How Learning One Language Well Helps You Learn Others

Repost from the old site. In the comments, the ever-perceptive dano notes:

dano: The thing is, I’ve found that once you learn to speak a European language, and particularly a Latin-based one, you see similarities in many words across the board and a rough kind of pattern emerges, making it easier to learn more languages.

Dano is correct – once you learn one Romance language, you can learn others. Also, the better you know English, the more easily you can learn a Romance language because so many English words have Latin roots. I also have knowledge of Proto Indo-European, so I can see roots that go back even farther back than Latin. It helps to learn Greek and Latin roots in English. That way you can pick up more English words that you don’t know just by figuring out roots. Also it helps a lot with Romance languages. Let’s try a little experiment. I know English very well, including many obscure terms, and I am familiar with many Latin roots. I know Spanish pretty well. I know a tiny bit of French and know a few words in Indo-European. With that knowledge, let us see how far that will get me in Venetian, a language I had never heard of before, and Italian, a language I have never been able to make heads or tails of. Comparison of Venetian and Italian with English, Spanish, French and Indo-European Venetian grasa, Spanish “grasa”, English “gross” fat, corpulent Venetian can, Indo-European “kuon”, French “chien”, English “canine”, “hound”, dog Venetian çena, Spanish “cena”, dinner Venetian scóła, Spanish “escuela”, English “school” Venetian bała, Spanish “bala”, English “ball” Venetian pena, English “pen” Venetian bìsi, English “peas” Venetian diałeto, Spanish “dialecto “, English “dialect” Venetian sgnape, English “schnapps” Venetian scóndar, Spanish “esconder”, English, “abscond”, to hide, to depart rapidly to avoid persecution Venetian baxar, Spanish “besar”, English “buss”, to kiss, kiss Venetian dormir, Spanish “dormir”, English “dormitory”, to sleep Venetian pàre, Spanish “padre”, English “patrilineal”, father, in the father’s family line Venetian parlar, French “parler”, English “parlance”, to speak, way of speaking Venetian scusàr, Spanish “excusar”, English “to excuse”, to forgive Venetian aver, Spanish “haber”, English “to have,” to possess Venetian essar, Spanish “estar”, to be, English “essence,” essential quality of a thing Venetian sentir, Spanish “sentir”, English, “sentiments”, to feel, feelings Venetian venir, Spanish “venir”, to come Venetian cantar, Spanish “cantar”, English “cantata”, to sing, song, “canto,” a type of lyric poetry, Venetian vaca, Spanish “vaca”, cow Venetian vardar, Spanish “guardar”, English “to guard”, to look, to guard Venetian sghiràt, English “squirrel” Venetian récia, Spanish “orecha,” English “ear” Venetian plàstega, Spanish “plastica”, English “plastic” Italian forchetta, English “fork” Italian ratto, Spanish “raton”, English “rat” Italian pipistrello, English “pipistrelle”, bat, a type of bat Italian asino, English “ass”, donkey Venetian mustaci, English “mustache” Italian io, Spanish “yo”, English “I” Venetian mare, Spanish “madre”, mother, English “matriarchal”, rule by women Italian uscita, English, “exit” Venetian fiól, English “filial”, son, relating to a son or daughter Italian quando, Spanish “cuando”, when Venetian cascàr, English “cascade”, to fall, waterfall Venetian trón, English “throne,” chair, king’s chair Venetian bèver, Spanish “beber”, English “to imbibe”, to drink Venetian trincàr, English “to drink” Venetian òcio, Spanish “ojo”, English “ocular”, eye, of the eye Venetian morsegàr, English “morsel”, to bite, a bite Venetian nome, Spanish “nombre”, English “name” Venetian solo, Spanish “solo”, English “solo”, only, alone Venetian grande, Spanish “grande”, English “grand” big, great Italian piccante, Spanish “picante”, English “piquant”, spicy hot Venetian cale, Spanish “calle,” street Venetian łéngua, Spanish “lengua”, English “language” Venetian senpre, Spanish “siempre”, always Venetian mar, Spanish “mar”, English “maritime”, sea, of the sea Venetian nostre, Spanish “nuestro”, our Venetian vite, Spanish “vida”, English, “vital”, life, living Venetian virtuosi, Spanish “virtuoso”, English “virtuous” Venetian serae, Spanish “seria”, would be Venetian spirito, Spanish “espiritu”, English “spirit”, ghost, spirit Venetian segura, Spanish “seguro”, English “secure”, safety, safe Venetian robar, Spanish “robar”, English “to rob”, to loot, to steal Venetian mal, Spanish “mal”, English “malevolent”, bad, evil-minded As we can see, there is a huge amount of similarity between Venetian, an obscure language I had never heard of, and Spanish and English. Even the frightening Italian has quite a few Spanish and English cognates. Learning one foreign language, or even learning your own language very well, really does help you to learn even more languages so much more easily. Go ahead and give it a shot!

A Look At the Venetian and Friulian Languages

Repost from the old site. Here we will compare Friulian and Venetian with Italian. The Friulian language is spoken in northeastern Italy. Among Friulian speakers, the language is affectionately known as Marilenghe and is best known from the Udine, the main town of the Friulian zone. It has 794,000 speakers and is in pretty good shape. There is a close relationship with Ladin and Romansch. Most speakers also speak Standard Italian. In regions of Slovenia bordering Friuli, almost everyone speaks Friulian as a second or third language. Friulian is closer to French than to Italian. legal status of Friulian and feels that it is lacking, although a landmark law was passed in Italy in 1999. This law was very controversial, and public opinion in Italy continues to be that regional languages should all give way to Italian. Venetian is said to be a dialect of the Italian language, but it is actually a completely separate language related more to French than Italian. It is spoken mostly in northeastern Italy in Venice, Trieste and other areas by 2,280,387 people, but the number may actually be up to 3 million. ethnic nationalist myths have arisen – that Northern Italians are Celtic (more White) and that Venetian is some kind of Celtic language. There was a Celtic language spoken in the area some 1,800 years ago, but it has not left much trace on the languages of today. North Italians are not Celtic and Venetian has no relation to Celtic. Venetian is close to the northern Italian languages Piedmontese, refer to such a mindset as “that of the Roman Empire” and those who promote it as fascists. My English translation is a free literary translation and is not literal or word for word at all. It translates the text into the best possible literary English. Central (Udine) Friulian Copiis Il puar biāt al ą copiāt il Siōr par dīj: “O soi come tč”: ma il Siōr nol ą copiāt. Magari chel biāt j ą vuadagnāt, ma i fīs, daspņ, cetant ąno pajāt no savint jéssi sé? Il lōr destin al č, savéso quāl? Copie de brute copie origjnāl! Eastern/Coastal (Triestino) Venetian Copie Il sempio il gą copią il Sior par dir “Mi son come ti” ma il Sior no’l gą copią. Forsi quel sempio xč divegnudo sior, ma i fioi, dopo, quanto i gą pagą par non saver come xe stado? Savč vł qual xč il loro destin? copie dela bruta copia original! Notes: Both Friulian and Venetian are structurally separate languages. It’s very difficult to write in Friulian, and very few people know how to do it properly. Venetian is easier to write, and more speakers are able to write it. Friulian ā is a long a. Venetian x is the same as English z Venetian ł resembles the “lh” sound. This sound does not occur in English. Standard Italian Il poveretto voleva copiare il Signore per dire: “Io sono come te’, ma il Signore non ha copiato. Forse quel poveretto ha guadagnato ma i figli, dopo, quanto hanno pagato non sapendo cosa ? Sapete qual’č il loro destino? Essere copia dell’originale brutta copia! Notes:  Poveretto: povero di mente: simpleminded fellow. Signore: educated, gentleman. Guadagnato: learned something, got wiser. Pagato: to pay in a moral, education way, to “learn your lesson.” English The simple man tried to copy the gentleman so he could say, “I’m just like you”, but the gentleman could not be copied. Now, maybe that simple man learned a thing or two, but how much would his sons, later on, have to pay for not knowing a thing? The sons’ destiny? To be a copy of the original rude copy.

