The 34 Languages of McDonald's

[Mapraputa Is]

Nicholas Whyte:

This set of pages was inspired by a visit to McDonald's in May 2004. Along with our son's Happy Meal, we got a small playstation-type game where you have to help a monkey catch bananas as they fall from the sky. I was amused to note that the instructions came in no fewer than 34 languages, spoken in and around Europe . It occurred to me that even without speaking a word of some of these languages, it is possible to work out what they are from their unique spelling peculiarities, and as we munched away I scribbled down my guesses.

Then I thought, why not see if other people find this an interesting process? So I've drawn up this interactive quiz - no scores, just the intellectual challenge at each stage of knowing how many guesses it took you to get the right answer.

Take a quiz and see how many languages you can identify.

Via LanguageHat

[Vladan Radovanovic]

No peeking at the status bar is allowed.

[Mapraputa Is]

Not fixed yet, then!

Actually, considering there are no scores, it's a feature, not a bug.

[Helen Thomas]

Nice quiz, Map.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Who would have thought that a McDonald's Happy Meal was the modern-day equivalent of the Rosetta Stone?

[Helen Thomas]

Learn Arabic, and clinch Farsi and Urdu at the same time.

Norwegian, and clinch Danish and Swedish as you'd expect but also some other Russio-Slav languages. Gotta work through thequiz again

I didn't recognise Italian after all the hard work at the start.