Language to Country Quiz

Identify a country from its main language.

Identify a country from its main language — and learn which languages span continents, because those are the ones that group answers together.

The languages that cross borders

A handful of languages are official in a great many countries, and they trace the shape of former empires:

English is official in more countries than any other language, spread across Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, South Asia and North America.
French is second, concentrated in West and Central Africa plus parts of Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Arabic runs across North Africa and the Middle East.
Spanish covers almost all of Latin America plus Spain and Equatorial Guinea.
Portuguese appears in Brazil, Portugal and several African states — Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe.

Learning those five groups accounts for a very large share of the world's countries and turns the quiz from recall into classification.

The ones that catch people

Brazil speaks Portuguese, not Spanish — the single most common language-and-country error there is.

Equatorial Guinea is the only African country with Spanish as an official language, a leftover of a different colonial history from its neighbours.

Suriname speaks Dutch, which makes it the odd one out in South America, where Guyana speaks English and everyone else speaks Spanish or Portuguese.

Switzerland has four official languages — German, French, Italian and Romansh — and no single national language.

Belgium has three — Dutch, French and German — and the division is politically significant rather than incidental.

South Africa has eleven official languages, more than almost any other country.

Languages official in only one country

Japanese, Korean, Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Icelandic, Hebrew, Thai, Vietnamese and many others are official in a single state, which makes them reliable one-to-one clues when they appear.

Why this helps with everything else

Language groups map closely onto colonial history, which in turn explains flag families, currency groups and even capital city placement. Learning the language map gives you a scaffold that makes several other quizzes easier at once.

Frequently asked questions

What language do they speak in Brazil?

Portuguese, not Spanish. Brazil was colonised by Portugal while the rest of South America was largely colonised by Spain, and it is by a wide margin the most populous Portuguese-speaking country in the world.

Which language is official in the most countries?

English, spread across Africa, the Caribbean, the Pacific, South Asia and North America. French is second, concentrated in West and Central Africa alongside parts of Europe and the Caribbean.

Which African country speaks Spanish?

Equatorial Guinea is the only one with Spanish as an official language, reflecting a Spanish rather than French, British or Portuguese colonial history — unusual among its neighbours.

How many official languages does Switzerland have?

Four: German, French, Italian and Romansh. There is no single national language, and the linguistic regions are a defining feature of how the country is organised.

Play Language → Country offline in the app

Language to Country Quiz and the rest of the arcade are in the free Geography Quiz Arcade app: Get it on Google Play · Download on the App Store.