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02 June 2011

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The World’s Hardest Language

 

Of the world’s approximately 6,000 languages

English is one of the easiest to learn despite its idiosyncrasies of spelling and pronunciation

 

The word ghoti is often cited to highlight peculiarities of English spelling and pronunciation. The word can quite legitimately be pronounced “fish;” the “gh” coming from laugh or cough; the “o” from women; and the “ti” from nation or mention.

 

This construction is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, who was a strong supporter of attempts to reform English spelling. However, linguist Benjamin Zimmer has tracked down a reference to the word that predates Shaw.

 

Richard Lederer, author of the 1998 book Crazy English, points out many of the problems non-English speakers are likely to have with the language: “How is it,” he asks, that your nose can run and your feet can smell?”

 

While quirks such as these can be found by the thousand, English is apparently not one of the most difficult languages to master.

 

Trouble with Languages Depends on Mother Tongue

Defining the difficulty of learning another language requires a point of reference. Most English-speakers find Mandarin and other Chinese tongues difficult to master. Similarly, an Arab is likely to find German or Spanish tricky.

 

Sigismund von Dobschütz

Nepali Sign is Difficult for non-Nepalis to Read.

 

And, everybody who is not from southern Africa will have trouble with the “click” sound that is part of the Xhosa language that was made famous by Miriam Makeba in her Click Song in the 1960s.

 

Difficulty for Native English Speakers

From an English perspective some of the most difficult languages to tackle are Asian. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) teaches languages to U.S. State Department diplomats; it rates the most difficult tongues for Americans to get to grips with are Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, and Arabic.

 

This assessment is confirmed by how-to-learn-a-language.com. It also rates the five FSI’s list as the most difficult for English speakers and adds several central and eastern European languages – Romanian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Bulgarian – as close runners-up.

 

Vowels and Consonants Can Get Complicated

Again, English is one the easier languages with its five vowels (six if y is counted) and 20 consonants.

 

Vowel-rich languages, such as the Chinese family, use tones to create numerous vowel sounds. There are four tones in Mandarin, so the word “he” means “to drink” if spoken in a high-level tone, but it means “river” if a rising tone is used.

 

Using the wrong tone on a word can cause the unwary to turn a compliment into an insult.

 

Ubykh was spoken on the eastern end of the Black Sea around Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. This language had a bewildering 78 consonant sounds, many of which a native-English speaker would have a very hard time conquering. However, that’s not likely to be a problem as, according to omniglot.com, the last fluent speaker of Ubykh died in 1992.

 

Which is the Hardest Language?

After a careful study of the subject The Economist (December 19, 2009) picked a couple of very difficult tongues to speak that, like Ubykh, are obscure.

 

!Xó? is spoken by only a few thousand people in Botswana, southwest Africa. The Economist describes it as having “a blistering array of unusual sounds.” It takes the Xhosa click to a whole new level with “five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones.”

 

However, the British magazine has chosen a language from the eastern Amazon, called Tuyuca, as the world’s most difficult.

 

Complexities of Tuyuca Language

Tuyuca is spoken by only about 800 people. It is what’s known as an SOV (subject, object, verb language), so an English sentence would read, “George dinner cooked.”

 

Then, Tuyuca gets tricky through agglutination, which is the squeezing together small units of language into a single word; an English example of an agglutinated word is antidisestablishmentarianism. After that comes the postpositional factor that means using modifying elements after a word – governor general in English.

 

But, Tuyaca language has many more pitfalls in wait; it is tonal with a nasality element. That said, it’s unlikely the average person should learn to speak it unless she or he needs to know where piranha are lurking.

 

Sources

“Language Log.” Ben Zimmer, April 23, 2008.

“Tongue Twisters.” The Economist, December 17, 2009.

“English Won’t Dominate as World Language.” Associated Press, February 26, 2004.

 

© Canada and the World, June 2011

All rights reserved

 

 

The United Nations has six official languages:

Arabic

English

French

Mandarin Chinese

Russian Spanish

 

PSOURRPHUAKNTW

 

The spelling reformer Alexander J. Ellis published a book in 1845 entitled A Plea for Phonotypy and Phonography.

 

In it he suggested several ghoti-like English language spellings that should be changed.

 

He said that “servant” could just as well be spelled as it is in our headline above. The sounds could come from psalm, journey, burr, Stephen,victuals, know, two.

 

 

According to Ethnologue - Languages of the World, 473 languages are in danger of becoming extinct.  

 

Meanwhile, an Associated Press report looked at the work of language researcher David Graddol: “ ‘The world’s language system, having evolved over centuries, has reached a point of crisis and is rapidly restructuring,’ Graddol says. In this process as many as 90 percent of the 6,000 or so languages spoken around the world may be doomed to extinction, he estimated.”