Country Languages Questions and Answers

Answer: A

It is Oman.

Arabic is the official language of the sultanate. Baluchi, Swahili and several South Arabian languages, including Jibbali in Dhofar, are also spoken.

Answer: A

It is Urdu.

Urdu is the national language and shares official status with English. It is the mother tongue of less than a tenth of Pakistanis - Punjabi, Pashto and Sindhi have far more speakers - but serves as the common language.

Answer: C

It is Palau.

Palauan and English are both official. Palauan is Austronesian, and Japanese remains official in the state of Angaur, a survival of the Japanese administration between the wars.

Answer: C

It is Spanish.

Spanish is the official language of Panama. English is widely spoken along the canal and among the Afro-Antillean community, and seven indigenous languages survive, Ngabere the largest.

Answer: D

It is Papua New Guinea.

Tok Pisin, an English-based creole, is the country's lingua franca, official with English and Hiri Motu. With more than 800 languages, Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country in the world.

Answer: D

It is Guarani.

Paraguay is the only country in the Americas where an indigenous language is spoken by the majority, including by most of the non-indigenous population. Guarani has been official with Spanish since 1992.

Answer: A

It is Peru.

Quechua and Aymara are official alongside Spanish wherever they predominate. Quechua was the administrative language of the Inca empire and still has some eight million speakers across the Andes.

Answer: D

It is English.

The Philippines has two official languages, Filipino and English. Spanish was official for over three centuries and until 1987, but is no longer; it survives in place names and in thousands of loanwords.

Answer: A

It is Poland.

Polish is a West Slavic language written in the Latin alphabet with its own diacritics and nasal vowels, and is the largest Slavic language of the European Union.

Answer: D

It is Portuguese.

Portuguese is official in Portugal and in eight other countries. Portugal itself holds only about four per cent of the world's Portuguese speakers, most of the rest being in Brazil.