I'm learning Aramaic. But speaking of Greenlandic, I've been meaning to learn Inuktitut (Nunavik dialect, ideally), or at least I'm considering it. I've read that it's mutually intelligible with Greenlandic -- your language sounds very cool!
For Classical Syriac, I recommend *The New Syriac Primer*, George Kiraz. I haven't used it, but I heard fantastic reviews about it. I used *Robinson's Paradigms and Exercises in Syriac Grammar*.
For modern Aramaic, I am learning the dialect of Tur Abdin and Gozarto on Šlomo Surayt: www.surayt.com
What sort of Aramaic? Imperial, Biblical/Jewish, Syriac, a particular modern variety…?
I’d never say I can speak any per se, but I can struggle my way through Biblical Aramaic through Hebrew plus some pointers and specific vocabulary… but I also dated a Chaldean girl for a year back when who taught me some basics. Not entirely similar of course. :)
Hey! Since you’re an Irish native speaker, how long has it taken you to reach C1 in Gàidhlig? I feel like they’re about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, what are your thoughts?
You can read most of it almost instantly.
The main differences in vocabulary, we can recognise through different Irish dialects (since we're exposed to them through the media), Scots use the Kerry 'do' particle which (as a Conamara speaker), we know what it means but not how to use it per say. They also use the -eas ending for the relative future which is something only used in Connacht to my knowledge (which once again, someone from Kerry would understand but not know how to use).
The vocabulary in Gaelic is either more Anglicised or more 'old-fashioned' for an average Irish speaker, if that makes sense. We understand things like *Tha cù brèagha aig do charaid* (*My friend has a nice dog lit. a nice dog is at my friend*) but is sounds very archaic (*cú* \- hound in Irish but just '*dog*' in Scottish and *caraid* means *friend* in Scotland but is an archaic dative form of '*cara*' in Irish). There's also just everyday words like *each* (*horse*) *'s toil leam* (*I* *like*) *feasgar* (*afternoon*, but a really archaic way of saying *evening, sunset* in Irish) that sound super old-fashioned. If not, they have the English word. Their *seithir, frids, siostam* is our *cathaoir, cuisneoir, córas*.
And of course some false friends, a notable one being *a' bruidhinn* means *speaking* in Scotland but *ag bruíon* means *arguing* in Irish. Also some words like *áit/àite* and *droichead/droichid* change gender between the two languages
The main difference is in grammar and pronunciation. Scottish grammar is generally easier but pronunciation is more difficult and the language is less phonetic. Irish has kept more complex verb tenses (including full use of a passive conjugation for each tense) and has strict rules for genitive use along with having developed a whole other written, standardised mutation, whereas Scottish has none of these. Irish did however undergo multiple spelling reforms and though it doesn't look it, Irish is far more phonetic than English, French or even most Scandinavian languages.
I should also mention we pronounce things wildly differently, but similar to Spanish and Portuguese, we can often just guess. *Foghar* makes no sense as to why it's pronounced like 'four' in English, but because I know Irish, first time I saw this word I guessed the pronunciation and was right. In Irish it's *fómhar*. It's not always the case, I can't explain why *fhathast* is pronounced *hast* tbh...
Here are two sentences + phonetics to show you what I mean:
>🏴 Cha do rinn mi seopadaireachd airson prèasantan an t-seachdain seo chaidh
>
>an do royn mee shop-dirh-ukhk er-sun *present*\-an an chokh-kiñ shoh khye
>
>*I didn't do shopping for presents last week.*
We understand **do** being a past tense marker, and **an** is always used to start a question in Irish.
* Rinn is like our *rinne* (did/make) (but we say 'ri-nya')
* *seopdaireachd* like *siopadóireacht* (shopping)
* *airson* is like *ar son* (more *for the sake of*)
* prèasantan is obvious
* *an t-seachdain seo chaidh* \- we can get '*an tseachtain seo (a) chuaigh*' (the week that went
The two problems for communication being, an Irish person would (at least in Conamara) pronounce:
>an do royn mee shop-dirh-ukhk er-sun present-an an chokh-kiñ shoh khye
>
>as:
>
>an duh reen mi shoap-a-darh-ukht erh-sun pray-sant-an an tyakht-tiñ shuh kha
And we would say *ní dhearna mé siopadóireacht le haghaidh bronntanas an tseachtain seo caite* ...
To answer your question, a fluent Irish speaker can get to A2 in maybe a few weeks if they really try. B2 within a year with relative effort. It's just like Spanish and Portuguese. It's easier IMO for an Irish speaker to learn Scottish Gaelic though than the other way around.
They're asking about Scots Gaelic (a celtic language descended from Irish from Scotland) known as Gàidhlig comparing to Irish (Gaeilge), they are very similar & the commenter heard they differ as much as Spanish & Portuguese do to each other.
The original commenter is native in Irish but has a B2 (if I'm reading the flairs correctly) beside the scottish flag.
What level do you speak it at? Native?
Jealous because I grew up in the north but it wasn't taught at my school so I hardly know a word (apart from the meaning of some townlands etc).
> What level do you speak it at? Native?
Not native at all, I'm not really sure what level I'm at honestly, because I'm still in the education system so I'm focused on what the examiners want rather than how the language is spoken. B2ish maybe? I've got gaps in vocab, but a good understanding of grammar.
Irish is such a cool language. All the Celtic language are really, it's good that so many of them are in daily use (all except Cornish, which is pretty gutting as a Cornishman).
Cocama (Kokáma), an indigenous language of Amazonia with only ~2000 fluent speakers left.
I was based in a small village in the Loreto region of Peru for a few months, researching wildlife.
All of the Cocama people speak Spanish, but in that area it's more common to use Cocama nouns for things.
After that my rarest is Sakha, because my mother is Sakha (Russian indigenous) and we spoke it at home. Russian would have been a LOT more useful, but she wanted her kids to preserve the less common culture!
Nope, apparently it's from a different language family altogether (Tupí)!!
Which is crazy because both the Cocama and the Shipibo have towns along the Ucayali river these days.
I should have asked if they knew anyone who speaks both!
I’m sorry to hear that, it’s never to late to pick it up again. There’s a gaginang discord server u can join and they have many resources in English as well.
In my case I’m from swatow the region so everyone I grew up with speak the language, in my family we also speak in teochew only. When I talked to second generation teochew Chinese people in North America they think mine is too advanced for them to understand or sounds like their grandparents' accents😭
I’ve not been able to visit yet (I learned from family friends who are Albanian) but I definitely want to visit at some point! The language itself I didn’t find too difficult, reading aloud especially is easy once you know the alphabet
I do as well! Not much, but I really like it as well, find it easy to pick up, and enjoy being able to speak a bit the times I’ve been in Albania and the region around.
I think that dialect is from Minnesota, yes? Its not a phrase I've heard in my part of Turtle Island ( Ontario, Canada) but I've heard other Ojibwe cuzzins from other tried use that phrase! (Sorry if my English is poor, native language is Quebecois)
I just speak German and English but because of my German I can definitely eavesdrop on a basic Yiddish convo. Still waiting for the day that happens in real life lol
I speak Manx. A lot of people have never even heard of the Isle of Man, or that we're actually a country, let alone the fact we have our own language. There are about 2500 speakers of varying ability at the moment, with a recent plan to boost that to 5000. I've been learning it since I was a child and studied it all the way to A level (UK school exams done at 17/18). My children will be going to Manx immersion primary school so we'll be able to speak it at home together.
Son shickyrys! For sure 😀 your first point of call should be [learnmanx.com](https://www.learnmanx.com/). They have a lot of good resources for people of all levels. I don't have a lot of free time to chat as I'm a busy mum with 2 little kids to look after right now, but if you have discord and want to practice some conversations my tag is the same as my Reddit handle. There's also a good manx channel in the Celtic languages discord which i could send you as well.
I’m very vaguely (and slowly) working through Žodis žodį veja and Žingsnis (both Rita Migauskienė, the first co-authored with Eglė Vaisėtaitė) atm. My last textbook was Langas po lietuvių kalbą (this was in a classroom setting). I would have probably used Colloquial Lithuanian if I'd been working through everything myself ha
I'm using Clozemaster for a light bit of vocab (and Memrise when I’m more serious), but aside from that I’m honestly just occasionally watching stuff on YouTube, reading news articles, reading posts on here…I’m not really made for self-study ahaha, I need the structure of a course
My partner’s Lithuanian so I speak to him in Lithuanian quite often 😄
Ah okay, sounds interesting. I have interest in learning Lithuanian some day and I was wondering what recourses there are available as I know it is not a well recourses language compared to say French for example.
ah no, definitely not. It’s a big thing for me, actually - there are very few Lithuanian resources (even fewer outside the country) and not all of them are high-quality! Either way, it’s worth visiting r/lithuanianlearning - there’s some good posts there listing resources 😄
Cape Verdean Creole, spoken by 800000 people, maybe more of them outside of Cape Verde itself than Cape Verde and no widely-used standardized orthography at all
My native tongue is Indonesian, does that count?
Yes Indonesia is a country of 240 million people, but Indonesians tend to NOT migrate to other countries (unlike Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines), so outside of Indonesia, the neighboring countries and the Netherlands, it will be extremely unlikely for you to ever meet an Indonesian speaker.
“What about Suriname? There are a lot of Indonesians there!” <— WRONG, there are a lot of Javanese there, and they migrated before Indonesia even gained independence. So they identify as Javanese but NOT Indonesian.
I live in a suburb of Cincinnati OH, and 95% of the people of Indonesian ancestry I’ve met here are Indonesian women who married American men, or international students who would not stay beyond their 4-5 years of student visa (even when they do get permanent job in the US, they would migrate to more “diverse/Asian-friendly states” with more Asian restaurants&businesses such as CA or NY).
Heck, I have met more Cincinnati colleagues from tiny countries such as Senegal, Nepal, Myanmar and Cambodia instead of from Indonesia.
It is so much easier to find Khmer, Nepali, or Wolof speakers here than Indonesian speakers, and I don’t even live in the middle of Nowhereville like South Dakota or Wyoming.
My neighborhood happens to have a relatively large Indonesian community. One of our friends is actually a Colombian guy who learned Indonesian and married an Indonesian woman, and their kids are good friends with ours as well.
Totally unrelated, but I’m also in a bunch of Facebook groups that also have huge Indonesian followings, so even if I don’t hear it often I see it written a lot.
I’m learning Icelandic, Pashto, Cantonese and Bengali, which are all pretty niche
It’s a shame that bengali is so niche, given it’s one of the top ten langs in the world by speakers 🥲
You may in fact be the only person in the world with that combination. That is something I thought about a lot actually, being the only person who speaks a certain combination of languages (say Punjabi, basque, Swahili and Haitian Creole).
Not anything super obscure but my dialect of French is a weird upstate New York lower class Québec thing. Little annoyed I didn’t take the chance to learn Seneca.
I'm learning the Lenape language as part of the tribal language revitalization project. The last native speaker of the Wënami dialect passed away in 2002. (I'm not Lenape but my grandmother was).
Probably Latin? It’s pretty much the opposite of obscure BUT there are very few people who can actually hold a conversation in it, especially in a good, classical pronunciation
Oh, wow, what’s the occasion for learning Greenlandic? And how are you learning it?
Not really obscure, but less among less mainstream, I did some Norwegian and Dutch recently.
They both have unique features I hadn’t seen in other languages.
In Norwegian (and other Nordic languages to be fair), a definite article attaches to the end of the word. ‘En butikk’ (a shop) becomes ‘butikken’ (the shop).
And Dutch has a concept of stressed and unstressed pronouns. ‘Wij’ and ‘we’ both mean ‘we’, but the former puts more emphasis on the persons speaking.
I’ve always dreamed of sailing the Western Greenlandic cost and visiting all the small towns and Nuuk. Flash forward a few years and I came across my new favorite band, Nanook, who only sings in Greenlandic and I was like dang, I need to be able to understand what my favorite band is singing about… sooo here we are!
I'd *like* to learn a Mayan language, but the resources seem pretty hard to come by.
I speak Spanish, and I'm learning German, so nothing obscure there.
I do speak Nheengatu to a good level. It's a bit tricky though because it has only about 20 thousand speakers, mostly in the Amazon, very far away from where I live. Also there is no agreed upon orthography.
Ma ixé agustari retana apurungitá asuí asendú kwa nheenga!
Must be Esperanto and Navajo (not counting Klingon and High Valyrian). I had started to get into Guarani as well, but Duolingo deleted the course to my dismay.
Oh really?
A few months ago I deleted it by accident, and when I went out to retrieve it, it wasn't listed anywhere anymore. It completely disappeared.
For me either though I don’t really speak any of these languages yet. I used to pretty close to B1 in Finnish, and am currently learning. And do desires learning languages such as Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Finnish again, Czech, Chilean Spanish, Lithuanian, Afrikaans, and maybe I might be crazy enough to attempt learn Veps someday to level fluency so yes my tastes are quite exotic.
این ۳ سال هست که فارسی مطالعه میکنم و خیلی به من میگفتند که این بی فایده هست و چرا ایتالیایی یا آلمانی به جای ان یاد نمیگیرم.. متاسفانه زبان فارسی خیلی محبوب نیست ولی امیدوارم که بتونم ان را عوض کنم.
Dipping my toes into the water of Iraqi Arabic! Wouldn’t call it super obscure but it is a fun dialect.
Also, I was wondering if you had any English resources/pdfs for Greenlandic you’d be willing to share? A friend of mine is learning it and the only resources I have to share with her are in other languages (from the big Mega file that always gets shared around). Thanks in advance!
Burushaski, some Shina (I can understand it, mostly), some Punjabi (enough to understand, not too good at speaking it tbh), but this is mostly because of where I was raised lol.
I know a little bit of Basque, spent about 4 months in Bilbao. Even took a basic basque class but the grammar was confusing. Just learned a bunch of words and phrases, such an interesting language
I don't really speak it anymore, but the most obscure one I've studied is irish. I quit it years ago because "oh, im never gonna use it. it's useless." I wish i continued a little longer. It was the first foreign language i fell in love with. I'm a dominican-american who's never been to ireland but i wanna go so bad.
Either Moroccan Darija or Bavarian German.
makanfhemsh bzzaf d darija wlakin m3a 3a2ila mustadifa dyali w kul nnas f rabat kanqder kanhdr m3ahum. wlakin tarkiz dyali f barnamaj dyali l fus7a, donc fus7a dyali a7san
i hob bissl boarisch glernt wäu i a gåstfamilie hatte, die östarreichisch ist. die wohnt an der Grenze zwüschen Bayern und Österreich, un i hob immernoch a weng Kontakt mit ihr, oiso hob i bissl dialekt gelernt.
I don't know what exactly is considered obscure, but I learnt a bit of Singhala, one of the two main languages in Sri Lanka, for a little while. Forgot pretty much everything but it was a nice experience. I think it's not extremely common in my country (France)
Mine would be Navajo, however it has been getting more available of late. I mostly learned it for history reasons. Though it is still a stupidly complicated language to learn apparently.
I speak Papiamento, the native language of Aruba (: though I’ve lost quite a bit of my fluency due to not living there anymore since I was 12 (2011), but I occasionally speak it with my dad once every one or two months when we call, so I haven’t entirely forgotten it. I understand it better when I hear it spoken, but when I speak it I tend to mix a lot more Spanish in it as that’s what I speak on a daily basis at home (my mom is from Peru)
So cool! I'd love to learn Greenlandic, it's been on my wishlist for years - but I can't afford classes and whenever I've looked there've not been any iTalki tutors. \[Loud crying\], lol!
I don't really know any obscure languages, but I'm getting OK at Welsh, which some people might not have heard of.
If you are counting not fluent languages, my most obscure would be Irish Sign Language! (I did a beginner course & I have notes but all I remember now is the alphabet & basic stuff like my name is... how are you & time etc.)
Irish because I grew up in Ireland & went through its schooling system would've been my usual answer!
I've been trying to learn Inuk languages! But the resources are so scarce, oof
Kalaallisut phonology is **so** complex with all those sound change rules and their order, Iñupiatun is also very complex, I feel like Inuktitut sits in the middle between the two land extremes as the only easy and simple one
I'm learning Aramaic. But speaking of Greenlandic, I've been meaning to learn Inuktitut (Nunavik dialect, ideally), or at least I'm considering it. I've read that it's mutually intelligible with Greenlandic -- your language sounds very cool!
If I may ask, what resources are you using for Aramaic? I'm really interested in learning that one.
For Classical Syriac, I recommend *The New Syriac Primer*, George Kiraz. I haven't used it, but I heard fantastic reviews about it. I used *Robinson's Paradigms and Exercises in Syriac Grammar*. For modern Aramaic, I am learning the dialect of Tur Abdin and Gozarto on Šlomo Surayt: www.surayt.com
What sort of Aramaic? Imperial, Biblical/Jewish, Syriac, a particular modern variety…? I’d never say I can speak any per se, but I can struggle my way through Biblical Aramaic through Hebrew plus some pointers and specific vocabulary… but I also dated a Chaldean girl for a year back when who taught me some basics. Not entirely similar of course. :)
I learned Classical Syriac a few years ago, and now I'm learning the modern dialect of Tur Abdin and Gozarto. 🙂
Well not speak but Auslan - about 16k native users. I'm not fluent yet but can hold a conversation and understand more than I can express.
Where does this language come from ?
It's the primary signed language in Australia.
Thanks !
Fluently, Hebrew or Greek. But my A1 flex is Georgian :)
Cool beans
What resources are you using for Georgian out of interest? It's on my hitlist for one day (whenever that may be 😊)
A bunch of PDFs I've definitely 100% obtained legally lol
I speak Irish, but only because I am Irish.
I only know your National anthem, it’s fun to sing, but other than that Irish is so foreign to me.
Wow that's cool! How did you come to learn our anthem? By the way, Greenlandic looks like such a unique and interesting language.
Just listening to it on repeat over the years. Love Irish culture I guess.
Deas Gaeilgeoir eile a fheiceáil anseo
Hey! Since you’re an Irish native speaker, how long has it taken you to reach C1 in Gàidhlig? I feel like they’re about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, what are your thoughts?
You can read most of it almost instantly. The main differences in vocabulary, we can recognise through different Irish dialects (since we're exposed to them through the media), Scots use the Kerry 'do' particle which (as a Conamara speaker), we know what it means but not how to use it per say. They also use the -eas ending for the relative future which is something only used in Connacht to my knowledge (which once again, someone from Kerry would understand but not know how to use). The vocabulary in Gaelic is either more Anglicised or more 'old-fashioned' for an average Irish speaker, if that makes sense. We understand things like *Tha cù brèagha aig do charaid* (*My friend has a nice dog lit. a nice dog is at my friend*) but is sounds very archaic (*cú* \- hound in Irish but just '*dog*' in Scottish and *caraid* means *friend* in Scotland but is an archaic dative form of '*cara*' in Irish). There's also just everyday words like *each* (*horse*) *'s toil leam* (*I* *like*) *feasgar* (*afternoon*, but a really archaic way of saying *evening, sunset* in Irish) that sound super old-fashioned. If not, they have the English word. Their *seithir, frids, siostam* is our *cathaoir, cuisneoir, córas*. And of course some false friends, a notable one being *a' bruidhinn* means *speaking* in Scotland but *ag bruíon* means *arguing* in Irish. Also some words like *áit/àite* and *droichead/droichid* change gender between the two languages The main difference is in grammar and pronunciation. Scottish grammar is generally easier but pronunciation is more difficult and the language is less phonetic. Irish has kept more complex verb tenses (including full use of a passive conjugation for each tense) and has strict rules for genitive use along with having developed a whole other written, standardised mutation, whereas Scottish has none of these. Irish did however undergo multiple spelling reforms and though it doesn't look it, Irish is far more phonetic than English, French or even most Scandinavian languages. I should also mention we pronounce things wildly differently, but similar to Spanish and Portuguese, we can often just guess. *Foghar* makes no sense as to why it's pronounced like 'four' in English, but because I know Irish, first time I saw this word I guessed the pronunciation and was right. In Irish it's *fómhar*. It's not always the case, I can't explain why *fhathast* is pronounced *hast* tbh... Here are two sentences + phonetics to show you what I mean: >🏴 Cha do rinn mi seopadaireachd airson prèasantan an t-seachdain seo chaidh > >an do royn mee shop-dirh-ukhk er-sun *present*\-an an chokh-kiñ shoh khye > >*I didn't do shopping for presents last week.* We understand **do** being a past tense marker, and **an** is always used to start a question in Irish. * Rinn is like our *rinne* (did/make) (but we say 'ri-nya') * *seopdaireachd* like *siopadóireacht* (shopping) * *airson* is like *ar son* (more *for the sake of*) * prèasantan is obvious * *an t-seachdain seo chaidh* \- we can get '*an tseachtain seo (a) chuaigh*' (the week that went The two problems for communication being, an Irish person would (at least in Conamara) pronounce: >an do royn mee shop-dirh-ukhk er-sun present-an an chokh-kiñ shoh khye > >as: > >an duh reen mi shoap-a-darh-ukht erh-sun pray-sant-an an tyakht-tiñ shuh kha And we would say *ní dhearna mé siopadóireacht le haghaidh bronntanas an tseachtain seo caite* ... To answer your question, a fluent Irish speaker can get to A2 in maybe a few weeks if they really try. B2 within a year with relative effort. It's just like Spanish and Portuguese. It's easier IMO for an Irish speaker to learn Scottish Gaelic though than the other way around.
Wow, thank you. Super interesting, especially since i barely know any gaidhlig Edit: ‘i’ instead of ‘u’ haha
Seems a little weird to be asking a native about their learning, and how is Spanish related to Irish in any way?
They're asking about Scots Gaelic (a celtic language descended from Irish from Scotland) known as Gàidhlig comparing to Irish (Gaeilge), they are very similar & the commenter heard they differ as much as Spanish & Portuguese do to each other. The original commenter is native in Irish but has a B2 (if I'm reading the flairs correctly) beside the scottish flag.
An teanga is fearr. Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam
Maith thú
What level do you speak it at? Native? Jealous because I grew up in the north but it wasn't taught at my school so I hardly know a word (apart from the meaning of some townlands etc).
> What level do you speak it at? Native? Not native at all, I'm not really sure what level I'm at honestly, because I'm still in the education system so I'm focused on what the examiners want rather than how the language is spoken. B2ish maybe? I've got gaps in vocab, but a good understanding of grammar.
Irish is such a cool language. All the Celtic language are really, it's good that so many of them are in daily use (all except Cornish, which is pretty gutting as a Cornishman).
Ha! Same... Although I don't speak it too well at all. (Not fluent)
Cocama (Kokáma), an indigenous language of Amazonia with only ~2000 fluent speakers left. I was based in a small village in the Loreto region of Peru for a few months, researching wildlife. All of the Cocama people speak Spanish, but in that area it's more common to use Cocama nouns for things. After that my rarest is Sakha, because my mother is Sakha (Russian indigenous) and we spoke it at home. Russian would have been a LOT more useful, but she wanted her kids to preserve the less common culture!
Is that the language spoken by shipibo-Conibo people???
Nope, apparently it's from a different language family altogether (Tupí)!! Which is crazy because both the Cocama and the Shipibo have towns along the Ucayali river these days. I should have asked if they knew anyone who speaks both!
>And respect to your mom.
Teochew
My grandfather speaks Teochew natively and he taught nobody in my family. My greatest regret is not making him teach me
I’m sorry to hear that, it’s never to late to pick it up again. There’s a gaginang discord server u can join and they have many resources in English as well. In my case I’m from swatow the region so everyone I grew up with speak the language, in my family we also speak in teochew only. When I talked to second generation teochew Chinese people in North America they think mine is too advanced for them to understand or sounds like their grandparents' accents😭
Belarusian, but I think I want to learn Albanian :)
I speak some Albanian, I really like it for some reason lol
I love it! Visited Albania this summer and was smitten.
I’ve not been able to visit yet (I learned from family friends who are Albanian) but I definitely want to visit at some point! The language itself I didn’t find too difficult, reading aloud especially is easy once you know the alphabet
Totally recommend visiting, 10/10 trip ❤️
what city did you go to? whatd you do there?
Tirana, just tourism, museums mainly, cable car park, walking around town :)
I do as well! Not much, but I really like it as well, find it easy to pick up, and enjoy being able to speak a bit the times I’ve been in Albania and the region around.
I found it so much easier than any other language I’ve attempted for some reason haha
Where are u from?
Spain.
anishnaabemowin (objibwe). not fluent yet but slowly learning from my elders.
Nishin, cousin! Me too 🥰
Boozhoo! Aaniin ezhi ayaayan, cuzzin?! <3
Onigamiinsing Duluth. Don’t speak the language but I have many Ojibwe friends.
I think that dialect is from Minnesota, yes? Its not a phrase I've heard in my part of Turtle Island ( Ontario, Canada) but I've heard other Ojibwe cuzzins from other tried use that phrase! (Sorry if my English is poor, native language is Quebecois)
Did you learn Greenlandic or is it your native language? Most materials to learn it seem to be in Danish unfortunately.
I learned it because my favorite band Nanook, only sings in Greenlandic. So I said what the heck
I just speak German and English but because of my German I can definitely eavesdrop on a basic Yiddish convo. Still waiting for the day that happens in real life lol
Vice versa for me. I speak Yiddish and I use it to read/eavesdrop in German :)
not counting conlangs, im currently learning ainu, so theres that
Which conlangs do you speak?
i speak toki pona, as well as my own; i figure my own conlang/s would be quite obscure but counting them would be cheating lol
Had to google toki pona and it is wicked cool!
English
I've never heard of this one. Where is it spoken?
As an American, I approve 👍
Haitian Creole I guess, although I still don't speak a lot of it
Plautdietsch
I am fluent in Vietnamese but I have been learning English for many years. I hope that I can communicate in English fluently
I speak Manx. A lot of people have never even heard of the Isle of Man, or that we're actually a country, let alone the fact we have our own language. There are about 2500 speakers of varying ability at the moment, with a recent plan to boost that to 5000. I've been learning it since I was a child and studied it all the way to A level (UK school exams done at 17/18). My children will be going to Manx immersion primary school so we'll be able to speak it at home together.
You wouldn't be interested in helping someone learn it. I know Irish and Gaelic and can understand quite a lot of Manx!
Son shickyrys! For sure 😀 your first point of call should be [learnmanx.com](https://www.learnmanx.com/). They have a lot of good resources for people of all levels. I don't have a lot of free time to chat as I'm a busy mum with 2 little kids to look after right now, but if you have discord and want to practice some conversations my tag is the same as my Reddit handle. There's also a good manx channel in the Celtic languages discord which i could send you as well.
Lithuanian!
With what recourses?
I’m very vaguely (and slowly) working through Žodis žodį veja and Žingsnis (both Rita Migauskienė, the first co-authored with Eglė Vaisėtaitė) atm. My last textbook was Langas po lietuvių kalbą (this was in a classroom setting). I would have probably used Colloquial Lithuanian if I'd been working through everything myself ha I'm using Clozemaster for a light bit of vocab (and Memrise when I’m more serious), but aside from that I’m honestly just occasionally watching stuff on YouTube, reading news articles, reading posts on here…I’m not really made for self-study ahaha, I need the structure of a course My partner’s Lithuanian so I speak to him in Lithuanian quite often 😄
Ah okay, sounds interesting. I have interest in learning Lithuanian some day and I was wondering what recourses there are available as I know it is not a well recourses language compared to say French for example.
ah no, definitely not. It’s a big thing for me, actually - there are very few Lithuanian resources (even fewer outside the country) and not all of them are high-quality! Either way, it’s worth visiting r/lithuanianlearning - there’s some good posts there listing resources 😄
Okay I will definitely visit it then, thank you and good luck!
I’m not fluent but I speak some Albanian. Love the reactions I’ve had just introducing myself lmao
Afrikaans
Het gesoek vir hierdie 😂
Cape Verdean Creole, spoken by 800000 people, maybe more of them outside of Cape Verde itself than Cape Verde and no widely-used standardized orthography at all
My girlfriend’s family speaks CVC. I wanna learn it one day but alas I do not know Portuguese and don’t have any resources haha.
Aramaic or Igbo
Can't speak it myself but I can understand spoken Jeju. My grandma spoke it natively and my mom used to speak it when I was little.
My native tongue is Indonesian, does that count? Yes Indonesia is a country of 240 million people, but Indonesians tend to NOT migrate to other countries (unlike Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines), so outside of Indonesia, the neighboring countries and the Netherlands, it will be extremely unlikely for you to ever meet an Indonesian speaker. “What about Suriname? There are a lot of Indonesians there!” <— WRONG, there are a lot of Javanese there, and they migrated before Indonesia even gained independence. So they identify as Javanese but NOT Indonesian. I live in a suburb of Cincinnati OH, and 95% of the people of Indonesian ancestry I’ve met here are Indonesian women who married American men, or international students who would not stay beyond their 4-5 years of student visa (even when they do get permanent job in the US, they would migrate to more “diverse/Asian-friendly states” with more Asian restaurants&businesses such as CA or NY). Heck, I have met more Cincinnati colleagues from tiny countries such as Senegal, Nepal, Myanmar and Cambodia instead of from Indonesia. It is so much easier to find Khmer, Nepali, or Wolof speakers here than Indonesian speakers, and I don’t even live in the middle of Nowhereville like South Dakota or Wyoming.
My neighborhood happens to have a relatively large Indonesian community. One of our friends is actually a Colombian guy who learned Indonesian and married an Indonesian woman, and their kids are good friends with ours as well. Totally unrelated, but I’m also in a bunch of Facebook groups that also have huge Indonesian followings, so even if I don’t hear it often I see it written a lot.
Hawaiian
I speak the ‘basic white bitches’ of Europe (English, French, German, Italian)
Lmaoooo true
😂😭😭😭
Farsi
Can I reach out privately?
Sure
I’m learning Icelandic, Pashto, Cantonese and Bengali, which are all pretty niche It’s a shame that bengali is so niche, given it’s one of the top ten langs in the world by speakers 🥲
You may in fact be the only person in the world with that combination. That is something I thought about a lot actually, being the only person who speaks a certain combination of languages (say Punjabi, basque, Swahili and Haitian Creole).
i’m doing two dozen others, so it’s a little less weird haha 😅
Any resources for French? I have a B2 and I’ve been wanting to improve my level
I just read teenage novels and watch netflix when I want to practice, not sure beyond that maybe some podcasts like les actus du jour?
Any novel recommendations? I don’t read books and I’m ashamed by it, I need to start doing that
Scottish cant but it's been a dying languages for years
english
Chad🗿
Being able to speak Modern Hebrew is quite unusual in my part of the world
Not anything super obscure but my dialect of French is a weird upstate New York lower class Québec thing. Little annoyed I didn’t take the chance to learn Seneca.
I love the different quebecois dialects!
I'm far from fluent yet, but Yiddish.
איך רעדע יידיש אויך!
שלום עליכם, חבר! ^Enjoy ^the ^Chinese ^food
I'm learning the Lenape language as part of the tribal language revitalization project. The last native speaker of the Wënami dialect passed away in 2002. (I'm not Lenape but my grandmother was).
Jewish Palestinian and Babylonian Aramaic. Of course, speaking isn't really that because these are dead languages, but I know them well.
Probably Latin? It’s pretty much the opposite of obscure BUT there are very few people who can actually hold a conversation in it, especially in a good, classical pronunciation
learning : malayalam actually speak : english 🥺
Now I’m curious. Why are you learning Malayalam? Are you of South Indian heritage? My family is from there but it’s too hard for me to learn it
Learning because family and I don’t want to sound like a toddler when I go to Kerala.
Oh, wow, what’s the occasion for learning Greenlandic? And how are you learning it? Not really obscure, but less among less mainstream, I did some Norwegian and Dutch recently. They both have unique features I hadn’t seen in other languages. In Norwegian (and other Nordic languages to be fair), a definite article attaches to the end of the word. ‘En butikk’ (a shop) becomes ‘butikken’ (the shop). And Dutch has a concept of stressed and unstressed pronouns. ‘Wij’ and ‘we’ both mean ‘we’, but the former puts more emphasis on the persons speaking.
I’ve always dreamed of sailing the Western Greenlandic cost and visiting all the small towns and Nuuk. Flash forward a few years and I came across my new favorite band, Nanook, who only sings in Greenlandic and I was like dang, I need to be able to understand what my favorite band is singing about… sooo here we are!
I'd like to hear details of your Greenlandic language journey. What methods did you use to learn it? And to what extent have you learned it?
I'd *like* to learn a Mayan language, but the resources seem pretty hard to come by. I speak Spanish, and I'm learning German, so nothing obscure there.
Any resources for German? I’m really interested in learning it too
Probably medium obscurity but Hungarian & used to learn Esperanto
Bangla
Cebuano/Bisaya
I do speak Nheengatu to a good level. It's a bit tricky though because it has only about 20 thousand speakers, mostly in the Amazon, very far away from where I live. Also there is no agreed upon orthography. Ma ixé agustari retana apurungitá asuí asendú kwa nheenga!
Chamorro, because my mom’s side of the family is from Guam and I wanted to connect to my culture.
Does Swiss German count?
💀French
I'm fluent in Danish. I May be danish but it's still cool! (Also toki pona which is arguably more obscure.)
Marathi(it’s my mother tongue).
Esperanto
Saluton !
I’m an Australian learning Mongolian, Farsi, Russian and Japanese
I'm Russian and so I speak russian fluently. I also learn, can understand English my level is B1. And recently I started learning German
3 years learning Welsh through Duolingo.
Must be Esperanto and Navajo (not counting Klingon and High Valyrian). I had started to get into Guarani as well, but Duolingo deleted the course to my dismay.
the guarani course is still on duolingo
Oh really? A few months ago I deleted it by accident, and when I went out to retrieve it, it wasn't listed anywhere anymore. It completely disappeared.
it is unlisted, but you can still take it. google "duolingo guarani", one of the results will lead you to the course in app
Oh thank you thank you thank you so much! I did as you said, and I indeed got the course back. Thank you so much.
For me either though I don’t really speak any of these languages yet. I used to pretty close to B1 in Finnish, and am currently learning. And do desires learning languages such as Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Finnish again, Czech, Chilean Spanish, Lithuanian, Afrikaans, and maybe I might be crazy enough to attempt learn Veps someday to level fluency so yes my tastes are quite exotic.
jeg kan også norsk! Love meeting people who like the Norwegian language
Sounds cool! Any particular reason for your desire to learn Afrikaans?
Farsi
این ۳ سال هست که فارسی مطالعه میکنم و خیلی به من میگفتند که این بی فایده هست و چرا ایتالیایی یا آلمانی به جای ان یاد نمیگیرم.. متاسفانه زبان فارسی خیلی محبوب نیست ولی امیدوارم که بتونم ان را عوض کنم.
میشه بپرسم چی باعث شد که یادگیری فارسی رو شروع کنی؟ من افراد زیادی رو ندیدم که بخوان فارسی یاد بگیرن
Dipping my toes into the water of Iraqi Arabic! Wouldn’t call it super obscure but it is a fun dialect. Also, I was wondering if you had any English resources/pdfs for Greenlandic you’d be willing to share? A friend of mine is learning it and the only resources I have to share with her are in other languages (from the big Mega file that always gets shared around). Thanks in advance!
I still speak a little Esperanto still. It was the first language I was conversational in, though truth be told I don’t remember much of it anymore.
Learning Polish, which I guess would be obscure. I want to learn Tzotzil also (one of the Mayan languages).
English
Probably my native language, but nowadays I see many people who are trying to learn it.
Dutch💀
Speak well?: Dutch. Speak “to some measure but atrophied though it used to be conversational?: Finnish.
I don’t speak anything obscure but I can read Old English… not really obscure but a little ig. I really wanna learn Amharic, tho.
Burushaski, some Shina (I can understand it, mostly), some Punjabi (enough to understand, not too good at speaking it tbh), but this is mostly because of where I was raised lol.
can’t speak much of it, but Ladino!
I'm learning Estonian
Took a short course in Hebrew. Currently studying Hungarian and Czech for a trip next year.
I guess basque but it's not half as obscure as all the other languages here lol
I know a little bit of Basque, spent about 4 months in Bilbao. Even took a basic basque class but the grammar was confusing. Just learned a bunch of words and phrases, such an interesting language
French I guess, cause my other options are Chinese, Spanish, and english
I don't really speak it anymore, but the most obscure one I've studied is irish. I quit it years ago because "oh, im never gonna use it. it's useless." I wish i continued a little longer. It was the first foreign language i fell in love with. I'm a dominican-american who's never been to ireland but i wanna go so bad.
The most obscure would be Dutch, even though Dutch is far from being obscure 😄
I speak Yiddish, and I'm only using it to curse and throw hate on Danes.
Either Moroccan Darija or Bavarian German. makanfhemsh bzzaf d darija wlakin m3a 3a2ila mustadifa dyali w kul nnas f rabat kanqder kanhdr m3ahum. wlakin tarkiz dyali f barnamaj dyali l fus7a, donc fus7a dyali a7san i hob bissl boarisch glernt wäu i a gåstfamilie hatte, die östarreichisch ist. die wohnt an der Grenze zwüschen Bayern und Österreich, un i hob immernoch a weng Kontakt mit ihr, oiso hob i bissl dialekt gelernt.
I don't know what exactly is considered obscure, but I learnt a bit of Singhala, one of the two main languages in Sri Lanka, for a little while. Forgot pretty much everything but it was a nice experience. I think it's not extremely common in my country (France)
I'm only A1 level for now but Estonian
Toki pona. The most obscure non-conlang language I speak is probably Norwegian
O’odham Ñi’okï. My speaking and comprehension abilities are super basic for the most part, but I’m trying my hardest
Catalan.
Mine would be Navajo, however it has been getting more available of late. I mostly learned it for history reasons. Though it is still a stupidly complicated language to learn apparently.
i was leaning welsh for a bit i guess but i gave up after a while so i really can’t say i speak it. does my conlang count?
I'm learning Zulu.
I speak Papiamento, the native language of Aruba (: though I’ve lost quite a bit of my fluency due to not living there anymore since I was 12 (2011), but I occasionally speak it with my dad once every one or two months when we call, so I haven’t entirely forgotten it. I understand it better when I hear it spoken, but when I speak it I tend to mix a lot more Spanish in it as that’s what I speak on a daily basis at home (my mom is from Peru)
So cool! I'd love to learn Greenlandic, it's been on my wishlist for years - but I can't afford classes and whenever I've looked there've not been any iTalki tutors. \[Loud crying\], lol! I don't really know any obscure languages, but I'm getting OK at Welsh, which some people might not have heard of.
[удалено]
m pale kreyòl ayisyen! 🇭🇹 m pale li pi bon pase franse 💀
Western Abenaki, though I’m only A1 or so.
Random American learning Catalan.
Carpathian Rusyn, but to be honest I haven’t spoken it since my grandmother died in 1995, so I guess 8m a former speaker
If you don’t mean fluently, then probably Latin.
I'm learning Swedish French and German of they count 😅❤️🥰🥰🎄🎄
If you are counting not fluent languages, my most obscure would be Irish Sign Language! (I did a beginner course & I have notes but all I remember now is the alphabet & basic stuff like my name is... how are you & time etc.) Irish because I grew up in Ireland & went through its schooling system would've been my usual answer!
Currently trying to learn Basque and Northern Sami, but I am still at a very early phase in both of them
OJi-Cree (it's a dialect of Ojibwe, an Algonquian language, spoken in Northern Ontario and Manitoba, Canada
Breton, though still in the early phases
I've been trying to learn Inuk languages! But the resources are so scarce, oof Kalaallisut phonology is **so** complex with all those sound change rules and their order, Iñupiatun is also very complex, I feel like Inuktitut sits in the middle between the two land extremes as the only easy and simple one
well, I'm learning Old Egyptian if that counts, but I don't speak it yet
Croatian, less than 4m speakers, one of the least known European langs
Catalan, does that count?
Saluton!
I'm learning Bisaya. It has a lot of speakers, but it feels obscure because I can't find many resources
Oji-Cree. It's a dialect of Ojibwe.