hey come on I fancy yourself a linguist
why not brush up on one of these obscure
tongues welcome to watchmojo.com and
today we’re counting down our picks for
the top ten rare languages still spoken
around the world
before we begin we publish new videos
every day so be sure to subscribe for
more great content for this list we’re
looking at the rarest organic languages
meaning those that arose naturally and
were not intentionally created like
Esperanto or Ling Coase or created for
TV or movies like Klingon or Navi number
10 Friulian
while this Romance language is spoken by
roughly 600,000 people worldwide the
vast majority of speakers are found in
northern Italy near the Slovenian border
related to Latin spelled with a D and
not a T the language took on its own
identity over the centuries under the
influence of Slovene Italian German and
Phoenician oddly despite originating
deep in Alpine Italy the language is
thought to be more similar to French and
construction than Italian though once
very much isolated to the province of
Edina poverty in that region has seen
Friulian speaking Italians move across
the globe and generate more interest in
this distinct language
by other principal maintain free old odd
chica number nine to Yuka
this uncommon language is spoken by the
– Yuka an indigenous people located near
the Papua deep in in Ambu and team K
rivers in South America
it’s a poly synthetic language meaning
that complex words are created by
staking simple words together and as a
result it is notoriously hard to learn
with about fifty to one hundred and
forty genders or noun classes it’s
considered one of the most difficult
languages in the world
you really have to be immersed in it
daily to even begin to get it right not
to mention that there are tones to worry
about so unless you are one of the 500
to 1000 native speakers good luck number
eight you pick like in the previous
entry the you pick lexicon is
polysynthetic and largely created with
combinations the new words can have very
very specific meanings you can basically
create sentences out of a single word an
often cited example is well this word
which means he had not yet said again
that he was going to hunt reindeer it’s
spoken by the you pick peoples in Alaska
and far eastern Russia where more than
75 percent of the population is fluent
in this language whether some form of it
you see you pick isn’t one language but
rather a collection of similar but
distinct languages one of which is
actually extinct number seven Pawnee
school did do these school eyes suck of
it just to hold it
another poly synthetic language this one
is perhaps the big boss of them all the
language spoken by Native Americans of
the same name who reside predominantly
in what is now
Lahoma has a fairly simple alphabetical
set up with only eight vowels and nine
consonants
however most sentences will have at
least one word with more than ten
syllables with some words containing as
many as 30 with the number of native
speakers shrinking as the population
ages the Pawnee nation has developed
programs to teach the language to youth
and adults alike in the hopes of saving
it from extinction number six
Archy spoken almost exclusively in the
village of our cheap and the six smaller
nearby villages in southern Dagestan
Russia this one is seriously rare for a
long time there was no writing system
and it wasn’t until 2006 that a Cyrillic
based alphabet was created for this
North East Caucasian language it has a
ton of phonemes or distinguishing sounds
and an incredible morphological system
with many irregularities for every verb
root there are over one and a half
million forms to be derived and you
thought your intro to Spanish class was
hard number five pirahã as a change of
pace here is a much simpler language in
fact it’s often thought to be one of the
simplest languages in the world with ten
or less phonemes sometimes there are no
words at all only hums it’s also lacking
many descriptors common in other
languages there don’t seem to be any
words for colors numbers or past or
future tenses the language of the
isolated pirahã people of Brazil it is
the only remaining dialect of the Mura
language which once had a robust
speaking population of between thirty
and sixty thousand but has dwindled to
just about 300 native speakers number
four Basque really lingual tasting some
be very nice conservative wood Dada
a language isolate Basque is its own
language family and there is nothing
else like it in the world
Basque speakers are mainly found near
the Western Pyrenees Mountains between
Spain and France predating almost all
indo-european languages the origins of
Basque are shrouded in mystery it was
once even postulated that Basque dated
back to prehistoric Europe based off the
theory that many of the words for
various tools contained the root word
for stone suggesting a Stone Age
beginning this is now known as the ice
kora controversy and widely debated the
language was strongly discouraged during
the Franco regime in Spain but in the
1960s measures were taken to strengthen
this ancient language number three Welsh
[Music]
