Subscribe to Rapport International Tidbits Newsletter
Twice each month Rapport International sends a "Tidbit." A tidbit is an entertaining or interesting cultural, language or translation fact. You'll receive things like:
- Whistled speech exists in over 80 languages worldwide and travels about 10 times farther than ordinary shouting. Sylbo, a whistled language spoken by the ~22,000 inhabitants of La Gomera, the third-smallest of the Canary Islands archipelego, imitates the phonetic sounds of Spanish and can be heard up to 7 km (over 4 miles) away!
- A Guinness-sponsored study revealed that over 162,000 pints of stout vanish yearly due to mustaches slurping up 0.56 milliliters per sip. In the UK, at least 93,000 beer lovers sport facial hair and consume an average 180 pints annually, a loss of close to $550,000!
- Approximately 18.2 million people speak Khmer; at 74, the Cambodian language also holds the Guinness World Record for the longest alphabet. Rotokas has the shortest alphabet, with only 12 letters. It is spoken by the 4,000 residents of Central Bougainville Island in Papua, New Guinea.