What are the Weirdest Languages in the World?

A lot people call some languages weird, be it through sounds or through their features, but which languages have features so bizarre that they could be considered on of the weirdest in the world?

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#language #languages #linguistics

[LingoLizard]

Notes:
Pirahã is not even close to the language where tones take up the highest percentage of the phonemes, that goes to Iau, which has 6 consonants, 8 monophthongs, 11 diphthongs, and *8* tones, with 11 tone clusters
I should’ve also noted that field research on Pirahã is a bit limited, so some of the information might turn out to be inaccurate, as new studies come out about the language

[etzharai]

Kaixo! I am from the Basque Country and Basque is my mother tongue. I am always happy to see my beloved language represented internationally, especially as something "rare". Indeed it is, and not only that, it is considered by many linguists to be one of the most difficult languages to learn. I feel lucky to have grown up speaking it, because now I would be unable to learn it because of its complexity. Milesker!

[thatniceguy]

I personally deem english as a kind of weird - it's a germanic language with a frenchified nord-ish orthography and with a majority of the vocabulary derived from it and latin, tons of synonyms in the language itself and when a noun has a lot of discribing adjectives added to it, there's an unspoken rule of in what order the adjectives should go in some cases.

[theradiumgirl]

me: walking around a Spanish village, whistling peacefully
The locals wondering why I want to eviscerate their kitchen:

[serdarservet]

Turkish also has a whistled version. Spoken in only a small region in Turkey, it's almost extinct. I hope both the Spanish and Turkish whistle languages can be saved. Whistled language, which is based on an existing language is the most unique way to communicate.

[robert]

I would bet with you those people who called German weird have only heard it from screaming nazis in Hollywood movies

[heimirjosefsson]

I'm a native Icelandic speaker and I still consider English kind of weird, especially the fact that there are so many silent letters, double vocabulary, weird spelling and the changing vowels. I learned English as a kid and these things still fascinate and confuse me.

[mikearndt]

despite it being the most spoken language in the world (if you include non native speakers) english has an extra weird feature. it is called “do support” where instead of saying something like “i want it not” we say “i do not want” that do is extremely rare and is only really found in languages from the british isles, making some people think that it is a celtic feature that simply influenced english and was more widespread but later went extinct when the celtic languages declined in the first millennium bce

[tsikli]

Cool video! Lots lots lots of languages that you didn't mention that I find fascinating:

- Celtic Languages: sound beautiful, fun grammar, and consonant mutations
- Navajo: Really really cool grammar
- Georgian for the sheer complexity of its grammar as well
- Polynesian languages. ALL OF THEM
- Yele for everything

[xgl]

This is a great video but Pirahã is (in my opinion) not that strange when you consider its context. If you have ever watched a video where people from hunter gatherer communities are interviewed, they usually don't have words for abstractions either, many of them don't even understand what an abstraction is, and can only describe a negative feeling like sadness or anger through a survival situation like "running out of food" or "not being able to hunt an animal", considering how inhospitable the Amazon was until the 20th century, there's a chance that the Pirahã language simply didn't have the need for features such as abstract ideas, specific kinship and even colors, and even if some of the speakers have moved onto urban or agricultural lives, they still haven't had time to develop new features that adapt to their new context.

[onlinestonedogii]

I come from a Spanish English bilingual community, mainly Spanish, and I’ve experienced how subjective languages can be to different people first hand. When considering a third language to learn, a friend told me that I would find french way easier, so I took some classes and struggled horribly. Then one day I switched to German, and I had a super easy time, it just felt so much more intuitive. When I told my friend about this she was baffled, because she had actually taken some German and suffered a lot, only later switching to french and feeling way more in tune with it in comparison. Was a pretty eye opening experience.

Also if you want more examples of difficult Spanish accents, look up some Dominican. They talk so fast I can barely keep up, even if I memorized the slang

[Paguo]

I'm portuguese and when I was about 16yo I discovered Basque and was amazed and intrigued on how Basque endured for so long. Resisting the romanization and all... not even related to the celtic languages. It's really a mystery. So I've tried to learn it, and gave up after 2 weeks

[ashlaskash]

The virgin Basque-Icelandic pidgin versus the chad Algonquian-Basque pidgin

[Lemonz]

I’m a native Faroese speaker, and I think it’s pretty weird. The written language doesn’t match the spoken language very well, in that many of the day to day words aren’t “correct”, so they are considered spelling mistakes if you write them. The written language is much more formal than the spoken language.

