European Parliament launches Language Code Quiz

26 September 2014

To celebrate the European Day of Languages today, the European Parliament has launched a Language Code Quiz on its website.

The quiz presents you with the translations of the phrase "European Parliament" into the EU's 24 official languages. Your job is to determine what language it is and then figure out what is the corresponding language code of that language in a race against the clock.

Identifying the language is easy enough: Ευρωπαϊκό Κοινοβούλιο is clearly Greek, and if you have a bit of a clue about Celtic languages you will recognize Parlaimint na hEorpa as Irish. Guessing the language codes for those languages is a different story, however. Even Noam Chomsky didn't know Greek was 'el' and Irish was 'ga'. He got all languages right of course, but he timed out on the stupid codes.