intelligible. Here too there's no grammatical gender, no tenses – and doubling for plural or emphasis.
Four tones. Mandarin is a tonal language: the same syllable "ma" can mean "mother", "hemp", "horse", or "scold" depending on the pitch contour. The melody carries real meaning.
Cyrillic instead of Mongolian script. Today's Mongolia writes in Cyrillic – a legacy of the Soviet era. The traditional vertical Mongolian script (read top to bottom) lives on mainly in Inner Mongolia (China).
Related to Hindi, written like Sanskrit. Nepali is an Indo-Aryan language written in the Devanagari script, the same script used for Sanskrit and Hindi.
A rare, undocumented tongue. Od is spoken by wandering communities across northern India and Pakistan, and remains one of the least documented Indo-Aryan languages.
An Iranian language in the Caucasus. Ossetian is an Iranian language, related distantly to Persian, spoken in the Caucasus mountains rather than the Middle East.
Poetry-loving language. Pashto has one of the richest oral poetry traditions in Central Asia, with 'landay' – short two-line folk poems – still composed and shared today.
Not Arabic, despite the script. Persian (Farsi) is written in Arabic script, but it's actually an Indo-European language – distantly related to German and English, not to Arabic.
A language with its own tones. Punjabi developed lexical tone from lost consonant sounds – a rare trait for a language in the Indo-Aryan family, more typical of East Asian languages.
Named after its mountains. Seediq (also called Truku or Taroko, after Taiwan's famous gorge) is spoken by an Indigenous Austronesian people in Taiwan's central highlands.
A mountain language of the Himalaya foothills. Shina is spoken across the rugged valleys of Gilgit-Baltistan, an area so mountainous that neighboring valleys can have noticeably different dialects.
A script all its own. Sindhi is usually written in a modified Arabic script with extra letters for sounds not found in Arabic or Urdu, like implosive consonants.
An older layer of Chinese. Taiwanese Hokkien preserves pronunciations of Chinese characters that are centuries older than standard Mandarin, closer to how Tang-dynasty Chinese may have sounded.
Persian in Cyrillic clothing. Tajik is essentially a form of Persian, mutually intelligible with Farsi and Dari, but written in the Cyrillic alphabet instead of Arabic script.
Over 2,000 years of literature. Tamil has one of the longest continuous literary traditions of any living language, with classical poetry dating back more than two millennia.
Called the 'Italian of the East'. Telugu earned this nickname because nearly all its words end in a vowel, giving it a smooth, melodic rhythm similar to Italian.
Five tones, no gaps. Thai is a tonal language with five distinct pitch contours that change meaning. It's also written completely without spaces between words.
Vowel harmony. Turkish automatically matches the vowels in suffixes to the vowels in the word stem – this is called vowel harmony. It makes long, suffixed words sound remarkably fluid.
Vowel harmony on the steppe. Turkmen is a Turkic language written in a Latin alphabet since the 1990s, sharing the vowel harmony patterns found in Turkish and Azerbaijani.
Hindi's script-swapped twin. Urdu and Hindi are nearly identical when spoken but use completely different scripts – Urdu is written right-to-left in a Perso-Arabic script.
Central Asia's most spoken Turkic language. Uzbek has more native speakers than any other Turkic language in Central Asia, and switched from Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet after independence.
Tones in the Latin alphabet. Vietnamese has six tones but – unlike most tonal languages – is written in the Latin alphabet with lots of accent marks. That goes back to Portuguese and French missionaries.
Almost only spoken, rarely written. Wakhi is spoken by a few tens of thousands of people in the remote Wakhan Corridor, where Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and China meet. It belongs to the Eastern Iranian languages and has traditionally had almost no written form of its own – passed down nearly entirely orally across generations.
Simplified Dutch. Afrikaans descends from the Dutch of 17th-century settlers but has drastically simplified the grammar – verbs are no longer inflected for person – and absorbed words from Khoisan and Malay languages.
A Gbe language. Aja (Adja) belongs to the Gbe language cluster, the same family as Ewe and Fon – its speakers in Benin and Togo can often understand their neighbors surprisingly well.
Its own script. Amharic is written in Ge'ez script, read left to right, where each symbol represents a full consonant-vowel syllable rather than a single letter.
Endangered Bantu tongue. Bankon is spoken by only around 12,000 people in Cameroon's Littoral region. Like many Bantu languages, nouns are sorted into classes that each take their own prefix.
Tone changes meaning. Basaa is a tonal Bantu language of Cameroon – the same syllable can mean completely different things depending on whether the pitch rises or falls.
West Africa's trade language. Dyula has long served as a lingua franca along West African trade routes, understood far beyond its native speakers thanks to centuries of Manding commerce.
A melting pot of loanwords. South African English has borrowed heavily from Afrikaans and Zulu – words like "braai" (barbecue), "lekker" (nice), and "robot" (traffic light) are everyday vocabulary that would confuse other English speakers.
Gabon's dominant language. Fang is the most widely spoken Bantu language of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, with distinct dialects like Ntumu and Okak spread across the region.
