Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for learners. Catch up on past installments here.
Hi, language enthusiasts! It’s clear you love learning about languages as much as you love studying them: After my Dear Duolingo post about some language families around the world, you sent in questions about languages without families—and there’s a lot to say! Let’s go ✈️
Our question this week:
There are a lot of things all languages have in common, but there are also plenty of things that most languages don’t share. When we talk about what makes a language “unique,” there are (at least) two ways we can think about this question: One is whether it’s a language isolate, and the other is whether it has any features that distinguish it from most or all other languages in the world. In this post, I’ll talk about both!
Language isolates
A language isolate is a language that has no known languages related to it. Basque, spoken primarily in northeastern Spain and southwestern France, is a great example: While most languages spoken in Europe are part of the Indo-European family, Basque doesn’t belong to this family, or any other family of languages spoken in Europe!
Basque is probably the most famous language isolate, but it’s not the only one—there are over 100 language isolates spoken around the world, not to mention sign languages, many of which develop out of necessity in communities with large deaf populations and therefore aren’t related to any other signed (or spoken) languages.
Here are just a few other language isolates and where they’re spoken:
- Zuni – the southwestern United States
- Pirahã – the Brazilian Amazon
- Bangime – south-central Mali
- Sandawe – Tanzania’s Dodoma Region
- Burushaski – northern Pakistan
- Ainu – the Japanese island of Hokkaido
- Tiwi – the Tiwi Islands of northern Australia
When we refer to a language as an “isolate,” we’re really talking about the language as it exists in a certain moment of time—Basque may have had other linguistic relatives in the past that we don’t know about. Other languages were probably isolates at some point but spread and evolved over time, forming their own family tree. We also don’t know the entire history of every language, so it’s possible that some languages that we think of as isolates are actually distantly related to another living language, but no one has been able to prove it so far.
Unique features among languages
Language isolates are certainly unique, but that doesn’t mean they should get all the attention! Lots of other languages have features you may have never heard of—or even thought about—because they’re so rare worldwide. Here are just a few:
Ojibwe
If you’ve ever studied another language, you’ve probably had the phrases “first person,” “second person,” and “third person” drilled into your memory. It’s important to know who you’re talking about! But Ojibwe, an Algonquian language spoken in Minnesota, Manitoba, and Ontario, goes one step further with a fourth person. The Ojibwe fourth person (also called the “obviative”) is a way to talk about someone who’s further away or less relevant to the conversation than the third person. Take the sentence Elena saw her dog: In English, we don’t know without more context if her dog means Elena’s dog or someone else’s—like maybe Elena saw the dog that belongs to Sara. In Ojibwe, it would be clear thanks to the fourth person!
Bonus: Ojibwe also has inclusive/exclusive “we,” like many Quechuan languages!
Guugu Yimithirr
I’ve already fangirled over the incredible linguistic diversity in northern Australia, but here’s a concrete example: Guugu Yimithirr, a language spoken in the northernmost part of Queensland, Australia, is known for using absolute directions (north, south, east, west) where many other languages would use relative directions (left, right, ahead, behind). So in Guugu Yimithirr, you might hear someone say Look in the northeast corner of the room or I was talking to the person sitting west of me. If anyone’s ever told you you have a great sense of direction—or if you always seem to confuse your left and right—then maybe you should add this to your list of languages to learn!
Bonus: English got the word kangaroo from Guugu Yimithirr! 🦘
Tariana
Tariana is an Arawakan language spoken in the Brazilian Amazon, and if you hate unfounded rumors and fake news, then you’ll love this feature! Tariana has something called evidentiality built into its verbs, which means that you have to specify where you got the information you’re telling someone. For example, in English you can groan My roommate drank my milk!, but in Tariana, you’d have to be more specific:
- Did someone else tell you he drank your milk?
- Did you see him with a milk mustache, and infer it was from your milk?
- Did you feel that your milk carton is lighter than it was before, and assume based on that?
- Or did you actually see him drink your milk?
In English (and many other languages), we have optional ways to state how certain we are of what we’re saying, like I heard they broke up! or She must have gone home early, but in Tariana and other languages with evidentiality, it’s built into the grammar. So in each of the four cases above, the Tariana verb for “drink” would look different because of evidentiality!
Khoe Kwadi, Zulu, and Xhosa
We’ve talked about languages with click sounds like Zulu plenty of times, and for good reason! Click consonants are incredibly rare worldwide, and virtually limited to languages spoken in the southern half of Africa. They probably started out in Khoe Kwadi languages, then spread to other neighboring languages via trade and migration. They’re also really noticeable, since they’re produced so differently than most other consonants! You can hear them clearly in this song, sung by Miriam Makeba in her native Xhosa.
The other fascinating thing about click consonants is how many there are: Some languages have dozens! Check out this example from Zulu, in which each of the highlighted segments represent a different click sound:
Ima kumgwaqo omncane kwesokunxele.
Stop on the small street on the left.
…And many others!
Those aren’t even close to all the rare and unique features of languages around the world!
- There are languages like Bassa, a Niger-Congo language spoken in Liberia, which only has two words for colors: one that encompasses dark colors (sort of like black) and one for light colors (sort of like white).
- There are languages like Lithuanian and Icelandic, that seem so resistant to the natural processes of language change that today’s speakers can easily read medieval texts (this is not the case in English!). Lithuanian in particular, thanks to the features it’s retained, has been instrumental in helping linguists hypothesize what proto-Indo-European looked like.
- There are also languages with a particularly large or small number of sounds. For example, Archi—a language spoken in Dagestan, Russia—has 26 distinct vowel sounds and at least 74 distinct consonant sounds (that’s 100 total!), while Hawaiian has as few as 5 vowel sounds and 8 consonant sounds, for a total of 13. (Like most other languages in the world, English falls somewhere in between: It has about 44 distinct sounds.)
Don’t be afraid to stand out!
Studying rare or endangered languages (like many of those described above) can be rewarding! It’s extra challenging to learn a language with grammar, sounds, or concepts that are entirely different from the ones in the language(s) you already know. Whether you’re learning one because it’s linked to your family or culture, or just because it fascinates you, language can connect you to an entire community of people that you never could have communicated with otherwise.
Happy learning! 💚
For more answers to your language and learning questions, get in touch with us by emailing dearduolingo@duolingo.com.