Did you know that there are over 7,000 languages all over the world?
And a person who can speak multiple languages is called a polyglot!
But I bet even the most experienced polyglots will have a hard time mastering these languages
you’re about to hear, that just seems to defy the norms of speech, structure, and pronunciation,
at least to the untrained tongue.
Get ready to be tongue-tied by the 8 Weirdest and Rarest Languages in the World!
What’s up, fact-natics!
This is Discovery Amuse, serving up your daily dose of the most outrageous, outlandish, and
out-of-this-world fun facts!
Keep watching ‘til number one because that one is considered the hardest language on
the planet!
#8: Silbo Gomero (Spain) Off the coast of Africa is a small island
called La Gomera--part of Spain’s Canary Islands.
If you happen to be visiting, you might chance upon a series of whistles echoing across the
mountains.
Nope, those are not bird calls.
They’re actually sending out messages to people at the other side of the mountain,
through a language called Silbo Gomero.
The whistling sounds made through the fingers are composed of varying pitches and trills
that imitate the phonetic sounds of Castilian Spanish.
Woman: The Silbo Gomero means a lot to me.
It’s part of our heritage and it remains an active part of our lives to this day.
Since these whistles can be heard from miles away, it’s a pretty quick way to make announcements
or even send out invitations to neighbors.
Though, you might want to be careful with that if you don’t want the entire island
to show up to the party.
Although the natives do speak Spanish, they still want to preserve their native tongue,
especially since only about 20,000 people remain fluent in Silbo Gomero.
Young natives are taught Silbo Gomero as soon as they learn how to speak.
You’ll likely hear a lot of whistling in school hallways since they have to practice
the language up until high school.
If you thought that was complicated, stay tuned ‘til number one and see if you have
what it takes to learn that language.
#7: Chalcatongo Mixtec (Mexico) Imagine being able to speak the world’s
weirdest language!
Well, according to statistics, that is.
Among the more than 50 varieties of the Mixtec language, the Chalcatongo Mixtec, also known
as San Miguel el Grande Mixtec, is the most difficult to study.
Roughly 6,000 people speak the language in Oaxaca Mexico.
A team of researchers from a natural language processing company called Idibon compared
239 different languages.
They analyzed how subjects, objects, and verbs are ordered or the syntax of their sentences.
Among all of them, Chalcatongo Mixtec stood out as the most complex.
The most notable of all its features, apparently, is the fact that you can’t really tell if
the native speaker is asking a yes or no question or declaring a simple statement.
There’s really no difference in the intonation nor the word order!
#6: Guugu Yimidhirr (Australia) Did you know that the word “kangaroo”
is from an Australian Aboriginal language?
It’s based on the word “gangurru” from the native language of the Guugu Yimidhirr
people from Far North Queensland.
One notable element of the language is its use of cardinal directions like north, south,
east, and west to reference something in front or behind.
You probably should also know which way is North every single time.
Among the 1,400 population of the Guugu Yimidhirr people, only half can speak the language as
of 2020.
So the elders are helping out in making tutorial videos such as this to pass the language on
to the younger generation, and ultimately preserve their heritage.
#5: Archi (Russia) You can only hear people counting this way
if you happen to be in the village of Archib in Southern Dagestan, Russia.
Although this ultra-rare language has been around for hundreds of years, the Archi didn’t
have a writing system until a Cyrillic alphabet was developed in 2006.
What makes this language all the more unusual is its multitude of phonemes or distinguishing
sounds.
One verb root can also have more than a million possible other forms—1,502,839 possible
forms, to be exact.
In English, you only add prefixes and other endings to verbs to create different forms.
But in Archi, they take the verb and make new words out of it.
It can vary based on the tense, mood, or evidentiality.
They only use a few of these verb forms in everyday conversations, but it won’t hurt
to have a million more options, right?
#4: Taa (Botswana) Who said languages only involved words and
accents?
Over at the southern part of Africa, many languages have “clicking” sounds.
One of which is the language used by native people from Botswana called Taa.
Although most of these “clicking” languages equally sound pretty unusual for foreigners…
Taa is on a whole other level with its arsenal of unique sounds—making it one of the world’s
most complex spoken languages.
Wait, what?
“Prevoiced with voiceless velar fricative followed by glotalized vowels?”
! I don’t even know what half of those words mean!
And that just describes one clicking sound!
Learning Taa can be a “lumpy” ride.
Just ask non-Botswanan Taa expert Tony Traill, who literally developed a lump on his larynx
after trying to master the language’s five basic clicks, 17 accompanying ones, and four
vowel types.
He later discovered that native speakers also have the same lump.
Although it has a wide sound range, Taa still uses subject-verb-object agreement, a sentence
structure common among popular languages like English.
#3: Rotokas (Papua New Guinea) On the island of Bougainville in Papua New
Guinea, you can hear a language spoken by its 4,300 inhabitants.
It’s called Rotokas, and it has three recognized dialects: Aita Rotokas, Pipipaia, and Central
Rotokas.
The most notable of which is Central Rotokas,
which has one of the smallest phonemic inventories in the world with only 11 phonemes.
It also has the smallest modern alphabet with only 12 letters!
That’s A, E, G, I, K, O, P, R, S, T, U and V.
Rotokas doesn’t have “nasal” consonant sounds like [n] and [m], which is quite unusual
for a language.
You can only hear these nasal sounds from a native speaker when they’re trying to
imitate a foreigner imitating their language.
#2: Pirahã (Brazil) Aside from its natural wonders, Amazonian
Brazil holds a lot of cultural treasures, including an indigenous language called Pirahã.
It’s the only remaining dialect of the Mura language, which once had a speaking population
of around 60 thousand.
However, as natives began learning Portuguese, only about 250 to 380 people were left who
speak the language.
Pirahã is one of the simplest languages in the world in terms of phonemes.
There have been claims that it only has ten.
They don’t just communicate with words.
They also incorporate hums, whistles, or music.
Linguist Dr. Dan Everett claims that Pirahã lacks descriptors, unlike other languages.
It doesn’t have words for colors, numbers, or even past or future tenses.
They only use the Pirahã equivalent for “light” and “dark” in place of colors and their
version of “few” or “many” for numbers.
Some of Dr. Everett’s claims were criticized, but at least 3 other studies back up his claim.
Since Pirahã is a complex language to learn, only a few linguists have in-depth knowledge
about it.
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#1 Tuyuca (South America) Tuyuca is a language spoken by the indigenous
people who live near the Papuri river, the Inambu river and Tiquie River that run along
Colombia and Brazil.
In 2009, The Economist hailed Tuyuca as the hardest language in the world.
Besides having 50 to 140 noun classes, it’s notoriously hard to learn for two significant
reasons.
One is that it’s an agglutinating language, which means that it strings together simple
words to form longer, more complex ones that translate to an entire sentence.
It’s made even more difficult with its evidential nature, which means that the verb depends
on the speaker’s evidence of it happening.
If you really want to learn Tuyuca, you might have to immerse yourself and spend a great
deal of time with the 500 to 1,000 indigenous people who remain to speak the language.
So, which of these languages would you like to take a shot
at learning?
Tell us about it in the comments section below!
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Awesome, right!
Now, let’s take a trip to the dark side as we count down 9 of the World’s Toughest
Prisons!
‘Til then, stay chatty, fact-natics!
And see you in the next video!