A blend of French and Darja. Algerian French speakers often mix in Arabic (Darja) words and grammar mid-sentence – a style called "franco-arabe" that's instantly recognizable to French speakers elsewhere.
French with West African rhythm. Benin's French carries the tonal rhythm and vocabulary influence of local languages like Fon and Yoruba, giving it a distinct musicality compared to European French.
French with a Creole soul. Réunion Creole (Réunionnais) blends French with Malagasy, Tamil, and other influences from the Indian Ocean – most islanders switch fluidly between it and standard French.
West Africa's most-spoken language. Hausa has more speakers than any other language in West Africa and serves many as a trade language across national borders. It's marked by implosive consonants – sounds that are drawn in rather than pushed out.
Three tones decide everything. Igbo distinguishes words by high, low, and gliding tones – getting a tone wrong can turn a compliment into an insult. It's spoken mainly in southeastern Nigeria by the Igbo people.
Almost everyone speaks the same language. Kinyarwanda is spoken as a native language by virtually the entire population of Rwanda – a linguistic unity that's rare in Africa, where many languages usually coexist. It belongs to the Bantu family with complex noun-class prefixes.
Swahili's southern cousin. Koti, spoken on Mozambique's coast, absorbed a great deal of vocabulary from old Swahili, brought by traders who settled at Angoche centuries ago.
A national language of DR Congo. Luba-Kasai (Tshiluba) is one of Congo's four national languages, spoken by around 15 million people in the Kasai region.
Uganda's lingua franca. Luganda is spoken as a first or second language by millions in and around Kampala – its vowel-rich syllables give it a very melodic rhythm.
Mountain language of Cameroon. Mada is spoken by roughly 17,000 people who live around the rugged Mandara Mountains in Cameroon's Far North region.
Straddling two countries. Mundang is spoken across the Chad–Cameroon border by the Mundang people, and is still taught as a subject in some local schools.
One of Africa's largest languages. Oromo is spoken by tens of millions of people across Ethiopia and Kenya, and is written in the Latin-based Qubee alphabet.
A language of praise poetry. Shona is one of Zimbabwe's most widely spoken languages and has a rich tradition of oral praise poetry (nhetembo), often performed to honor ancestors, chiefs, or totems.
A kingdom's own tongue. Siswati is the language of Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), one of the last absolute monarchies in the world, and is closely related to Zulu – speakers of each can often understand one another.
Click-free Bantu neighbor. Southern Sotho (Sesotho) is the national language of Lesotho, a country entirely surrounded by South Africa.
Written in an ancient script. Standard Moroccan Tamazight is written in Tifinagh, a script with roots going back over 2,000 years to ancient Berber inscriptions.
Bantu meets Arabic. Swahili has Bantu grammar with noun classes instead of gender, but a huge amount of Arabic vocabulary – a legacy of centuries of trade on the Indian Ocean. It's the lingua franca across much of East Africa.
Written like Amharic. Tigrinya shares the Ge'ez script with Amharic, though the two languages are only distantly related and not mutually intelligible.
Botswana's national language. Setswana greetings like 'Dumela' are used throughout the day in Botswana, regardless of the time – it works for hello any time.
A tonal language with melody. Twi (part of the Akan languages) is a tonal language: the same syllable can carry completely different meanings depending on pitch. It's also marked by many nasal and double vowels.
Click sounds in the vocabulary. Xhosa is famous for its click sounds (written as c, q, x), borrowed from neighboring Khoisan languages. It was Nelson Mandela's mother tongue – the name "Xhosa" itself begins with a click.
A tonal language with three pitches. Yoruba uses three distinct tones – high, mid, and low – where the same written word can carry entirely different meanings depending on pitch.
South Africa's most-spoken native language. Zulu has more native speakers than any of South Africa's other 12 official languages. Like Xhosa it uses click sounds, and long compound words (agglutination) shape its sentence structure.
Caught between two neighbors. Canadian English sits between American and British spelling and vocabulary – Canadians write "colour" like the British but say "zee" like Americans, plus the famous "eh?" tag at the end of sentences.
Rhotic & flapped. American English always pronounces the R after vowels (rhotic) – the opposite of British English. A T between vowels often becomes a soft D, so "water" sounds like "wader".
A melody of its own. Québec French has its own diphthongs, a different sentence melody than French from France, and mixes in English loanwords as well as its own slang ("joual").
Born from French and West African languages. Haitian Creole developed from 18th-century French mixed with West African language structures, and is now a fully independent language with its own grammar.
A language built for the Arctic. Inupiaq, spoken across Arctic Alaska, has an extraordinarily rich vocabulary for describing snow, ice, and sea conditions.
Consonants that disappear. Caribbean Spanish tends to drop or soften the S at the end of syllables, so "más o menos" can sound like "máh o menoh" – a hallmark of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican speech.
Land of 'vos'. Much of Central America uses "vos" instead of "tú" for "you", each with its own verb conjugation – a feature it shares with Argentina but pronounces quite differently.
Clear, with Aztec heritage. Mexican Spanish pronounces consonants very clearly and crisply. Many everyday words like "chocolate", "tomate", or "aguacate" come from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.
