“In general, every country has the language it deserves”*…
The folks at Idibon, a natural language processing company, spend a great deal deal of time thinking about how we say what we say. Of late, they’ve become positively ruminative…
The language that is most different from the majority of all other languages in the world [that’s 2,67 other languages] is a verb-initial tonal languages spoken by 6,000 people in Oaxaca, Mexico, known as Chalcatongo Mixtec (aka San Miguel el Grande Mixtec). Number two is spoken in Siberia by 22,000 people: Nenets (that’s where we get the word parka from). Number three is Choctaw, spoken by about 10,000 people, mostly in Oklahoma.
But here’s the rub—some of the weirdest languages in the world are ones you’ve heard of: German, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech, Spanish, and Mandarin. And actually English is #33 in the Language Weirdness Index.
The 25 weirdest languages of the world. In North America: Chalcatongo Mixtec, Choctaw, Mesa Grande Diegueño, Kutenai, and Zoque; in South America: Paumarí and Trumai; in Australia/Oceania: Pitjantjatjara and Lavukaleve; in Africa: Harar Oromo, Iraqw, Kongo, Mumuye, Ju|’hoan, and Khoekhoe; in Asia: Nenets, Eastern Armenian, Abkhaz, Ladakhi, and Mandarin; and in Europe: German, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech, and Spanish.
The five least-weird languages in the world? Lithuanian, Indonesian, Turkish, Basque, and Cantonese.
Read the entire tale– from background and methodology to tongue-twisting examples– at “The Weirdest Languages.”
* Jorge Luis Borges’ wry twist on Wittgenstein’s insistence that “the limits of my language means the limits of my world”
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As we e-nun-ci-ate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1995 that Amazon.com made its first sale: a copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.
