Which language has the greatest number of homophones?

Question

Because of its irregular spelling system, English seems to have a large number in comparison with, say, Spanish or German. But which language has the most?

Answer 1

I'd say Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin has only 416 possible syllables (included tone variations), and each character is one syllable. although most words are made of two characters, there are many monosyllabic words.

Second could be English, that has a richer sound repertoire, but also uses a lot of monosyllabic words.

Romance languages usually have longer words, thus homophones are rare. Additionally, as the sound corresponds more closely to the spelling, homophones would usually be homographs, and are often regarded as another sense of the same word.

Answer 2

It's a difficult question. I would lean toward saying any of the hundreds of chinese languages...where tones are the main differentiation between meanings....the chinese have a tremendous sense of puns and word misplacements because of it....for example the same 'word' can have 5 different meanings in mandarin...and cantonese has arguably 9 tones...but i don't know if the definition of homophones includes tonal variations of speech...certainly to the western ear they all sound the same.

Answer 3

Made us look up the word, huh, pretty clever gal. LOL

Answer 4

i think its arabic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic