RP227 The Most Distinct Language

 RP227 The Most Distinct Language

Any language other than your own is going to sound strange, funny, or even frightening. While many languages we encounter will have some similarity to our own, here are a few that are, perhaps, more unusual than most.

In Basque Country (parts of France and Spain), around 600,000 people speak Euskara. Euskara is the only pro-Indo-European language still spoken in Europe. Indo-European is the world's biggest language family. Euskara existed before the Indo-European languages came to Europe about 5,000 years ago. Euskara may be thousands of years older than that. Unlike most languages that surround it, Euskara is agglutative, meaning that grammar information is attached to an individual word as a suffix. This leads to longer words but shorter sentences, unlike Indo-European languages.

IKung (from southern Africa) has fewer speakers than Euskara, but has a larger language family. It's unique because of its huge variety of unusual sounds, including the "click" represented by the exclamation mark in the language's name. In addition to clicks (a sound made by tapping or snapping the tongue on different parts of the mouth and teeth), IKung also has about 30 different vowel sounds and many consonants. IKung speakers partially or completely close their throats to affect the sounds they make, and they distinguish between a murmured sound and a voiced one. The language even uses tones, like many Asian languages.

If IKung is unusual for having lots of sounds, Pirahã, or Hi' aiti' ihi', has the opposite distinction. This language, spoken by only a few hundred people, has only about three vowels and eight consonants. Pirahã is tonal, using pitch to change the meanings of sounds. The Pirahã do more than speak their language. They can hum, whistle, yell, or sing it. These, too, affect words' meanings. Pirahã also lacks many abstract terms, including numbers and many color descriptions. Pirahã focuses on action and immediacy.

Clicking, humming, adding on. There seem to be as many ways to express a thought as there are thoughts themselves.