Language Quiz
The main language of a country traces its history more directly than almost anything else on a map — trade, empire, migration and independence all leave their mark.
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About Language Quiz
Language maps and political maps rarely agree, which is what makes this interesting. Portuguese is the main language of Angola and Mozambique but of no country between them; Spanish is official in Equatorial Guinea and nowhere else in Africa; French reaches from Belgium to Vanuatu.
The surprises are worth collecting. Brazil is the only Portuguese-speaking country in the Americas. Suriname is the only Dutch-speaking one. Malagasy, spoken in Madagascar off the African coast, is most closely related to a language of Borneo, some 7,000 kilometres away.
This site lists one main language per country for the sake of a clean question. Many countries have several official languages — South Africa recognises twelve, India twenty-two at national level — so treat the answer as the principal one rather than the only one.
Difficulty and scoring
Easy, Medium and Hard run thirty questions. Easy covers the countries most people can already name; Hard reaches the ones that need real study. A correct answer is worth 100 points, with a bonus for answering inside five seconds and further bonuses at three, five and ten in a row. A wrong answer scores nothing and resets the streak, but never ends the round.
Expert is different. It has no fixed length and no second chances: questions keep coming from the hardest pool until you get one wrong, and that ends the run immediately. Your result is how many you survived. The full scoring breakdown is on the about page.