Interesting languages – The world has no dearth of languages.
There are people from all walks of life who converse in different dialect, many of them we are not even privy of. The exact estimate is not known whatsoever, may be between 6000-7000. Figures say, two of the widely spoken languages in the world are English and Spanish and billions of people across the world communicate in these languages.
No wonder, India presses on learning both of these languages among which English is no longer foreign to us. All of these language have their own kind of uniqueness and here are some of the features we bring forth for you.
Interesting languages
1. Basque:
It’s not a commonly known language but spoken by 720,000 people. This language belongs to both France and Spain. Derived from Indo-European family, this language fits both subject and object in a sentence with six different grammatical markers. The linguists are hair-splitting over it but it’s not any common man’s cup of tea.
2. Friulian:
This language belongs to North Eastern Italy and shares some similarities with Italian. The language is spoken by as many as 300,000 people and certainly not an endangered one. The origin of this language goes eons back, 20th century but a tad unusual to tell you.
3. Ongota:
Staunchly known as Birale, only handful, to say only by 10 people this language is spoken. There is no written form available of it except some preservations of linguists form SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics). This is on the verge of extinction so an Italian linguist started living with the speakers of this language to try to learn it.
4. Esperanto:
Estimated 100,000 and 2,000,000 people speak this language which is one of the old existing European languages. This draws its vocabulary from French mostly and spoken widely in the artifical nation of Rose Island which is located in the Adriatic Sea but never received the official language status.
5. Breton:
This language belongs to Brittany, France and is one of the Celtic languages like Welsh and Cornish. Since 1950, the number of speakers of this language is slashed by 20% hence deemed as a ‘severely endangered’ one. Most Breton speakers choose French as their first language in schools.
6. Finnish:
Although its dominant neighbours are Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, Finnish doesn’t share any similarities with these whatsoever. It comes from the Uralic language family, precisely the Indo-European family with 14 different cases for different grammatical situations.
7. Klingon:
This language is mostly put on the mouth of aliens in the sci-fi films for we don’t know what reason. It uses the Latin script and very easy to learn. You should not however take it lightly because it carries a lot of weightage to the linguists at large.
8. Ayapa Zoque:
This language is one of the nearly extinct languages of the world and only some elderly men living in Mexico are the speakers of this. But nowadays they too are refusing to speak this.
9. Piraha:
There is a clan of same name in Brazil who are the speakers of this language. Interestingly or unfortunately, this language has no words for colours and only has three pronouns. While some native Portuguese people still speak this language, renowned linguists like Noam Chomsky have put their efforts to bring it in limelight.
10. Taushiro:
This is another South American language from Peru which falls in the same group as Candoshi and Omurano. There are no words for numbers above ten and they use signs with their toes and fingers to communicate numbers over ten. Sadly, the last speaker of this language too has died.
These are the uncommon yet interesting languages spoken in farthest corners of the world which are remotely known to the civilized mankind