Named after its home town. Teutila Cuicatec is named for San Pedro Teutila in Oaxaca, Mexico, and is spoken natively by only a few thousand people today.
Official language alongside Spanish. Guaraní has equal official status with Spanish in Paraguay – unique for an indigenous language of the Americas. Over 90% of Paraguayans speak it, and many mix it with Spanish in everyday life into what's called "Jopará".
A living Inca-era language. Imbabura Highland Quichua descends from the Quechua spoken across the Inca Empire and is still the everyday language of Otavalo's Indigenous communities.
Nasal & open. Brazilian Portuguese sounds very open and nasal; the S at the end of a syllable is pronounced like "sh" depending on the region. Compared to Portugal, it comes across as rounder and more musical.
Spoken high in the Andes. Puno Quechua is spoken around Lake Titicaca in Peru, more than 3,800 meters above sea level, making it one of the highest-altitude living languages.
The 'clearest' Spanish accent. Andean Spanish, especially around Bogotá, is often cited as one of the clearest and most neutral-sounding Spanish accents – it's frequently used as the standard for dubbing and newscasts.
Voseo & the sh sound. Argentine Spanish uses "vos" instead of "tú" and pronounces "ll"/"y" like an English "sh" – "yo" sounds like "sho". The sentence melody is strongly shaped by the Italian of immigrants.
Fast and full of 'po'. Chilean Spanish is famous for its rapid pace and the filler word "po" (from "pues") tacked onto sentences, plus a very distinct pronunciation of the letter S.
Rising sentence melody. Australian English often ends statements with a rising pitch, almost like a question. Add to that vowel shifts ("today" sounds like "to-die") and lots of short forms like "arvo" or "brekkie".
Vowels on the move. New Zealand English has shifted its short vowels so much that "fish and chips" can sound like "fush and chups" to outsiders – a change that happened within just a few generations.
Beyond the modern world, LingoGuessr's Ancient Languages mode lets you hear reconstructed pronunciations of tongues that shaped history – from the clay-tablet cuneiform of Akkadian to the sagas of Old Norse.
Written by pressing reeds into clay. Akkadian was written in cuneiform - wedge-shaped marks pressed into wet clay tablets. It was the diplomatic lingua franca of the ancient Near East for over a thousand years, even used by Egyptian pharaohs to write to each other.
Ancestor of a whole alphabet family. The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin, Cyrillic, and Coptic scripts. Ancient Greek also had no spaces between words and was originally written boustrophedon - alternating direction line by line, like an ox plowing a field.
A writing system cracked only recently. Classical Maya script combines logograms and syllable signs and was carved into stone monuments across Mesoamerica. It remained largely undeciphered until breakthroughs in the late 20th century.
Still spoken by millions today. Quechua was the administrative language of the Inca Empire and, unlike most 'ancient' languages here, is still spoken by roughly 8-10 million people across the Andes today - it never went extinct.
The first Indo-European language on record. Hittite, preserved on clay tablets from Hattusa, is the earliest attested Indo-European language - its 1915 decipherment proved that Hittite, and therefore languages like English and Sanskrit, share a common ancestor.
Never really 'died'. Latin didn't disappear - it slowly turned into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Classical Latin had no punctuation, lowercase letters, or spaces between words either.
The ancestor of today's tones. Middle Chinese had a more complex syllable structure than modern Mandarin, including consonant endings that have vanished in the north but survive in Cantonese and other southern varieties - which is why old Chinese poetry often only rhymes properly in those dialects.
Written three different ways at once. Middle Egyptian could be written in hieroglyphs, the cursive hieratic script, or later demotic - all for the same language. It's considered the 'classical' phase of Egyptian, used for over 2,000 years of literature and monuments.
Built for one job: Bible translation. Old Church Slavonic was created in the 9th century by the brothers Cyril and Methodius specifically to translate Christian texts for Slavic peoples - and gave its name to the Cyrillic alphabet.
Barely recognizable as English. Old English had grammatical gender, case endings, and letters like þ (thorn) and ð (eth) for the 'th' sound. Without training, a modern English speaker can understand almost none of it.
Recorded in Japan's oldest poetry. Old Japanese is preserved mainly through the Man'yōshū, an 8th-century poetry anthology, and was written with man'yōgana - Chinese characters used purely for their sound rather than their meaning.
The language of the sagas. Old Norse was spoken across Scandinavia and Viking settlements from Greenland to Russia. Modern Icelandic has changed so little that Icelanders can still read the original Old Norse sagas today.
A separate branch, not a Japanese dialect. The Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa are close relatives of Japanese, together forming the whole Japonic language family - linguists classify them as a distinct language, not merely a dialect of Japanese.
Gave the world its alphabet. The Phoenician script is the ancestor of the Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets - and therefore of most alphabets used on Earth today. Phoenician traders spread it across the Mediterranean along their shipping routes.
Reconstructed, never directly recorded. Proto-Celtic was never written down - linguists reconstructed it by comparing later Celtic languages like Old Irish and Gaulish. It's the common ancestor behind today's Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Breton.
Want to test your ear against all of these? Play LingoGuessr and see how many you can place on the map.