developing out of common brittonic and
likely arriving in Britain during either
the bronze or the iron age this insular
Celtic tongue has enjoyed a revival
thanks in large part to grassroot
efforts to reclaim the language like
many Celtic languages by the 20th
century the populations of native
speakers were dwindling sharply in large
part due to Old English laws and
practices that sought to wipe them out
in 2011
the Welsh language measure granted this
brittonic language official status just
up the road from clan by the Queen go
get it Quinn draw a Santa City oh go go
go
this makes it the only other official
language in Britain outside of English
some words are a bit tricky so you might
need a little practice in order to
achieve fluency however number two taw
one of the many Khoisan languages which
incorporate clicks taw is spoken by
native peoples living in Botswana and to
a much lesser degree Namibia it’s
perhaps most famous for being the
language with likely the most number of
phonemes as it incorporates not only
vowel and consonant sounds but also many
clicks and tones within those clicks it
is the closest living relative so to
speak of the traditional South African
which sadly is all but extinct with only
three native speakers left as of 2013
despite its sound range taw is assembled
in a common subject-verb-object
agreement the sentence structure shared
by many other languages including
English French and Chinese come okay –
okay – come okay to get a plate before
we unveil our number one pick here are
some honorable mentions
vodka the cocoa so it’s not contact it’s
genocide Seymour – it’s a matter of
respect
CSS profs if these people are they’re
isolated in the forest
why not respect their right to do this
number one silbo go marrow this
incredible language is composed entirely
of whistles the rising and falling
pitches replace words completely with
the quick trills constructing full
sentences in its native location on the
Canary Islands the people developed it
as a way to quickly send messages up and
down the mountainous terrain okay can
you do Tracey Tracey stuff done right it
can be heard up to three miles away long
before the days of cell phones it was a
quick way to send invitations public
announcements or just to ask if someone
had seen persons X Y or Z of course
everyone else can hear your message so
maybe keep any mean tweets to yourself
Oh soft you and squid and one two eight
three do you agree with our picks check
out these other great clips from
WatchMojo and subscribe for new videos
every day
[Music]
why not brush up on one of these obscure
tongues welcome to watchmojo.com and
today we’re counting down our picks for
the top ten rare languages still spoken
around the world
before we begin we publish new videos
every day so be sure to subscribe for
more great content for this list we’re
looking at the rarest organic languages
meaning those that arose naturally and
were not intentionally created like
Esperanto or Ling Coase or created for
TV or movies like Klingon or Navi number
10 Friulian
while this Romance language is spoken by
roughly 600,000 people worldwide the
vast majority of speakers are found in
northern Italy near the Slovenian border
related to Latin spelled with a D and
not a T the language took on its own
identity over the centuries under the
influence of Slovene Italian German and
Phoenician oddly despite originating
deep in Alpine Italy the language is
thought to be more similar to French and
construction than Italian though once
very much isolated to the province of
Edina poverty in that region has seen
Friulian speaking Italians move across
the globe and generate more interest in
this distinct language
by other principal maintain free old odd
chica number nine to Yuka
this uncommon language is spoken by the
– Yuka an indigenous people located near
the Papua deep in in Ambu and team K
rivers in South America
it’s a poly synthetic language meaning
that complex words are created by
staking simple words together and as a
result it is notoriously hard to learn
with about fifty to one hundred and
forty genders or noun classes it’s
considered one of the most difficult
languages in the world
you really have to be immersed in it
daily to even begin to get it right not
to mention that there are tones to worry
about so unless you are one of the 500
to 1000 native speakers good luck number
eight you pick like in the previous
entry the you pick lexicon is
polysynthetic and largely created with
combinations the new words can have very
very specific meanings you can basically
create sentences out of a single word an
often cited example is well this word
which means he had not yet said again
that he was going to hunt reindeer it’s
spoken by the you pick peoples in Alaska
and far eastern Russia where more than
75 percent of the population is fluent
in this language whether some form of it
you see you pick isn’t one language but
rather a collection of similar but
distinct languages one of which is
actually extinct number seven Pawnee
school did do these school eyes suck of
it just to hold it
another poly synthetic language this one
