Underrated Languages

[Xenops]

To me a more interesting question would be why there are some languages "nobody" seems to study. I may be wrong, but in all my years at HTLAL and LLorg I cannot remember anyone seriously studying e.g. Armenian, which has some eight million speakers scattered around the world. Or what about Guaraní, an official language of Paraguay and the native language of more than six million people? I guess if I were to give up on Arabic and Russian for five years I'd pick one or both of these.

Inspired by said post, I decided to start a new topic.

The language that comes to my mind, that has a large presence in Italy and France and is the Romance language nobody remembers, is Romanian--why isn't anybody studying that one? Of course, when I try to think of the culture, the only thing that comes to mind is the Numa Numa song:



And, of course, the famous lip synching parody for it, which I'll let you Google yourselves.

So, what languages do you think are ignored that shouldn't be by language learners?

[zatris]

Well, Armenian is definitely in my wishlist, and I've collected some resources over the years, but they're somewhat scarce. That may be a reason why it doesn't get more attention. There seem to be a good number of resources in Russian circulating online, but I guess many of them are from the URSS period.

A language which sparks my curiosity is K'iche', I may focus on it someday. It doesn't seem to get much hype either, even the Wikipedia article about it is sparse. Can't remember ever coming across someone learning it, or its earlier form, which is the language the Popol Vuh is written in (though certainly such people can be found in academic circles).

[Brun Ugle]

I’m not sure about Armenian, but several of our members here or on the old site study Romanian or have studied it. And at least one of our members studies Ki’che’, but he’s not very active. You can see his talk on it from the Polyglot Gathering here.

[iguanamon]

Our member Tarvos, she speaks Romanian. We had a member on the old site who learned Armenian during my time there. As far as big languages go, Portuguese seems underrated to me, though not to the same extent as Romanian, in Romance languages. There's a wealth of literature, poetry, music and film. Amazing travel opportunities exist, Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, Cape Verde. It is the largest language in the Southern Hemisphere. There's a lot of "bang for the buck" that comes from learning a world language like Portuguese.

[tarvos]

Iversen speaks Romanian too.

[Theodisce]

One of the most widely known Romanians seems to be Mircea Eliade, but it's mostly because of his works published in languages other than Romanian. I've been reading Romanian historiography since my February trip to Cluj-Napoca with much pleasure and great interest.

Many Slavic languages are barely studied, the biggest of them in terms of speakers being Ukrainian. Slovene, Bulgarian, Belarusian, Macedonian and Slovak share similar fate, not to mention both varieties of Sorbian. I don't have the feeling that many people outside South Africa learn Afrikaans. Lithuanian and Latvian seem to be neglected as well, Estonian has been already mentioned. Albanian does not have many students, similarly to Georgian and Turkic languages other than Turkish. And those are just some languages with official or at least co-official status.

[basica]

Nikolić is learning Romanian. I actually find Romanian interesting too. I think a Romance language with a lot of Slavic influence to be fascinating.

That said, I think interest in Australian Aboriginal languages is near non existent. I don't recall anyone studying one of them. Other languages with a lack on interest would probably be Indonesian/Malaysian, PNG languages, and aside from Swahili or Afrikaans most African languages too. There's a bit more interest in Indian languages, but the situation is probably not that much better than the African ones.

Indonesian is probably the biggest example for here in Australia. Despite our proximity there's little interest in it and there's a significant amount of speakers of the language and its home is close to Australia offering plenty of opportunities to use it.

It's actually fascinating for me how many small European languages attract people that don't have ties to them (e.g. not a heritage speaker). Norwegian is probably a great example as on here and unilang I seem to come across heaps of people learning it and to me at least it's a real obscure language with almost 0% of actually using it in day to day life (I'm sure this is different depending on where you live, but even still I can't imagine there's too many Norwegian expat communities of noteworthy size considering their population size). Of course, you're interested in what you're interested in but I don't know where that interest comes come. Maybe because I live in Australia and have less of a connection with the region ?

[zatris]

Albanian does not have many students, similarly to Georgian and Turkic languages other than Turkish. And those are just some languages with official or at least co-official status.

Funny that you mention Albanian. Here in Brazil we have the peculiarity of Ismail Kadaré's books being directly translated from the original (I mean, it's doubly peculiar because, for example, Orhan Pamuk, who writes in a much more "popular" language, is published in retranslations from French; at least it was so some years ago), but that's due to the translator having worked as a foreign correspondent in Albania for a few years during the seventies. He says in interviews that until today people are impressed upon learning that he speaks the language.

[Xmmm]

If there are 7000 languages, 6950 must be underrated.

Flipping the question, what's overrated? Irish, Icelandic, Basque, Catalan.

[mick33]

I'm surprised that there isn't more interest in Scottish Gaelic or Welsh. Who knows, maybe I'll learn them someday.

Other languages that seem a bit underrated to me are Cambodian, Laotian, Burmese, Mongolian and the languages of India (even though there are loads of resources for Hindi/Urdu, Tamil etc).