The latest figures approximate the number of languages present and practiced around the globe to be 6500. Out of these, about 2000 languages have fewer than 1000 speakers.
While most of us have come across a good part of those languages at some point in our lives, there is still a sizeable chunk that you probably didn’t know about. Read on and be introduced to a world of exciting languages you might have never come across.
Abruzzese
Abruzzo is a region of central Italy with Lazio to the west and the Adriatic Sea bordering it to the east. If you learn Abruzzese language, you will quickly discover that it’s closely related to Italian, with its own rules for word forms, syntactic rules, vocabulary, and literature and sounds a bit like Portuguese. Its linguistic rules differ strongly from those of Italian and of other Romance languages.
Alsatian
Alsatian is closely related to Alemannic dialects, such as Swiss German, Swabian, and Markgräflerisch as well as Kaiserstühlerisch. Like other dialects and languages, Alsatian has also been influenced by outside sources. Words of Yiddish origin can be found when you learn Alsatian, and modern conversational Alsatian includes adaptations of French words and English words. Many speakers of Alsatians are capable of writing in reasonable standard German.
Amharic
Amharic is an Afro-Asiatic language of the Semitic branch. It is spoken as a mother tongue by the Amhara in Ethiopia. The language serves as the official working language of Ethiopia and is also the official or working language of several of the states within the federal system. The Amharic language is the second-most widely spoken Semitic language in the world after Arabic. Amharic is spoken by 22 million native and 15 million secondary speakers in Ethiopia. Additionally, 3 million people outside of Ethiopia speak the language. Most of the Ethiopian Jewish communities in Ethiopia and Israel speak Amharic.
Aymara
Aymara language is spoken by the people of Aymara in the Andes. It is one of the only handful of Native American languages with over a million speakers. Aymara, along with Quechua and Spanish, is an official language of Bolivia and Peru. It is also spoken, to a much lesser extent, by some communities in northern Chile.
Azeri
Azeri also referred to as Azerbaijani Turkish or Azeri Turkish or simply, Turkish. It is a Turkic language spoken primarily by the Azerbaijanis, who are concentrated mainly in Transcaucasia and Iranian Azerbaijan. The language has official status in Azerbaijan and Dagestan. It is also spoken to lesser varying degrees in Azerbaijani communities of Georgia and Turkey and by diaspora communities, primarily in Europe and North America.
Azerbaijani is a member of the Western Oghuz branch of the Turkic language family spoken by about 32.2 million people mainly in Azerbaijan, Iran, Georgia, Russia and Turkey, and also in Iraq, Syria, and Turkmenistan. There are two main varieties of the Azeri language: North Azerbaijani and South Azerbaijani, which are sometimes classified as separate languages, although there is a fair degree of mutual intelligibility between them.
Basque
The Basque language is spoken by about 660,000 people mainly in the Basque Country in the north of Spain and the southwest of France. The Basque language, also called Euskara or Euskera, is the only remnant of the languages spoken in southwestern Europe before the region was Romanized. The Basque language is predominantly used in areas of Spain and France. There are also significant numbers of Basque speakers elsewhere in Europe and in the Americas. The number of speakers, who are largely bilingual, was estimated in the early 21st century to be approaching one million.
Breton
Breton is a Southwestern Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Brittany. Breton was brought from Great Britain to Armorica by migrating Britons during the Early Middle Ages. It is an Insular Celtic language and as such not closely related to the Continental Celtic Gaulish language which had been spoken in pre-Roman Gaul. The Breton language is most closely related to Cornish, both being Southwestern Brittonic languages. Welsh and the extinct Cumbric are the more distantly related Brittonic languages.
Chichewa
Chewa is a language of the Bantu language family. The noun class prefix chi- is used for languages, so the language is also called Chichewa and Chinyanja (spelled ‘Cinyanja’ in Zambia, and ‘Cinianja’ in Mozambique). In Malawi, the name was officially changed from Chinyanja to Chichewa in 1968 at the insistence of the then President and is still the name most commonly used in Malawi today. In Zambia, Chewa is spoken by other people like the Ngoni and the Kunda, so a more neutral name, Chinyanja ‘language of the lake’, referring to Lake Malawi, is used instead of Chichewa.
ChiBemba
The Bemba language, ChiBemba (also Cibemba, Ichibemba, Icibemba, and Chiwemba), is a major Bantu language spoken primarily in north-eastern Zambia by the Bemba people and as a lingua franca by about 18 related ethnic groups, including the Bisa people of Mpika and Lake Bangweulu, and to a lesser extent in Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Botswana. Including all its dialects, Bemba is the most spoken indigenous language in Zambia. The Lamba language is closely related and some people consider it a dialect of Bemba.
Corsican
Corsican is a romance language within the Italo-Dalmatian subfamily and is closely related to the Italian language. It is spoken and written on the islands of Corsica (France) and northern Sardinia (Italy). The Corsican language was long the vernacular alongside Italian, the official language in Corsica until 1859. Over the next two centuries, the use of French grew to the extent that all islanders had a working knowledge of French. The 20th century saw a language shift, with islanders changing their language practices to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican speakers left.
Have you heard of any of these languages? If yes, let us know in the comments below how you came across these and whether or not you would be interested in learning some of these exotic languages!
Andrie Steliou
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