is perhaps the big boss of them all the
language spoken by Native Americans of
the same name who reside predominantly
in what is now
Lahoma has a fairly simple alphabetical
set up with only eight vowels and nine
consonants
however most sentences will have at
least one word with more than ten
syllables with some words containing as
many as 30 with the number of native
speakers shrinking as the population
ages the Pawnee nation has developed
programs to teach the language to youth
and adults alike in the hopes of saving
it from extinction number six
Archy spoken almost exclusively in the
village of our cheap and the six smaller
nearby villages in southern Dagestan
Russia this one is seriously rare for a
long time there was no writing system
and it wasn’t until 2006 that a Cyrillic
based alphabet was created for this
North East Caucasian language it has a
ton of phonemes or distinguishing sounds
and an incredible morphological system
with many irregularities for every verb
root there are over one and a half
million forms to be derived and you
thought your intro to Spanish class was
hard number five pirahã as a change of
pace here is a much simpler language in
fact it’s often thought to be one of the
simplest languages in the world with ten
or less phonemes sometimes there are no
words at all only hums it’s also lacking
many descriptors common in other
languages there don’t seem to be any
words for colors numbers or past or
future tenses the language of the
isolated pirahã people of Brazil it is
the only remaining dialect of the Mura
language which once had a robust
speaking population of between thirty
and sixty thousand but has dwindled to
just about 300 native speakers number
four Basque really lingual tasting some
be very nice conservative wood Dada
a language isolate Basque is its own
language family and there is nothing
else like it in the world
Basque speakers are mainly found near
the Western Pyrenees Mountains between
Spain and France predating almost all
indo-european languages the origins of
Basque are shrouded in mystery it was
once even postulated that Basque dated
back to prehistoric Europe based off the
theory that many of the words for
various tools contained the root word
for stone suggesting a Stone Age
beginning this is now known as the ice
kora controversy and widely debated the
language was strongly discouraged during
the Franco regime in Spain but in the
1960s measures were taken to strengthen
this ancient language number three Welsh
[Music]
developing out of common brittonic and
likely arriving in Britain during either
the bronze or the iron age this insular
Celtic tongue has enjoyed a revival
thanks in large part to grassroot
efforts to reclaim the language like
many Celtic languages by the 20th
century the populations of native
speakers were dwindling sharply in large
part due to Old English laws and
practices that sought to wipe them out
in 2011
the Welsh language measure granted this
brittonic language official status just
up the road from clan by the Queen go
get it Quinn draw a Santa City oh go go
go
this makes it the only other official
language in Britain outside of English
some words are a bit tricky so you might
need a little practice in order to
achieve fluency however number two taw
one of the many Khoisan languages which
incorporate clicks taw is spoken by
native peoples living in Botswana and to
a much lesser degree Namibia it’s
perhaps most famous for being the
language with likely the most number of
phonemes as it incorporates not only
vowel and consonant sounds but also many
clicks and tones within those clicks it
is the closest living relative so to
speak of the traditional South African
which sadly is all but extinct with only
three native speakers left as of 2013
despite its sound range taw is assembled
in a common subject-verb-object
agreement the sentence structure shared
by many other languages including
English French and Chinese come okay –
okay – come okay to get a plate before
we unveil our number one pick here are
some honorable mentions
vodka the cocoa so it’s not contact it’s
genocide Seymour – it’s a matter of
respect
CSS profs if these people are they’re
isolated in the forest
why not respect their right to do this
number one silbo go marrow this
incredible language is composed entirely
of whistles the rising and falling
pitches replace words completely with
the quick trills constructing full
sentences in its native location on the
Canary Islands the people developed it
as a way to quickly send messages up and
down the mountainous terrain okay can
you do Tracey Tracey stuff done right it
can be heard up to three miles away long
before the days of cell phones it was a
quick way to send invitations public
announcements or just to ask if someone
had seen persons X Y or Z of course
everyone else can hear your message so
maybe keep any mean tweets to yourself
Oh soft you and squid and one two eight
three do you agree with our picks check
out these other great clips from
WatchMojo and subscribe for new videos
every day
[Music]
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