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In Manchu, there's a group of nouns that belong to different synharmonic groups when they name males (a-group) or females (e-group), here are some of them: haha 'man' – hehe 'woman' ama 'father' – em …

Russian normally does not use the verb 'to be' in the Present Tense ('есть' for all numbers and persons), it just omits the verb altogether: She is a young woman. - Она молодая женщина. - 'She you …

The Yoruba language has a rather elaborate vigesimal (base-20) numeral system that involves both addition and subtraction and multiplication. There are words for each of the decades; units in 1–4 are …

First, diacritics are used in English, in borrowed words, sometimes optionally (like in the words café ~ cafe, façade ~ facade), but sometimes there is no alternative spelling without diacritics (like …

In Wolof, a language spoken in Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania, the verbs never change their form, it is the pronouns that have the tense. In Wolof there is I-which-is-now, I-that-will-be, I-that-was, …

Russian has this feature, too: этот больной человек 'this sick person' vs. этот человек болен 'this person is sick'.

The only such language I know about is Pirahã, the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. It is minimalistic in many ways, having the least number of phonemes (only 11) …

Russian is such a language. Being a Slavic language, Russian has nouns belong to either animate or inanimate class. The difference is how the Accusative case is formed: the inanimate nouns have Accusa …

The Japanese Kana alphabets, Hiragana and Katakana, also have a similar distinction of their letters, big vs. small, but in Kana this distinction is used for quite a different purpose than marking the …

Russian has several words with triple letters: длинношеее - 'having a long neck', also короткошеее - 'having a short neck' змееед - 'snake-eater', the name of a bird доооновский - 'pre-U …

In Ukrainian and Russian, you can form the passive voice form of practically any transitive verb by adding the reflexive particle -ся to the active voice form of the verb. Historically, this particle …

Yes, this feature is called clusivity, there are dozens of languages that have it, for example Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Malay, Hawaiian, etc. This article has a list of such languages together wi …

In the Northeast Caucasian languages, nouns are divided into classes, that category is analogous to the Indo-European and Semitic genders. Let's take Archi, a Northeast Caucasian language. It has 4 no …

Russian is such a language, although this feature is not followed by speakers as consistently as, for example, in Spanish. The majority of the Russian qualitative adjectives have two forms, short and …

Since numeral symbols are ideograms, even English has such sequences, for example '666' is often pronounced as 'six-six-six'.