Bonjour, Szia, Muraho: one greeting at a time, where in the world are you?
A run is 6 greetings. Each one is shown on screen as written in its language, or in the Latin alphabet for languages with their own script (Konnichiwa!, Nǐ hǎo!), and you pick the country it comes from out of a list of countries. The game covers 79 countries and 18 language families, counting large branches such as Romance, Germanic and Slavic as families of their own.
Picking the right country scores 100 points. Picking a different country whose language is in the same family scores 40: for Bună! (Romania), choosing Italy or France counts, because Romanian, Italian and French are all Romance languages. Anything else scores 0. After each answer the game names the country, its language and the family, and highlights any other options from the same family. The best possible run is 600.
On Medium you see Muraho! with six countries to choose from, among them Kenya and Rwanda. You remember that Swahili is spoken in Kenya and pick it. The answer is Rwanda, whose language, Kinyarwanda, is like Swahili a Bantu language, so you still get 40 points.
Over a full run, getting 3 greetings exactly right, 2 in the right family and 1 wrong gives 3 × 100 + 2 × 40 + 0 = 380 out of 600.
Tongue Tied connects everyday greetings to countries and to the language families behind them, so players learn which languages are related as well as where they are spoken.
The partial credit follows the idea of a language family: languages descended from a common ancestor, drawn as a family tree. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian, for example, all descend from Vulgar Latin and form the Romance family.
Families do not follow borders. Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are the largest Uralic languages, so in Tongue Tied guessing Finland for the Hungarian Szia! earns 40 points, while guessing Hungary's neighbour Austria earns nothing. In the other direction, one language can cover many countries: Spanish is the official language of 21 countries, and Arabic is the third most widespread official language after English and French.
Greetings also travel between families. The Arabic greeting as-salamu alaykum is often shortened to salām in Arabic and other languages, and Hebrew shalom comes from the same Semitic root (as-salamu alaykum). That is why the game uses Salam! for Morocco (Arabic), Iran (Persian) and Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan (both Turkic). The game counts the Bantu languages, about 600 of them with Swahili the most widely spoken, as a family of their own, separate from the West African languages it groups as Niger-Congo, even though Bantu is usually classed as a branch of Niger-Congo.
Tongue Tied is an original PlayPendium game. It started from a simple observation: you can know exactly which language a greeting is in and still not know the country, and you can miss the country and still be close. Runs take a couple of minutes, need no install or account, and the Daily run is the same for everyone.