Letters match the spoken sounds pretty poorly, and there are letters that are never pronounced consistently like “ð”. You simply have to remember where it’s supposed to be in a word, and thus is the most difficult part of the written language to learn. It has multiple sounds attached to it where other letters could be used instead, or simply no sound at all. An example “vegur” and “veður” (road and weather) are pronounced exactly the same, where the “ð” and “g” are pronounced as a “v” in this case. We learn when spelling, so it’s easier to remember, that the “g” points down to the road and that “ð” points up to the weather.

New words are regularly created, often from historical linguistic concepts, for new technologies and loan words are regularly purged from the language as well.

There is no “c, q, z, x or w” in the alphabet, but instead the added “á, ð, í, ó, ú, ý‚ æ, ø”.
Because of this, when loan words are used, like for “pizza” we write it “pitsa” because we aren’t allowed to use “z”. Squash (the vegetable/fruit) is written “skvassj” because it makes the same sound and we aren’t allowed to use “q”.

[winningsmile]

I was having a good day until I heard the phrase “Basque Icelandic pidgin”, which immediately sent shockwaves throughout my body which would develop into tier 5 cancer, which I would never recover from.

[mysteriousDSF]

Most probably while the Sentinelese are isolated, it's impossible that they have literally isolated themselves from the outside world for 60, 000 years. The genetic pool needs refreshment. There are actually records of them becoming more hostile and isolated when European explorers began to visit the area during the age of discovery. Most likely the Sentinelese along with their language are closely related to the Andamanese, their languages are obviously not mutually intelligible but I suggest a Finnish-Hungarian sort of relationship between them where nothing seems to cognate at first but you just scratch the surface a little bit and the similarities start to reveal themselves in droves.

[AverytheCubanAmerican]

Here's another interesting language: Macanese Patois, or patuá. Called the sweet language, it's a Portuguese creole language, but it's more than just that! It's combined with Malay, Cantonese, and Sinhala too. This is the result of Macau being such an important colonial trading hub for the Portuguese. The language developed first mainly among the descendants of Portuguese settlers. They'd marry women from Portuguese Malacca, Portuguese India and Portuguese Ceylon rather than from neighboring China. The modern version arose in the late 19th century, when Macanese men began marrying Chinese women from Macau and the Pearl River Delta region. British influence from neighboring Hong Kong also added English words.

The language started to decline under the Estado Novo when standard Portuguese was imposed, and patuá became a language of resistance used to poke fun at the Portuguese authorities. It declined further as Macau was returned to China and the majority of Macau's population now being just ethnic Chinese, there were an estimated 50 according to UNESCO back in 2007. But there has been a revival effort, arguing that unlike Hong Kong, Macau has its own language and Macau's unique status as a 500-year-old bridge between Orient and the Occident justifies said effort to try to preserve it.

[Xyronyte]

I love the weirdness index! (the one that ranks German 10th weirdest) it's one of the few non-anglocentric metrics out there, and while imperfect, does do a pretty good job of classifying languages based on their similarities and differences. (and the only reason we don't think German is weird is because English has so many "weird" quirks in common. Without checking, I want to say English landed in the high 30's)

[lyxthen]

A comentary on whistled Spanish: while silbo gomero is of course the most notable, Mexican Whistled Spanish is also a thing! As far as I know, it is not related to the canary variety, and instead it came from native Mexican languages, such as mixtec. Most people don't actually know it "fully", only a few words, curses, names, directions, stuff like that. Ceirtain kinds of whistles can help convey mood. I thought this was as deep as it went, however, the research I could gather describes more complex versions of this kind of comunication typical of rural areas (and therefore endangered).

At the beginning I didn't think it was special at all, but I asked some international online friends and they never heard of the concept. Such a cool thing, that whistled Spanish didn't only evolve once, but TWICE! And I think that's even weirder.

[thequantumcat]

As a Basque speaker it's so cool seeing my language on a video