What is the most bizarre language on the planet from a linguistic point of view?

Answer 1

As a linguist, "bizarre" is rather a judgemental term. All languages are essentially equal in their communicative power and all languages take about 12 years for children to learn to a basic level of adult competency. So I will answer your question by giving some examples of "extreme" pieces of grammar. The Archi language of the Caucasus has 1.5 million different conjugational forms for each verb in the language. Fortunately there are only about 200 conjugated verbs in the language--finer shades of meaning are created by combining a conjugated verb with a non-conjugated verb. The !Xóõ language of southern Africa has 126 different consonants, over half of which are clicks. The Pawnee language of the American Plains has fewer than a dozen consonants, but their words can be up to 30 syllables long and nearly every sentence has a word of at least 10 syllables. The Sentinelese language spoken on the island of Sentinel in the Indian Ocean has only about 100 speakers, but none of them speak any other language. No one off the island speaks a word of Sentinelese. When strangers go to the island, they are killed or beaten violently. The government of India leaves them alone and they leave the government of India alone. So it is impossible to learn Sentinelese.

Answer 2

Linguists do not have any official views about what are the most bizarre or strange languages in the world and there seems to be a lot of political correctness among them these days which causes them to refrain from labling any language as "strange", "bizarre" or "primitive."

Speaking for myself, however, I have always thought that one of the strangest languages in the world is Albanian. For example, shtpi is "house', shtpija is "The house", shtpija eme Is "My house" and çatija e shtëpisë sonë is "The roof of our house." Po and jo are "yes" and "no." However, I would say that Chinese, Bulushaski (northern India), Twi (Ghana) and Ashaninca Campa (Peru) are close competitors of Albanian. I heard I a guy in a book store once tell his girlfriend that Basque was the strangest language in the world but to me, Basque seems quite average (mainstream) compared to the ones I just mentioned.

Answer 3

Don't try to use science to justify your own prejudice. Linguistic point of view doesn't label languages as bizarre or corrupt. Linguistics studies languages, doesn't judge them. All languages are equal and worth investigation from the linguistic point of view.

This question makes no sense.!

Answer 4

When you think about it, English.

- It has taken so much from so many other languages - words, sounds, spellings, prounciations.

- It doesn't always follow the "rules" like the majority of languages do. (We use "a" before nouns starting with consonants but "an" before words that start with vowels. Then, we put, or should according to grammarians, "an" before some consonants nouns like "historical.")

- It pronounces words one way and spells them another ("colonel" for example).

- It reuses words with different pronounciations to get different meanings ("wound" can mean an injury or something you've done to string; "wind" is something that blows trees over or something you're going to do to string; "tear" - something you get when you cry or something you do to paper).

But with all that, it's still the most direct and efficient language. Bizarre...

Answer 5

I do not know but I am an American soldier who study foreign languages I speak five, to me, the most difficult one as far is German. Those who are foreigners and claim that they speak German are kidding themselves, the Germans say that they do not speak fluently but most German are polite and say nothing, they are happy that you are trying to learn their language. I can communicate,write, read German but have difficulties listening to conversations and getting 100 per cent the idea. I hope one day I could master this language. There are a lot of American soldiers who are fluent in German for the fact that their father was a soldier as well who married a German senorita. My next challenge is Korean I hope I am blessed one day to speak and write it as well.

Answer 6

was going to say english but the dude before me already said it


so maybe PIG LATIN...anyone else do that when you were younger???

xx

Answer 7

ebonics, by far, the most bizarre.