It should come as no surprise that the ducks - because of their extensive travelling to all corners of the world - encountered a lot of foreign cultures speaking in their native tongues. Scrooge is often the front-runner in these meetings, because he actually speaks a wide variety of both modern and ancient languages, a fact that never fails to impress both his nephews and the natives. Sometimes Scrooge reveals to his nephews how he learned the languages: He learned Russian when selling concertinas to the Czar's cavalry, he learned Arabic when selling lawn movers in Sahara, and he learned Dutch when selling wind to the windmill makers along the Zuider Zee! But most often we are given examples of different languages either directly in the speech bubbles or on various objects. The sub-pages in this page give you examples of the graphic portraying of many languages - restricted to one example from each language.

There can be little doubt that Carl Barks enjoyed placing these texts in his panels, and it is fun to 'read' them. Not only because they add a lot of atmosphere to the plots, but also because most of them are pure nonsense invented by Barks' imaginative mind. So most of the examples show bogus languages, and consequently most of the accompanying explanatory remarks are just meant to amuse...