Each round shows four options about languages. Three of them belong to the group in the question. One does not. You tap the one that does not belong.
The groups cover the whole subject: language families, alphabets and scripts, official languages of countries, greetings and everyday words, dead languages and invented ones.
The traps are the point. Finnish sits in the middle of the Nordics and is not Germanic. Persian is written in Arabic letters and is closer to English than to Arabic. Galician sounds Celtic and is Romance. Each round ends with one line that explains the answer.
How to play
Each round asks one question, for example "Which of these is NOT a Romance language?".
Read the question. Then tap the option that does not belong.
You get one pick for each round. There are no second guesses.
The quiz marks your answer immediately. It also gives one line that explains the answer.
You start with three lives. The hearts in the top bar show the lives that you have.
A correct answer gives one point. A wrong answer costs one life.
A round that costs a life gives no points. The quiz continues with the next round.
The run ends when you lose the third life. It also ends when you play all the rounds.
Select "Review rounds" on the result screen to see each round that you played.
What counts in this quiz
32 groups about languages. One run can use all of them. The rounds, the options and the impostor are drawn fresh every run.
Every option is clearly in the group or clearly out of it. No round has two possible answers.
Family rounds follow the classification reference works use. Romanian is Romance, Maltese is Semitic, Malagasy is Austronesian.
Official-language rounds follow the law of the country today, not the size of a community.
Your score is the number of correct answers. The maximum score is 32 — every round in the quiz.
A wrong answer costs one life. You keep the points that you have.
The timer counts up from your first pick. It only separates equal scores on the leaderboard.
What's not included — and why
Languages that linguists still argue about are not used, on either side of a round.
Serbian is in no script round. It uses two alphabets, so a script question about it would have two answers.
Kazakh is in no script round. The country is in the middle of a switch from Cyrillic to Latin.
Japanese is not in the tone round, on either side. Its pitch accent is not a tone system, but the difference is a debate this quiz does not need.
Good to know
Basque is related to no other living language. It was spoken in Europe before the Indo-European languages arrived.
Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, came from Borneo — settlers crossed the Indian Ocean about 1,200 years ago.
The Armenian alphabet has been in continuous use since the year 405.
Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet, and the only one that is an official language of the European Union.