Cool Neo-Latin Websites

Repost from the old site. Forgive me a bit while I trip off into obscure Romance linguistics here for a bit, but I’m really getting off on this little journey. Here is the website for La Quotidiana, an online and printed daily newspaper in the Romansch language. This is the closest Romance language of all to Latin itself. Below are a couple of websites entirely in the Ladin language. Ladin is spoken in northeastern Italy, in the Eastern Alps. The specific range is called the Dolomites. Ladin is a weird-looking language. At first you think it’s French, then…no, it can’t be. Wait, it’s Italian, no, not quite. You keep thinking Romanian, but that’s wrong too. The one thing that keeps hitting you is that it looks so much like Classic Latin. Noeles.net is said to be the only online Ladin newspaper. Ladins da Friul is even better. It’s also entirely in Ladin, but it has lots of really cool photos. The people in this region are isolated in small mountain valleys, wear strange but fascinating traditional garb including wide-rimmed hats, have sloped roofs on the buildings with Swiss clocks on the outside, and seem to be very, very deeply Catholic. The people have interesting features and look more Germanic or Slavic than anything else. Lots of blond and red hair and blue and green eyes. There seems to be a deep tradition of scholarly endeavors and a general serious, even ponderous nature. These are not the happy go lucky Italians of the South. Traditional racial science classed the Europeans in this area as “Dinarics.” A gallery of Dinarics is here. It’s from a horrible proto-Nazi book by Hans F.K. Gunther, but the photos are pretty interesting. Employment seems to be mostly tourism now, but it looks as if some small farming, especially wine grapes, logging and handicrafts such as woodcarving still employ some folks. It doesn’t seem to be the sort of place one gets rich, but you get the feeling that people in the Dolomites really don’t care about getting rich. That’s a good set of values! Modern, sophisticated White people who don’t give a damn about getting rich. Persistence of small languages in Europe is associated with isolation, rural areas, poor economics, “backwardness,” deep religious values and regular churchgoing, and employment in traditional industries. In these isolated regions, speakers of small languages continue to marry their own kind – they don’t breed with outsiders too much. You also get the impression that many folks here spend their whole lives in one small village. I recall an anecdote where a writer was in a small Scottish village and an old-timer informed that he was moving for the first time in his life. “Oh?” asked the writer. “Where?” He was moving across the street. Ladin has 30,000 speakers and Romansch has 35,000. These are cultured, intelligent, educated Europeans, yet they are still speaking small languages that don’t have a lot of use in our multicultural world. I wonder what it must feel like to speak one of these small languages? There is probably not a lot to read in your small language. But in the case of Romansch and Ladin, probably almost all speakers also speak Italian and/or German at least, so if they want to do a lot of reading, there’s tons of German and Italian stuff out there. These small languages are often called “the language of the hearth and home.” They are spoken with family and friends, in small towns and villages, on the street and in shops. In some rural or more isolated areas, they are spoken at work. But in the wider world, a larger language is used. In modern times, the fate of the language lies with the younger generation. If they see the small language as having little value in our modern world, they will fail to use it or even learn it and will eventually lose the tongue. There are also problems with immigrants moving into the area who are not interested in learning some small language. Due to poor economics, a lot of speakers of small languages emigrate out of their home region to big cities. Eventually, many of them lose their native language. Media for small tongues is a constant problem, and it’s one reason I’m a socialist. These languages usually need some sort of funding by the state as the wonderful market just can’t see any profit in a radio or TV station broadcasting in some small tongue. So the state typically funds newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, etc. Advertising is another problem. You can put up signs in your small language and try to sell to speakers, but outsiders won’t be able to read them. So bilingual signage is often used. Education is always a sticky issue. With the larger minority tongues, there are often lessons in the language available through various grades of school. With the bigger ones, you can also opt to use the minority tongue as a language of instruction, as long as you take courses in the national language every year. Shortages of quality schoolbooks and other learning materials are typical problems, along with teachers fluent in the language. Recent decades have seen revivals throughout Europe in most of the small tongues. Here are a couple of websites in the much larger Friulian language, with 800,000 speakers. It’s close to Ladin and Romansch. Lenghe.net looks quite thorough. The Radio Onde site is also pretty nice. Friulian looks like it is getting quite a web presence, probably due to the high number of speakers. Radio and TV stations and printed press costs money, but websites are a lot cheaper. Maybe the web is going to be savior of a lot of small tongues.

Really Cool Friulian Site

Repost from the old site. This very well-done site is all in the Friulian language. Has lots of good graphics and tons of great links. I can’t read it, but it’s cool to look at it. If you can read Friulian (or Furlan in Friulian) give it a go. It’s also interesting how many bloggers are blogging in Friulian. Italy now accepts Friulian as a minority language and schools are now offering it as a course. It’s still spoken by 794,000 speakers in the region. It’s spoken in far northeastern Italy. Friulian is closest to Ladin and Romansch. That is, it’s straight up from Vulgar Latin along with those two. Those three languages are probably the closest to pure Latin of any of the Romance languages. There are quite a few Friulian speakers in Canada. Until recently, the region was quite poor, hence many speakers left the area. There are also some speakers in Argentina and Brazil. Good overview here.

Virgilio Giotti, Triestine Venetian Poet

Repost from the old site. Let’s take a look again at Triestine Venetian. Virgilio Giotti was a famous poet who wrote in Triestine Venetian. He was born in 1885 in Trieste, a child of Riccardo Schonbeck and Emilia Ghiotto. He died in Trieste in 1957. He is considered to be the most important Triestine Venetian author. For this, he was honored in 1957 by the Accademia dei Lincei. Highly-regarded critics such Mario Fubini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gianfranco Contini, Cesare Segre and Franco Brevini enthusiastically described Virgilio Giotti as one of the most important Italian writers in Italian “dialects” of the 1900’s. From 1907 to 1919 he lived in Firenze. In 1912, he met Nina Schekotoff, a Russian from Moscow, the only woman he ever loved. In Tuscany, she bore him three children – Natalia, (Tanda), Paolo and Franco. Sons Paolo and Franco both died in Russia during World War 2. Giotti first book was Piccolo Canzoniere in Dialetto Triestino, published in Florence in 1914. He became famous in 1937, when the great critic Pietro Pancrazi, in a review in Corriere Della Sera pointed out the anti-dialectal character of Giotti: his poetry was described as écriture d’artiste (literary writing) or patois de l’ame (the language of love). Pancrazi described Giotti as a poet who wrote mainly in dialect, but he differed from the usual poetry of Italian “dialects” that was often folkloric, standardized, generic, etc. Giotti spoke Tuscan Italian as his principal language, and he considered Triestine Venetian as “the language of the poetry” only – that it only had a literary and cultural value, but was not useful beyond that. Giotti’s Triestine Venetian lexicon was impoverished and full of simple words, with only a very sparse use of idioms. Giotti’s Trieste was far from the Trieste of Svevo, Saba and other writers: there’s no Port wine, no psychoanalysis and no Mitteleuropa. Giotti’s world is one of sensations, little places, family and friends, the arcana of quotidian existence. He was a romantic poet of everyday life. Let’s look at one of Giotti’s poems, With Bolàffio, in classic Triestine Venetian, then in modern Triestine Venetian, then in an Italian translation by Antonio Guerra (Italian language link) or Tonino Guerra (a famous Italian screenwriter), (Italian language link) and finally I will try to translate it into literary English. If you think you can do a better job of translating this into nice poetic English, even a line or two, give it a shot. This translation stuff is kind of fun! Con Bolàffio Virgilio Giotti Classic Triestine Venetian Mi e Bolàffio, de fazza un de l’altro, col bianco tavoja de la tovàia in mezo, su i goti e el fiasco in fianco, parlemo insieme. Bolàffio de ‘na piazza de Gorìzia el me conta, ch’el voria piturarla: ‘na granda piazza sconta, che nissun passa. Do tre casete atorno rosa, un fiatin de muro, un pissador de fero vècio stravècio, e el scuro de do alboroni. Xe squasi mezogiorno E un omo, vignù fora de là, se giusta pian pian, e el se incanta sora pensier. Bolàffio in ‘sta su piazza bela, noi, poeti e pitori, stemo ben. La xe fata pròpio pai nostri cuori, caro Bolàffio. In quel bel sol, in quela pase, se ga incontrado i nostri veci cuori; là i se ga saludado stassera alegri. Con Bolàffio Virgilio Giotti Modern Triestine Venetian Mi e Bolàffio, de muso un co’ l’altro, col bianco tavoja dela tovaia in mezo, su i calici e il fiasco de fianco parlemo insieme. Bolaffio, de ‘na piazza de Gorizia il me conta ch’el voleria piturarla ‘na grande piazza sconta che nessun passa Do tre casete atorno rosa, un fiatin de muro un pisador de fero vecio stravecio, e il scuro de do alberoni Xe quasi mezogiorno E un omo, vignù fora de là, se giusta pian pian, e il se incanta sora pensier. Bolàffio in ‘sta sua piaza bela noi, poeti e pìtori stemo ben. La xe fata proprio pei nostri cuori caro Bolaffio In quel bel sol, in quela pase, se ga incontrado i nostri veci cuori; là i se ga saludado stasera alegri Con Bolàffio Virgilio Giotti Italian translation by Antonia Guerra Io e Bolaffio, l’uno di fronte all’altro, col bianco della tovaglia in mezzo, i bicchieri alzati e accanto il fiasco, parliamo insieme. Bolaffio mi racconta di una piazza di Gorizia, che vorrebbe dipingerla: una grande piazza nascosta, dove nessuno passa. Due tre casette intorno, rosa, un poco di muro, un pisciatoio di ferro, vecchio stravecchio, e lo scuro di due alberoni. È quasi mezzogiorno. E un uomo, venuto fuori di lì, si mette a posto pian piano, s’incanta sopra pensiero. Bolaffio, in questa sua piazza bella, noi, poeti e pittori, stiamo bene. È fatta proprio per i nostri cuori, caro Bolaffio. In quel bel sole, in quella pace, si sono incontrati i nostri vecchi cuori; là si sono salutati stasera, allegri. With Bolàffio Virgilio Giotti English translation by Robert Lindsay Bolaffio and I, face To face, sitting down At a table dressed in white In the middle Picking up the wineglasses and a bottle nearby Together we’re talking Bolaffio is telling me He would like to draw A picture of a square in Gorizia It’s a big hidden square Nobody is walking through 2 or 3 small houses around Rose-colored, a small wall An iron pissoir* Very old, and the dark shadows From a couple of trees It’s around noon And a man came out Of that pissoir Slowly, he buttons up his pants And he stops himself No thoughts in his head Bolaffio In his nice square We, painters and poets We feel good here It was created just for our hearts Dear Bolaffio In this nice sunshine, In this Peace, our old hearts Have met each other And tonight They’re enjoying each other *pissing place= Vespasiano, where to piss My friend Paolo describes Giotti’s language as the old “Modern” Triestine Venetian.

Thoughts on Etnocentrism and “Race-Mixing”

Repost from the old site.

White nationalists tend to say that any White person who dates or marries outside the White race is a “race traitor” who is engaging in “race mixing” and is fostering “racial suicide”. They also say that any such person must be a “White self-hater” with no love or pride on their own people.

This post will examine whether or not that is so. It will also examine ethnocentrism cross-culturally, with a view towards whether or not it is normal. It will also examine the tendency among human groups to simultaneously guard their women from outsiders while the males also attempt to mate with outsiders.

I argue that all of these things are cultural norms in human beings and may have biological or genetic origins.

I’ve been talking to some of my smart friends about this stuff, and here’s what we came up with.

I noted that I have met persons from all over the world. One tendency that I noted among most, but not all, persons, was ethnocentrism, often of an extreme type. They all had a lot of pride in their race, nation, ethnic group, religion, or whatever. In particular, they did not like to hear criticism of it from outsiders.

At the same time, many were not particularly racist. They certainly were friendly enough towards me. These same people, if they were young and unmarried, often combined a profound ethnocentrism with a desire to marry outside their group. In this case, many of them wanted to marry an American, especially a White American.

This would seem to strongly contradict White nationalist theory that everyone who desires to marry outside their race, nation or ethnicity is race-traitor who is full of hatred for their own kind. That just doesn’t seem to be true. White nationalists are flat out wrong. It’s perfectly possible to love your people and marry outside of them.

Oddly enough, people seem to be able to combine an often profound ethnocentrism with a desire to marry out and commit “race-treason” or “racial suicide”.

I talked to one of my friends, and while he is not a White nationalist (he despises them), he admitted that he thinks Whites, specifically Northern Europeans, are superior to all other groups. He also said that he had been in love with a number of non-White women, and he would have gladly married them.

He said that even after he married them, he would probably still have felt that Northern Europeans were superior, even though he loved his wife. He suggested that many people of other races who marry non-group members probably feel the same way.

How can we make sense of these findings?

First of all ethnocentrism does seem to be a norm in human societies. As an example, let us look at a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon called the Pirahã.

This tribe has been the subject of a lot of research lately because they appear to lack recursion in their language. As recursion is said to be a human linguistic universal (or part of universal grammar in the Chomsky-Pinker paradigm) that is genetically coded into our brain, its absence in the Pirahã implies either that they are genetically distinct (dubious) or that the Chomsky-Pinker theory of universal grammar needs a lot of work.

Leaving aside the Pirahã’s lack of recursion for a moment, let us look at their extreme ethnocentrism. The Pirahã have been in contact with Europeans for a good 200 years. During that time, many a missionary has tried to convert them to Christianity. However, for a primitive people, the Pirahã are very scientific-minded, so they have never accepted Christianity.

Anthropologist/linguist Daniel Everett has worked with the Pirahã for 30 years. He originally started out as an evangelical minister to them, but their rejection of his preaching caused him to question his own religion, and he is now an atheist.

He used to talk to them about religion and the Pirahã would say, “Well, who is this Jesus guy? Have you ever seen him? Have you ever met him? Do you know anyone who has seen him or met him?” He would have to answer no to all of these questions. The Pirahã would then say, “So why should we believe this stuff?”

According to their culture, one can only believe things that one has experienced with their own senses, or that someone you know has experienced sensually.

Anyway, this is why the Pirahã have been rejecting missionaries for 200 years now. Not only have they rejected missionaries, but they have also rejected the Portuguese language and modern living, which they have also been exposed to for 200 years. They know what the Portuguese language is, and they know what modern living is, but they want no part of either.

Portuguese language classes have often been offered to the Pirahã, and they attend the classes and pretend to be engaged, but actually refuse to learn any of the language. Some of the children start to learn Portuguese, but as soon as they show signs of learning the language, the parents pull them out of class and refuse to let them return. They don’t want to learn Portuguese! Period!

Further, they want no part of modern culture. They have been told over and over the advantages of modern culture, but they’re not buying.

These refusals are rooted in the Pirahã’s profound sense of ethnocentrism. The Pirahã see themselves as superior to all other races, and they are even superior to all of the Indian tribes around them, whom they want nothing to do with. I’ve seen pictures of the Pirahã, and they just look like Amazonian Indians to me. In my ethnocentric mind, I can’t see how they have anything to feel superior about. But they do feel this way.

From this interesting post in Majority Rights, a White Supremacist site that is nevertheless intelligent, interesting and relatively easy to tolerate, we can see that this feeling is not limited to the Pirahã. It’s a discussion of racism in China. One commenter, who is Chinese, notes that most NE Asian groups see their race, nation or ethnic group as superior to all others, including surrounding Asians.

A White commenter who met Vietnamese students in Europe noted that these Vietnamese felt the same way. Furthermore, he noted that the Vietnamese place strong restrictions of their women marrying out.

The commenter said that a female member of the group that married out to a White man would be considered a whore who was lower than dirt who had just married into a subhuman race, the Whites. But if she married into an Asian group not her own, that would be even worse. She was now worse than a whore for marrying into a group that was even lower than Whites. The commenter noted that the Chinese felt much the same way.

I would imagine many other East Asians, especially the ethnocentric Koreans and Japanese, feel the same.

We really could go on and on here, but ethnocentrism, even profound ethnocentrism, seems to be a human norm. We can certainly get away from it as individuals, but it’s probably always going to be with us. It also implies that the thorough deracination of Western Whites, to the point of deliberate self-abnegation, is simply not normal. Much as I dislike them, the White nationalists are correct on this point.

Another commenter linked to this article, reported in the press as racist anti-African riots by Chinese students in China against African students. To the extent this stuff was written up at all in the Western press, it was as irrational racist riots against innocent Africans by racist Chinese.

The truth seems to be more complicated. A White American who was a student in China at the time noted that the African students were throwing wild parties in their dorms. Non-African males were allowed in, but not Chinese males. Chinese females were very much invited. He attended one of these parties and “rescued” two Chinese women by getting them out of there.

It was common knowledge at the time that the Africans were getting Chinese women drunk and then “raping” them. Whether that meant date rape or actual physical rape is uncertain, but after a while, Chinese students (probably mostly young males ) had had enough and there were days of anti-African riots.

Among the regulations that followed was that African male students were forbidden from consorting with Chinese females in their dorms.

In the examples above we see another essential part of ethnocentrism – “Don’t any of you outsiders dare to fuck with our women. We will defend the honor of our women with our lives and we will kill any outsider males who take liberties with our females.”

You don’t have to study a lot of anthropology or history to see how this line seems to be written all through human history. The horrible stoning of Dua Khalil Aswad, a 17 year old Yezidi girl who eloped with a non-Yezidi man, is an example. She was stoned to death by a crowd of 10,000 Yezidi men for “marrying an outsider”.

One of the best ways to rile up a population against an invader or an enemy is to suggest that “they are taking liberties with our women.” Countless male armies have been roused to defend the honor of the nation’s or group’s females.

We also see this in the Jim Crow laws of the South where Black males were lynched for looking at, whistling at, talking to, having sex with, or raping White women. The image of pure Southern womanhood was to be upheld with blood.

What’s up with this? Kevin MacDonald argues that there are probably dual imperatives operating here. The first is protection of the females of the tribe from mating with outsiders. This is probably done in the furtherance of “ethnic genetic interests.” That is, most tribes probably want to survive for as long as possible as an entity. The best way to do this is to keep outsiders away from your women.

At the same time, MacDonald argues that there is an opposite genetic imperative at work, that the males seek to mate with outsiders, while protecting their females from doing so. MacDonald sees this as attempting to add genetic diversity to the group to make it more fit, but I see it as more base than that.

Probably many of these mating occurred during raids in which the outsider females were raped. In many cases, they were captured as some sort of slaves, brought back to the group, and forced into marriages with males of the group.

In this way, the tribe poaches the women (probably the best, or most attractive women were favored), removes them from the competing group, and brings them into one’s own group. Though White nationalists would argue that this is genetic contamination, it surely was not seen that way. The tribe simply wishes to perpetuate itself, and the genes it utilizes in that goal are not relevant.

In older times, a woman who mated out probably was carted off by invading outsiders or went off with the outsider willingly, and hence was simply lost to the group. If all the women did this, the tribe would go extinct.

Yet males could mate out and still live with the group, since they would bring any captured women back to reside with the tribe of the man who captured her.

Further, by capturing the best females of competing outsiders, you deplete them of their best resource. If you rape them and run off, you force the outsiders to bear the children of your tribe (assuming they raise the child and don’t kill it), interjecting the genes of your own tribe into theirs against their will. It’s a form of domination and aggression of a very base sort.

Racists typically use these facts to try to justify racism by saying that everyone is a racist and that anti-racism is abnormal. This is to be condemned. At least here in the modern West, there seem to be an awful lot of folks that are significantly free of racist feelings, so it would seem we are not genetically doomed to racism.

Modern political correctness argues that the tendencies above, ethnocentrism and protection of one’s women from outsiders, are examples of the most horrible and evil racism.

The Left would simply argue that these are reactionary archaisms that must be swept away via revolution. They would probably throw in something stupid and say that these backwards tendencies are all related to economics.

But it seems so much deeper than that.

Though civilized man is capable of transcending most of his base instincts much of the time, the fact remains that at the end of the day, we are just long-legged bipedal apes.

Any sensible analysis of human behavior needs to recognize that.

Colorism in Mexico

Color is a taboo subject in Mexican society, but the elite is mostly White or at least light skinned. There is more colorism as in lighter vs. darker. A lot Mexican Whites refuse to identify as White because that means gringo. They will just identify as Mexican. But others will identify as White, or more usually, as Spaniard, Frenchman, etc.

I know a guy whose family comes from Mexico who tells me he’s “French.” But he refuses to identify as White. That’s gringo, racist, etc. He also identifies as “Hispanic.” It’s like they would rather be Hispanic or Latino than White.

But a lot of them, I tell them, “You’re a Mexican? You’re as White as I am!” And they break into these huge grins and say that their families came from Spain. They clearly think they are better than the others.

One guy was insulted when I asked him if he was a Mexican. The guy was born in Mexico! He was a Spaniard, 10

But others get a little upset when I tell them they are White, even though they are as White as I am. To say that they are White is calling them a gringo, and Mexican nationalists don’t dig imperialist gringos. They will deny being White and say that they prefer to identify as Mexican.

Also, the word “White” is sort of racist in Mexican society. Mexican society is seriously racist, but it’s also European Spaniard with regard to manners. There is a color line, sure, but officially, all Mexicans are “mestizos,” that is, there are no Indians or Whites. Everyone is mixed.

Also Mexicans are in denial about their Black heritage. Your average Mexican is as Black as a Sicilian –

My Mom took a trip to Mexico once and got into a funny conversation with the Mexican guide about that subject.

Also the guide kept referring to the miltars. My Mom calmly told her that the English word was soldiers, not militars, which is not a word in English. The female guide got really mad, insisted that militars was the right word, and kept saying militars for the rest of the tour.

Proud people.

Linguistic Map of Latin America

Map of the major languages of Latin America

This is an interesting map, though on first thought it seems unnecessary.

First of all, it makes quite clear how Brazil stands out as the Portuguese speaking state in Latin America. One could argue that this makes them odd man out, but if we look in terms of population, Latin America has a population of 570 million. 192 million of those are Brazilians. So 3

All the Spanish-speaking countries can communicate well with each other, and there is a “neutral Spanish” that any educated person can use when conversing with any other educated person from Hispanophone Latin America. As long as you are doing this, you will both be understood.

Getting down to regional dialects, things do get complicated. I understand that Chilean soap operas, spoken in the rich dialect of the Chilean street, are dubbed in the rest of South America because other South Americans can’t understand Chilean street Spanish. But they are  probably well understood in Argentina. There does seem to be a “Southern Cone Street Spanish” that is harder to pick up as the latitudes move northward.

Bolivian Spanish sounds strange, but it’s probably intelligible in South America. It heavily inflected with Indian languages.

There is a general Caribbean Spanish that can be hard to understand.

The language of the Colombian Caribbean coast can be hard for even other Colombians to understand.

Dominican Spanish is notorious for being hard to understand. First of all, it seems to be based on Canarian Spanish of the Canary Islands, which is a very strange form of Spanish. Into this base went a ton of African words, much more than in the rest of Latin America. Further, it is spoken very fast. Dominican Spanish is pretty baffling to other Spanish speakers, at least for a while. Nevertheless, there is a more neutral form of Dominican Spanish that is widely intelligible to other Hispanophones.

On the streets of Mexico City, a very hardcore slang has emerged, sort of a Mexico City Street Spanish, that is pretty hard to figure out outside of Mexico.

Latin America is interesting in that the rest of the world seems to be learning “English as the universal language,” while Latin America is lagging behind.

I know quite a few educated Latin Americans who barely speak a lick of English. Latin Americans live not so much  in the society of the Western Hemisphere, but more particularly in the society of Latin America. And Latin America is extremely Hispanophone. Everywhere you go, most everyone speaks Spanish. Spanish is a very highly developed modern language with words for everything. Why bother to learn English? What for? To talk to gringos?

However, at advanced university levels, such as Master’s Degree and particularly doctorate level, increasingly there are requirements to learn English.

One would think that Mexicans at least would be required to take some English in school, right? Forget it. First of all, Mexican schools are crap, and they are broke. The elite and upper middle class steal all the money in the country, and the Libertarian/Republican dream minimal state/free market economy hosts horribly defunded and decrepit schools. It’s not uncommon to meet 20 year old Mexicans who dropped out in the 2nd grade.

English is typically not offered in Mexican public schools. It’s only offered in private schools, which is of course where the moneyed class above sends their kids, which is why they won’t pay for public schools (They don’t use ’em), which is why the public schools are crap. I’m sure many more non-Hispanic Americans in the US are taking Spanish than Latin Americans are studying English.

Hispanophones also often do not bother to learn Portuguese. Some of the educated ones claim they can understand it without studying it, but I doubt it.

A lot of Brazilians say they can understand Spanish pretty well (I think they study Spanish more than Hispanophone Latins study Portuguese), but when you start talking to them in Spanish (which I do on a regular basis) it doesn’t seem to work very well. Want to talk to a Brazilian? Learn Portuguese!

As we can see on the map, both French Guyana and Haiti speak French.

I was talking about Haiti with my liberal Democrat Mom once. The general conversation was along the lines that Haiti was all screwed up. She said, “Well, they’re all Black, they’re dirt poor, and worst of all, they’re in the Western Hemisphere, but they all speak French!” Indeed. What do these funny Frencophones think they’re doing in our Anglophone, Hispanophone and Lusophone Hemisphere anyway?

Further, the language of Haiti is not really intelligible to French speakers. It makes about as much sense as hardcore Jamaican English does to us. However, the Haitian elite often speaks good French. They also say they understand Spanish, but I’ve tried to talk to them in Spanish, and it didn’t go anywhere. Often they don’t understand much English either. Want to talk a member of the Haitian upper class? Learn French!

So the Haitians are rather isolated in this Hemisphere, but I’m not sure if your average dirt poor Haitian cares. I suppose they could always talk to the Quebecois, but no one understands Quebecois either.

French Guyana is also a French speaking country. It’s still a colony, and it has a very nice standard of living. Nowadays, colonies don’t even want to go free anymore, as it means a standard of living crash.

As you can see, British Honduras speaks English. There are some other English speaking islands in the Caribbean and some French speaking islands too, but none are marked on the map.

Dutch has pretty much died out in the Western Hemisphere, but it used to be spoken widely in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean.

The main language of Guyana is probably some English creole, but it’s not shown on the map.

Indian languages are still very widely spoken in Peru (Quechua), Bolivia (Aymara) and Paraguay (Guarani).

Map of the Romance Speaking World

Here is a very nice map of the parts of the world that speak a Romance language, in whole or in part. The main languages covered here are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian.

Nice map of the Romance languages of the world. Click to enlarge.

The heavy Spanish speaking zone is Spain, Rio Muni, New Mexico and Latin America except for Brazil, the Guyanas, Haiti and some Caribbean islands that speak French. To a lesser extent, it is spoken Spanish Sahara and Belize. To a much lesser extent, it is spoken in  parts of the US and in the Philippines where it is a dying colonial language.

The heavy Portuguese speaking zone is Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, other parts of Africa and East Timor. In the latter countries, it is a lingua franca.

French is heavily spoken in France, Quebec, French Guyana, French Polynesia, Belgium and Switzerland, less heavily in much of Africa, especially Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Gabon, Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Mali, Togo, Cote d’Ivorie, Burkino Faso, Senegal, West Africa, Central Africa, Djibouti and Madagascar, less in the rest of Canada, and even less in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Louisiana, where it is a dying colonial language overtaken by national languages in Southeast Asia, Arabic in Northwest Africa and English in Louisiana

Italian is spoken heavily in Italy and less so in Libya and Albania.

Romanian is spoken heavily in Romania, Moldova and Serbia.

Yet More Romance Intelligibility Figures

From here.

I happen to agree with these figures. The figures involve the intelligibility of various Romance languages, spoken and written, for speakers of Spanish.

Intelligibility for Spanish speakers, oral: 7

Written: 9

As you can see, the figures are much higher for written than spoken language. This makes a lot of sense. With my fluent Spanish and some knowledge of Portuguese, French and Italian, I can pick up a fair amount of the written text of any Romance language.

Orally though, I’m typically pretty lost. The best ones are those that are closest to Spanish, such as Andalucian dialect, Aragonese, Asturian and Galician. Leonese is a lot different, heading towards Portuguese. You get to Catalan and Occitan and I start having lots of problems. Portuguese is way harder than you might think, even with my rudimentary Portuguese. Standard Italian as spoken slowly by say a documentary narrator is a bit better.  Street Italian is nearly useless to me, as is Spoken French, Romansch, Romanian, Italian dialects and hard Andalucian.

It’s very interesting that Spanish speakers can understand Galician better than they can Portuguese, but it makes sense. After all, Galicia split off from Portugal long ago and came under the influence of Castillian. I am not sure which Galician they are referring to here. There is a soft Galician that is used on Galician TV which has very heavy Castillian influence. Even I can pick it up pretty well. But there is a hard Galician of the street and the rural areas that is much harder to understand.

The figure for Catalan is much lower than for Galician because Catalan has so much French influence. Look at the dismal figure for spoken French and you can see why Spanish speakers have a hard time with it.

2

I would agree that Standard Italian, especially spoken slowly by a professional speaker, is much easier to understand than many Italian dialects, which are actually spoken languages. I’ve seen them on Youtube and I can’t make out a single word.

With my Spanish, my figures for written intelligibility of Romance are not as high as those above, but I’m not really fluent as far as reading Spanish goes. I’m a lot better at speaking it and hearing it. Others have given much lower figures than the one above for Spanish speakers reading Galician, but it probably improves very quickly in a short period of time.

The Present Status of the Irish Language

This website is a very interesting overview of the state of the Irish language today. It’s a publishing house that does nothing but publish Irish language books and tapes and books and audio on the subject of the Irish language. One would have expected them to go out of business long ago, but not only are they still in business, but they seem to be doing well. I was amazed that there was even a market for Irish language literature, but apparently there is.

There are quite a few authors of Irish language novels, poetry, short stories, children’s books and even non-fiction! The first four, one might expect, but the last was really a shocker. Some of these are published in bilingual Irish-English editions.

The reports of the death of Irish language, like that of Twain, are premature. And looking back historically, it seems that Irish was in its worst shape about 100 years ago or so. Since then, things have improved dramatically. Of course Ireland was a British colony at the time, the Brits waged an all-out war against the Irish language which was very succcessful.

With independence in 1920 came a role for the Irish language. At some point, 12 years of schooling in Irish was required, and it still is. One of the strange things about the argument that Irish is dying is that all Irish schoolchildren get 12 years of Irish education. How could Irish possibly be dying if the whole country spends the entire school career studying Irish? It doesn’t make sense.

It’s true that Irish come out of that school system with less than perfect knowledge of Irish, but around 5

I believe that until recently, all Irish students had to pass a proficiency test in Irish to graduate from high school, but I think this has been junked. In 1968, the requirement to pass an Irish proficiency exam to work for the Irish government was trashed, as it was very unpopular. Getting rid of some of these unpopular requirements will probably benefit the language, as all these strictures did was make people hate Irish. There have been loud calls for getting rid of the mandatory 12 years of Irish study, but I don’t think that’s going down yet.

The great thing nowadays is state funding. There is a lot of state funding going into Irish. There are Irish TV stations and radio stations, but the nation’s largest Irish language daily recently closed its doors. There are Irish monthlies and weeklies though.

After high school, if you go on to university, there are vigorous Irish Language programs at the university level. Many people major in Irish, and there are quite a few jobs for translators. What exactly they are translating, I’m not sure, but I think that all major government paperwork must be in Irish and in English. There are calls to get rid of this too on grounds that it’s a waste of money, but it isn’t going to happen. A large number of Irish speak Irish every day, often sprinkling their Hibernian English with Irish words and phrases.

There has long been an obsession with Gaeltacht, the region of Ireland where Irish is the native langauge of children. This area has been shrinking for over 100 years and now exists mostly in the far west of the country. On a map, the Irish speakers appear to be falling off into the sea. It’s true that the Gaeltacht is in bad shape, but it doesn’t make sense to say that the death of the Gaeltacht will be the death of Irish.

In recent years, the government has actually been paying Gaeltacht speakers to speak Irish, which seems odd. There has been quite a bit of fraud associated with this program, and the money isn’t much anyway.

The Gaeltacht has been the poorest part of Ireland for 100 years now. The result was constant emigration from the Gaeltacht. Now that it’s doing better economically, a new curse has befallen the area. Non-Irish speakers are moving into the Gaeltacht! There are alarming that the speech of young Gaeltacht Irish speakers is full of English words. Non-Irish speakers complain about not being able to understand Irish signs in the Gaeltacht.

However, in recent years, many Irish language learners go to the Gaeltacht in the summer to study Irish and interact with Irish speakers. There are also now Irish medium schools, mostly in the Gaeltacht, but also outside of it, in which all, most of much of the curriculum is delivered in Irish. These are now running into problems as immigrants move to the Gaeltacht and insist on English-medium education for their kids.

Even if the Gaeltacht dies, there will still be a huge number of Irish speakers, mostly 2nd language speakers, with varying levels of proficiency. Many of these speak and write at a native to near native level. Some of the famous Irish language authors are actually second language speakers.

There have been loud calls to create a Modern Irish out of the Irish language, that is, to make its grammar and syntax less irregular and difficult and more sane and easy to learn. This has run into a lot of obstacles, but it’s a good idea. Irish grammar is still stuck in the 15th Century and there’s a lot of needless difficulty and irregularity in there.

One of the best books on the site was an overview of the state of the Irish language today by a leading scholar of Irish. He concluded that at least we know that in 100 years, Irish is assured of being alive and well. After that, everything is up for grabs. So Irish has at least a secure century ahead of it. But being alive in 100 years is better than what’s expected for 9

That a language in as tenuous a shape as Irish has a better future than 9

More On The Hardest Languages To Learn – Indo-European Languages

Caution: This post is very long! It runs to 184 pages on the Web. Updated November 25, 2016.

This post will deal with how hard it is for English speakers to learn other IE languages. The English section will necessarily deal with how hard it is for non-English speakers to learn English, and as such will be less scientific. Nevertheless, there are certain things about English that tend to cause problems for many, such as phrasal verbs.

We did a post on this earlier, but it looks like we only scratched the surface. There are many webpages on this topic, and one could read about the subject for a long time, but after a while, things start getting repetitive.

This post is very good. There are more in various places on the Web.

For starters, before we do our own analysis, let’s look at what some other people came up with. This post is very good. They did a survey, and the post describes the results of the survey.

According to the survey, the nine hardest languages to learn overall were Mandarin, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Arabic, Hindi, Icelandic, German and Swedish.

The eight hardest languages to speak (or to pronounce correctly, specifically) were French, Mandarin, Polish, Korean, Hungarian, Arabic, Basque and Hindi.

The nine hardest languages to write were Arabic, Mandarin, Polish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, Russian, Basque and English.

How does that survey line up with the facts? Surveys are just opinions of L2 learners, and carry variant validity. For starters, let’s throw Swedish off the list altogether, as it actually seems to be a pretty easy language to learn. It’s interesting that some people find it hard, but the weight of the evidence suggests that more folks find it easy than difficult.

Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese and Russian of course use different alphabets and this is why they were rated as hard to write.

Method. 42 IE languages were examined. A literature survey, combined with interviews of various L2 language learners was conducted. In addition, 100 years of surveys on the question by language instructors was reviewed. The US military’s School of Languages in Monterey’s ratings system for difficulty of learning various languages was analyzed.

Results were collated in an impressionistic manner along a majority rules line in order to form final opinions. For example, a minority said that Portuguese or Spanish were very hard to learn, but the consensus view was that they were quite easy. In this case, the minority opinion was rejected, and the consensus view was adopted. The work received a tremendous amount of criticism, often hostile to very hostile, after publication, and many changes were made to the text.

Clearly, such a project will necessarily be more impressionistic than scientific. Scientific tests of the relative difficulty of learning different languages will have to await the development of algorithms specifically designed to measure such things. And even then, surely there will be legions of “We can’t prove anything” naysayers, as this is the heyday of the “We can’t prove anything” School of Physics Envy in Linguistics.

One common criticism was, “In Linguistics, the standard view is that there is no such thing as an easy or difficult language to learn. All languages are equally difficult or easy to learn.” Unless we are talking about children learning an L1 (and even then that’s a dubious assertion), this statement was rejected as simply untrue and exemplar of the sort of soft science (“We can’t prove anything about anything”) mushiness that has overtaken Linguistics in recent years.

Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics have long been nearly ruined by soft science mushiness, and in recent years, soft science “We can’t prove anything” muddleheadedness has overtaken Historical Linguistics in a horrible way. Bizarrely enough, this epidemic of Physics Envy has been clouded, as one might suspect, in claims of rigorous application of the scientific method.

But hard sciences prove things all the time. Whenever a field claims that almost nothing in the field is provable, you’re heading in the realms of Politically Correct soft science Humanities brain mush.

Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was judged according to how hard it would be for a non-English speaker to learn the language. Speaking, reading and writing were all considered.

Ratings. Languages were rated 1-5 based on difficulty for an English speaker, easiest to hardest. 1 = easiest, 2 = moderately easy to average, 3 = average to moderately difficult, 4 = very difficult, 5 = most difficult of all.

Time needed. Time needed for an English language speaker to learn the language “reasonably well”: Level 1 languages = 3 months-1 year. Level 2 languages = 6 months-1 year. Level 3 languages = 1-2 years. Level 4 languages = 2 years. Level 5 languages = 3-4 years, but some may take longer.

Conclusion. The soft science, Politically Correct mush-speak from the swamps of Sociolinguistics currently in vogue, “All languages are equally difficult or easy for any adult to learn,” was rejected. The results of this study indicate that languages to indeed differ dramatically in how difficult they are for L2 English language learners.

Indo-European

Indo-Iranian

Indo-Aryan

Ind0-Ayran languages like Kashmiri, Hindi and especially Sanskrit are quite hard, and Sanskrit is legendary for its extreme complexity.

Central Zone Western Hindi Hindustani Khariboli

The Hindi script is quite opaque to Westerners, some of whom say that Chinese script is easier. You speak one way if you are talking to a man or a woman, and you also need to take into account whether you as speaker are male or female. Gender is also as prominent as in Spanish; you have to remember whether any given noun is masculine or feminine.Hindi is definitely an IE language by its rich system of gender, case and number inflection.

The most difficult aspects of Hindi are the pronunciation and the case system. In addition, Hindi is split ergative, and not only that, but it actually has a tripartite ergative system, and the ergativity is split by tense like in Persian.

The distinction between aspirated/unaspirated and alveolar/retroflex consonants is hard for many to make. There is a four-way distinction ion the t and d sounds with aspirated/unaspirated dental and aspirated/unaspirated retroflex t‘s and d‘s. The are three different r sounds – one that sounds like the English r and two retroflex r‘s that are quite hard to make or even distinguish, especially at the end of a word. Hindi also has nasalized vowels.

If you come from a language that has case, Hindi’s case system will not be overly difficult.

In addition, there is a completely separate word for each number from 1-100, which seems unnecessarily complicated.

However, Hindi has a number of cognates with English. I am not sure if they are Indic loans into English or they share a common root going back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE).

loot plunder/destroy, English loot. mausaumseason/weather, English equivalent is monsoon toofanstorm, English equiv. typhoon kammarband – something tied around the waist, English equiv. cummerbund badnaam – literally bad name, means bad reputation. These are both cognates to the English words bad and name. bangalaahouse, English equiv. bungalow jangaljungle panditpriest, English equiv. pundit

Nevertheless, Hindi typically gets a high score in ratings of difficult languages to learn. Based on this high score across multiple surveys, we will give it a relatively high rating.

Hindi is rated 4, very hard to learn.

Punjabi is probably harder than any other Indic language in terms of phonology because it uses tones. It’s like Hindi with tones. It has either two or three tones: high or high-falling, low or low-rising and possibly a neutral or mid tone. It is very odd for an IE language to have tones.

Punjabi is rated 4.5, very difficult.

Eastern Zone Assamese–Bengali

Bengali is similar to Hindi, but it lacks grammatical gender, and that fact alone is said to make it much easier to learn. Bengali speak tend to make stereotypical gender errors when speaking in Hindi. Nevertheless, it uses the Sanskrit alphabet, and that alone makes it hard to read and write.

Bengali is rated 3.5, harder than average to learn.

Northern Zone Eastern Pahari

Nepali is a very difficult language to learn as it has a complex grammar. It has case not for nouns themselves but for clause constituents. It has tense, aspect, and voice. Nepali has an unbelievable 11 noun classes or genders, and affixes on the verb mark the gender, number and person of the subject. It even has split ergativity, strange for an IE language.

Nepali has the odd feature, like Japanese, of having verbs have completely different positive and negative forms.

~ hoina (I am ~ I am not) chas ~ chainas (you (intimate) are ~ you are not) bolchu ~ boldina (I speak ~ I don’t speak)

Note the extreme differences on the conjugation of the present tense of the verb to be between 1 singular and 2 familiar singular. They look nothing like each other at all.

Adjectives decline in peculiar way. There is an inflection on adjectives that means “qualified.” So can say this by either inflecting the adjective:

dublo ~ dublai (tall ~ quite tall) hoco ~ hocai (short ~ rather short) rāmro ~ rāmrai (nice ~ nice enough)

or by putting the invariant qualifying adverb in front of the adjective:

ali dubloquite tall ali hocorather short ali rāmronice enough

Nepali gets a 4.5 rating, very difficult.

Northwestern Zone

Sinhalese-Maldivian

Sinhala is also difficult but it is probably easier than most other languages in the region.

Sinhala is rated 3, average difficulty.

Sanskrit

Sanskrit is legendary for its difficulty. It has script that goes on for long sequences in which many small individual words may be buried. You have to take apart the sequences to find the small words. However, the words are further masked by tone sandhi running everything together. Once you tease the sandhi apart, you have to deal with hundreds of compound characters in the script. Once you do those two things, you are left with eight cases, nine declensions, dual number and other fun things.

Even native speakers tend to make grammatical mistakes are admit that parts of the grammar are fiendishly difficult. There are many grammatical features that are rarely or never found in any other language. Noun declension is based on the letter than the noun ends in, for instance, nouns that end in a, e or u all decline differently. There are three genders for nouns, and those all decline differently also. Each noun has eight cases and three numbers (singular, dual and plural) so there are 24 different forms for each noun. Counting the different combinations of endings and genders (all subsumed into a sort of noun class system) there are 20 different “noun classes.”

Combining the “noun classes” with the three genders, you end up with 1,440 different regular forms that nouns can take. To make matters worse, some of the cases have different forms themselves. And there are some exceptions to these rules. The I and you pronouns decline differently, but pronouns are simple compared to nouns.

For the verbs, each verb had exist in 10 different forms of tense or mood (one from Vedic Sanskrit is no longer used). There are six tenses and four moods. The six tenses are: one present tense, two future tenses and three past tenses. The moods are: imperative, dubitive (expresses uncertainty), optative (expresses hope or offers a benediction) and a form that expresses the concept if only, then… There are two different conjugations based on who is the beneficiary of the action, you or others. There are ten different classes of verbs, each of which conjugates differently. Additionally, each verb has a different form in the singular, dual and plural and in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons.

Once you get past all of that, you are ready to take on the really difficult parts of the language, participles, noun derivatives and agglutination, each of which is far more complicated than the above. To add insult to injury, Sanskrit has pitch accent.

Nevertheless, the language is so mathematically precise and regular that some have said it is a perfect language for computer programming. There may not be a single irregularity in the whole language.

Sanskrit is rated 5, extremely difficult.

Indo-Iranian Iranian Western Iranian Southwestern Iranian

Iranian

Persian is easier to learn than its reputation, as some say this is a difficult language to learn. In truth, it’s difficulty is only average, and it is one of the easier IE languages to learn. On the plus side, Persian has a very simple grammar and it is quite regular. It has no grammatical gender, no case, no articles, and adjectives never change form. Its noun system is as easy as that of English. The verbal system is a bit harder than English’s, but it is still much easier than that of even the Romance languages. The phonology is very simple.

On the down side, you will have to learn Arabic script. There are many lexical borrowings from Arabic which have no semantic equivalents in Persian.

English: two (native English word) ~ double (Latin borrowing) Note the semantic transparency in the Latin borrowing.

Persian: do (native Persian word) ~ tasneyat (Arabic borrowing) Note the utter lack of semantic correlation in the Arabic borrowing.

Some morphology was borrowed as well:

ketābbook kotobxānahlibrary (has an Arabic broken plural)

It is a quite easy language to learn at the entry level, but it is much harder to learn at the advanced level, say Sufi poetry, due to difficulty in untangling subtleties of meaning.

Persian gets a 3 rating as average difficulty.

Northwestern Iranian Kurdish

Kurdish is about as hard to learn as Persian, but it has the added difficulty of pharyngeals, which are very hard for English speakers to make. Like Persian, it is no gender or case, and it also has a tense split ergative system.

Kurdish gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Eastern Iranian Northeastern

Ossetian is a strange Iranian language that has somehow developed ejectives due to proximity of Caucasian languages which had them. An IE language with ejectives? How odd.

Ossetian gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Indo-European Romance Italo-Western Italo-Dalmatian

Italian is said to be easy to learn, especially if you speak a Romance language or English, but learning to order a pizza and really mastering it are two different things. Foreigners usually do not learn Italian at anywhere near a native level.

For instance, Italian has three types of tenses – simple, compound, and indefinite.

There are also various moods that combine to take tense forms – four subjunctive moods, two conditional moods, two gerund moods, two infinite moods, two participle moods and one imperative mood.

There are eight tenses in the indicative mood – recent past, remote pluperfect, recent pluperfect, preterite (remote past), imperfect, present, future, future perfect. There are four tenses in the subjunctive mood – present, imperfect, preterite and pluperfect. There are two tenses in the conditional mood – present and preterite. There is only one tense in the imperative mood – present. Gerund, participle and infinite moods all take only present and perfect tenses.

Altogether, using these mood-tense combinations, any Italian verb can decline in up to 21 different ways. However, the truth is that most Italians have little understanding of many of these tenses and moods. They do not know how to use them correctly. Hence they are often only used by the most educated people. So an Italian learner does not really need to learn all of these tenses and moods.

Italian has many irregular verbs. There are 600 irregular verbs with all sorts of different irregularities. Nevertheless, it is a Romance language, and Romance has gotten rid of most of its irregularity. The Slavic languages are much more irregular than Romance.

Counterintuitively, some Italian words are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. There are many different ways to say the:

Masculine:

il i lo gli l’

Feminine:

la le l’

Few Italians even write Italian 10

Italian is still easier to learn than French – for evidence see the research that shows Italian children learning to write Italian properly by age six, 6-7 years ahead of French children. This is because Italian orthography is quite sensible and coherent, with good sound-symbol correspondence. Nevertheless, the orthography is not as transparent as Spanish’s.

In a similar sense, Italian changes the meaning of verbs via addition of a verbal prefix:

scrivere ascrivere descrivere prescrivere

mettere smettere permettere sottomettere

porre proporre

portare supportare

In these cases, you create completely new verbs via the addition of the verbal prefix to the base. Without the prefix, it is a completely different verb.

Like German and French, Italian forms the auxiliary tense with two different words: avere and essere. This dual auxiliary system is more difficult than French’s and much more difficult than German’s.

Italian is somewhat harder to learn than Spanish or Portuguese but not dramatically so. Italian has more irregularities than those two and has different ways of forming plurals, including two different ways of forming plurals that can mean different things depending on the context. This is a leftover from the peculiarities of the Latin neutral gender. The rules about when plurals end in -io or -e are opaque.

In addition, Italian pronouns and verbs are more difficult than in Spanish. Grammar rules in Spanish are simpler and seem more sensible than in Italian. Italian has the pronominal adverbs ne and se. Their use is not at all intuitive, however, they can be learned with a bit of practice.

Italian pronunciation is a straightforward, but the ce and ci sounds can be problematic. The only sounds that will give you trouble are r, gl and gn.

Italian gets a 3.5 rating, average difficulty.

Often thought to be an Italian dialect, Neapolitan is actually a full language all of its own. In Italy, there is the Neapolitan language and Neapolitan Italian, which is a dialect or “accent” of Italian. Many Italians speak with a Neapolitan accent, and it is easy for non-Neapolitans to understand. However, the Neapolitan language is a a full blown language and is nearly incomprehensible to even speakers of Standard Italian.Neapolitan is said to be easier than Standard Italian. Unlike Italian, Neapolitan conjugation and the vocative are both quite simple and any irregularities that exist seem to follow definite patters.

Neapolitan gets a 2.5 rating, fairly easy.

Western Romance Gallo-Romance Oïl French

French is pretty easy to learn at a simple level, but it’s not easy to get to an advanced level. For instance, the language is full of idioms, many more than your average language, and it’s often hard to figure them out.

One problem is pronunciation. There are many nasal vowels, similar to Portuguese. The eu, u and all of the nasal vowels can be Hell for the learner. There is also a strange uvular r. The dictionary does not necessarily help you, as the pronunciation stated in the dictionary is often at odds with what you will find on the street.

There are phenomena called élision, liaison and enchainement, which is similar to sandhi in which vowels elide between words in fast speech. There are actually rules for this sort of thing, but the rules are complicated, and at any rate, for liaisons at least, they are either obligatory, permitted or forbidden depending on the nature of the words being run together, and it is hard to remember which category various word combinations fall under.

The orthography is also difficult since there are many sounds that are written but no longer pronounced, as in English. Also similar to English, orthography does not line up with pronunciation. For instance, there are 13 different ways to spell the o sound: o, ot, ots, os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö.

In addition, spoken French and written French can be quite different. Spoken French uses words and phrases such as c’est foututhe job will not be done, and on which you might never see in written French.

The English language, having no Language Committee, at least has an excuse for the frequently irrational nature of its spelling.

The French have no excuse, since they have a committee that is set up in part to keep the language as orthographically irrational as possible. One of their passions is refusing to change the spelling of words even as pronunciation changes, which is the opposite of what occurs in any sane spelling reform. So French is, like English, frozen in time, and each one has probably gone as long as the other with no spelling reform.

Furthermore, to make matters worse, the French are almost as prickly about writing properly as they are about speaking properly, and you know how they are about foreigners mangling their language.

Despite the many problems of French orthography, there are actually some rules running under the whole mess, and it is quite a bit more sensible than English orthography, which is much more chaotic.

French has a language committee that is always inventing new native French words to keep out the flood of English loans. They have a website up with an official French dictionary showing the proper native coinages to use. Another one for computer technology only is here.

On the plus side, French has a grammar that is neither simple nor difficult; that, combined with a syntax is pretty straightforward and a Latin alphabet make it relatively easy to learn for most Westerners. In addition, the English speaker will probably find more instantly recognizable cognates in French than in any other language.

A good case can be made that French is harder to learn than English. Verbs change much more, and it has grammatical gender. There are 15 tenses in the verb, 18 if you include the pluperfect and the Conditional Perfect 2 (now used only in Literary French) and the past imperative (now rarely used). That is quite a few tenses to learn, but Spanish and Portuguese have similar situations.

A good case can be made that French is harder to learn than Italian in that French children do not learn to write French properly until age 12-13, six years after Italian children.

Its grammar is much more complicated than Spanish’s. Although the subjunctive is more difficult in Spanish than in French, French is much more irregular. Like German, there are two different ways to form the auxiliary tense to have. In addition, French uses particles like y and en that complicate the grammar quite a bit.

French is one of the toughest languages to learn in the Romance family.  In many Internet threads about the hardest language to learn, many language learners list French as their most problematic language.

This is due to the illogical nature of French spelling discussed above such that the spelling of many French words must be memorized as opposed to applying a general sound-symbol correspondence rule. In addition, French uses both acute and grave accents – `´.

French gets a 3.5 rating for more than average difficulty.

Ibero-Romance West-Iberian Castilian

Spanish is often said to be one of the easiest languages to learn, though this is somewhat controversial. Personally, I’ve been learning it off and on since age six, and I still have problems, though Spanish speakers say my Spanish is good, but Hispanophones, unlike the French, are generous about these things.

It’s quite logical, though the verbs do decline a lot with tense and number, and there are many irregular verbs, similar to French.

Compare English declensions to Spanish declensions of the verb to read.

English

I read He reads

Spanish

Yo leo Tu lees El lee Nosotros leemos Vosotros leéis Ellos leen leí leeré leería leyese leyésemos leyéseis ¿leísteis? leyéremos leeréis pudísteis haber leído hubiéremos ó hubiésemos leído

Nevertheless, Romance grammar is much more regular than, say, Polish, as Romance has junked most of the irregularity. Spanish has the good grace to lack case, spelling is a piece of cake, and words are spoken just as they are written. However, there is a sort of case left over in the sense that one uses different pronouns when referring to the direct object (accusative) or indirect object (dative).

Spanish is probably the most regular of the Romance languages, surely more regular than French or Portuguese, and probably more regular than Italian or Romanian. Pluralization is very regular compared to say Italian. There are generally only two plurals, -s and -es, and the rules about when to use one or the other are straightforward. There is only one irregular plural:

hipérbaton -> hipérbatos

This is in reference to a literary figure and you would never use this form in day to day speech.

The trilled r in Spanish often hard for language learners to make.

There is a distinction in the verb to be with two different forms, ser and estar. Non-native speakers almost never learn the use these forms as well as a native speaker. The subjunctive is also difficult in Spanish, and L2 learners often struggle with it after decades of learning.

Spanish pronunciation is fairly straightforward, but there are some sounds that cause problems for learners: j, ll, ñ, g, and r.

One good thing about Spanish is Spanish speakers are generally grateful if you can speak any of their language at all, and are very tolerant of mistakes in L2 Spanish speakers.

Spanish is considered to be easier to learn for English speakers than many other languages, including German. This is because Spanish sentences follow English sentence structure more than German sentences do. Compared to other Romance languages, Spanish one of the easiest to learn. It is quite a bit easier than French, moderately easier than Literary Portuguese, and somewhat easier than Italian.

Nevertheless, Hispanophones say that few foreigners end up speaking like natives. Part of the reason for this is that Spanish is very idiomatic and the various forms of the subjunctive make for a wide range of nuance in expression. Even native speakers make many mistakes when using the subjunctive in conditional sentences. The dialects do differ quite a bit more than most people say they do. The dialects in Latin America and Spain are quite different, and in Latin America, the Argentine and Dominican dialects are very divergent.

Spanish gets rated 2.5, fairly easy.

Galician-Portuguese

Portuguese, like Spanish, is also very easy to learn, though Portuguese pronunciation is harder due to the unusual vowels such as nasal diphthongs and the strange palatal lateral ʎ, which many English speakers will mistake for an l.

Of the nasal diphthongs, ão is the hardest to make. In addition, Brazilian (Br) Portuguese has an r that sounds like an h, and l that sounds like a w and a d that sounds like a j, but only some of the time! Fortunately, in European (Eu) Portuguese, all of these sounds sound as you would expect them to.

Portuguese has two r sounds, a tapped r (ɾ) that is often misconceived as a trilled r (present in some British and Irish English dialects) and an uvular r (ʁ) which is truly difficult to make. However, this is the typical r sound found in French, German, Danish and Hebrew, so if you have a background in one of those languages, this should be an easy sound.  L2 learners not only have a hard time making them but also mix them up sometimes.

You can run many vowels together in Portuguese and still make a coherent sentence. See here:

É o a ou o b? [Euaoube] Is it (is your answer) a or b?

That utterance turns an entire sentence into a single verb via run-on vowels, five of them in a row.

Most Portuguese speakers say that Portuguese is harder to learn than Spanish, especially the variety spoken in Portugal. Eu Portuguese elides many vowels and has more sounds per symbol than Br Portuguese does. Portuguese has both nasal and oral vowels, while Spanish has only oral values. In addition, Portuguese has 12 vowel phonemes to Spanish’s five.

Portuguese has also retained the archaic subjunctive future which has been lost in many Romance languages.

Try this sentence: When I am President, I will change the law.

In Spanish, one uses the future tense as in English:

Cuando yo soy presidente, voy a cambiar la ley.

In Portuguese, you use the subjunctive future, lost in all modern Romance languages and lacking in English:

Quando eu for presidente, vou mudar a lei. – literally, When I may be President, I will possibly change the law.

The future subjunctive causes a lot of problems for Portuguese learners and is one of the main ways that it is harder than Spanish.

There is a form called the personal infinitive in Eu Portuguese in which the infinitive is actually inflected that also causes a lot of problems for Portuguese learners.

Personal infinitive:

para eu cantar      for me to sing
para tu cantares    for you to sing
para el cantar      for him to sing
para nos cantarmos  for us to sing
para eles cantarem  for them to sing

Some sentences with the personal infinitive:

Ficamos em casa do Joao ao irmos ao Porto. We are staying at John’s when we go to Porto.

Comprei-te um livro para o leres. I bought you a book for you to read.

In addition, when making the present perfect in Spanish, it is fairly easy with the use have + participle as in English.

Compare I have worked.

In Spanish:

Yo he trabajado.

In Portuguese, there is no perfect to have nor is there any participle, instead, present perfect is formed via a conjugation that varies among verbs:

Eu trabalhei – because Eu hei trabalhado makes no sense in Portuguese.

Portuguese still uses the pluperfect tense quite a bit, a tense that gone out or is heading out of most IE languages. The pluperfect is used a lot less now in Br Portuguese, but it is still very widely used in Eu Portuguese. The pluperfect is used to discuss a past action that took place before another past action. An English translation might be:

He had already gone by the time she showed up.

The italicized part would be the equivalent to the pluperfect in English.

O pássaro voara quando o gato pulou sobre ele para tentar comê-lo. The bird had (already) flown away when the cat jumped over it trying to eat it.

Even Br Portuguese has its difficulties centering around diglossia. It is written in 1700’s Eu Portuguese, but in speech, the Brazilian vernacular is used. Hence:

I love you

Amo-te or Amo-o [standard, written] Eu te amo or Eu amo você  [spoken]

We saw them

Vimo-los [standard, written] A gente viu eles  [spoken]

Even Eu Portuguese native speakers often make mistakes in Portuguese grammar when speaking. Young people writing today in Portuguese are said to be notorious for not writing or speaking it properly. The pronunciation is so complicated and difficult that even foreigners residing in Portugal for a decade never seem to get it quite right. In addition, Portuguese grammar is unimaginably complicated. There are probably more exceptions than there are rules, and even native speakers have issues with Portuguese grammar.

Portuguese gets a 3 rating, average difficulty.

Eastern Romance

Surprisingly enough, Romanian is said to be one of the harder Romance languages to speak or write properly. Even Romanians often get it wrong. One strange thing about Romanian is that the articles are attached to the noun as suffixes. In all the rest of Romance, articles are free words that precede the noun.

English  telephone the telephone
Romanian telefon   telefonul

Romanian is the only Romance language with case. There are five cases – nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, vocative – but vocative is not often use, and the other four cases combine as two cases: nominative/accusative and dative/genitive merge as single cases.

Nominative-Accusative aeroportul
Genitive-Dative       aeroportului

The genitive is hard for foreigners to learn as is the formation of plurals. The ending changes for no apparent reason when you pluralize a noun and there are also sound changes:

brad (singular) brazi (plural)

Many native speakers have problems with plurals and some of the declensions. Unlike the rest of Romance which has only two genders, masculine and feminine, Romanian has three genders – masculine, feminine and neuter (the neuter is retained from Latin). However, neuter gender is realized on the surface as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, unlike languages such as Russian where neuter gender is an entirely different gender.

The pronunciation is not terribly difficult, but it is hard to learn at first. For some odd reason, the Latinization is considered to be terrible.

Romanian is harder to learn than Spanish or Italian and possibly harder than French. However, you can have odd sentences with nothing but vowels as in Maori.

Aia-i oaia ei, o iau eu? That’s her sheep, should I take it?

It may have the most difficult grammar in Romance. Romanian has considerable Slavic influence and this will make it harder for the English speaker to learn than other Romance languages.

Romanian gets a 3.5 rating, more than average difficulty.

Germanic West Germanic Anglo–Frisian Anglic

People often say that English is easy to learn, but that is deceptive. For one thing, English has anywhere from 500,000-1 million words (said to be twice as much as any other language – but there are claims that Dutch and Arabic each have 4 million words), and the number increases by the day. Furthermore, most people don’t understand more than 50,000, and a majority might only understand 30,000 words. Yet your average person only uses 5,000 at most.

Actually, the average American or Brit uses a mere 2,500 words. As we might expect, our cultivated Continentals in Europe, such as Spaniards and French, probably have twice the regular vocabulary of English speakers and far more colloquial expressions.

In addition, verbal phrases or phrasal verbs are a nightmare. Phrasal verbs are probably left over from “separable verbs” in German. In most of the rest of IE, these become affixes as in Latin Latin cum-, ad-, pro-, in-, ex-, etc.. In many cases, phrasal verbs can have more than 10 different antagonistic meanings.

Here is a list of 123 phrasal verbs using the preposition up after a verb:

Back up – to go in reverse, often in a vehicle, or to go back over something previously dealt with that was poorly understood in order to understand it better. Be up – to be in a waking state after having slept. I’ve been up for three hours. Also to be ready to do something challenging. Are you up for it? Beat up – to defeat someone thoroughly in a violent physical fight. Bid up – to raise the price of something, usually at an auction, by calling out higher and higher bids. Blow up – to explode an explosive or for a social situation to become violent and volatile. Bone up – to study hard. Book up – all of the booking seats have been filled for some entertainment or excursion. Bottle up – to contain feelings until they are at the point of exploding. Break up – to break into various pieces, or to end a relationship, either personal or between entitles, also to split a large entity, like a large company or a state. Bruise up – to receive multiple bruises, often serious ones. Brush up – to go over a previously learned skill. Build up – to build intensively in an area, such as a town or city, from a previously less well-developed state. Burn up – burn completely or to be made very angry. Bust up – to burst out in laughter. Buy up – to buy all or most all of something. Call up – to telephone someone. Or to be ordered to appear in the military. The army called up all males aged 18-21 and ordered them to show up at the nearest recruiting office. Catch up – to reach a person or group that one had lagged behind earlier, or to take care of things, often hobbies, that had been put off by lack of time. Chat up – to talk casually with a goal in mind, usually seduction or at least flirtation. Cheer up – to change from a downcast mood to a more positive one. Chop up – to cut into many, often small, pieces. Clam up – to become very quiet suddenly and not say a thing. Clean up – to make an area thoroughly tidy or to win completely and thoroughly. Clear up – for a storm to dissipate, for a rash to go away, for a confusing matter to become understandable. Close up – to close, also to end business hours for a public business. Come up – to approach closely, to occur suddenly or to overflow. Cook up – to prepare a meal or to configure a plan, often of a sly, ingenious or devious nature. They cooked up a scheme to swindle the boss. Crack up – to laugh, often heartily or to fall apart emotionally. Crank up – elevate the volume. Crawl up – to crawl inside something. Curl up – to rest in a curled body position, either alone or with another being. Cut up – to shred or to make jokes, often of a slapstick variety. Do up – apply makeup to someone, often elaborately. Dream up – to imagine a creative notion, often an elaborate one. Dress up – to dress oneself in formal attire. Drive up – to drive towards something and then stop, or to raise the price of something by buying it intensively. Drum up – to charge someone with wrongdoing, usually criminal, usually by a state actor, usually for false reasons. Dry up – to dessicate. Eat up – implies eating something ravenously or finishing the entire meal without leaving anything left. End up – to arrive at some destination after a long winding, often convoluted journey either in space or in time. Face up – to quit avoiding your problems and meet them head on. Feel up – to grope someone sexually. Get up – to awaken or rise from a prone position. Give up – to surrender, in war or a contest, or to stop doing something trying or unpleasant that is yielding poor results, or to die, as in give up the ghost. Grow up – to attain an age or maturity or to act like a mature person, often imperative. Hang up – to place on a hanger or a wall, to end a phone call. Hike up – to pull your clothes up when they are drifting down on your body. Hit up – to visit someone casually or to ask for a favor or gift, usually small amounts of money. Hold up – to delay, to ask someone ahead of you to wait, often imperative. Also a robbery, usually with a gun and a masked robber. Hook up – to have a casual sexual encounter or to meet casually for a social encounter, often in a public place; also to connect together a mechanical devise or plug something in. Hurry up – imperative, usually an order to quit delaying and join the general group or another person in some activity, often when they are leaving to go to another place. Keep up – to maintain on a par with the competition without falling behind. Kiss up – to mend a relationship after a fight. Knock up – to impregnate. Lay up – to be sidelined due to illness or injury for a time. Let up – to ease off of someone or something, for a storm to dissipate, to stop attacking someone or s.t. Lick up – to consume all of a liquid. Light up – to set s.t. on fire or to smile suddenly and broadly. Lighten up – to reduce the downcast or hostile seriousness of the mood of a person or setting. Listen up – imperative – to order someone to pay attention, often with threats of aggression if they don’t comply. Live up – to enjoy life. Lock up – to lock securely, often locking various locks, or to imprison, or for an object or computer program to be frozen or jammed and unable to function. Look up – to search for an item of information in some sort of a database, such as a phone book or dictionary. Also to admire someone. Make up – to make amends, to apply cosmetics to one’s face or to invent a story. Man up – to elevate oneself to manly behaviors when one is slacking and behaving in an unmanly fashion. Mark up – to raise the price of s.t. Measure up – in a competition, for an entity to match the competition. Meet up – to meet someone or a group for a get meeting or date of some sort. Mess up – to fail or to confuse and disarrange s.t. so much that it is bad need or reparation. Mix up – to confuse, or to disarrange contents in a scattered fashion so that it does not resemble the original. Mop up – mop a floor or finish off the remains of an enemy army or finalize a military operation. Move up – to elevate the status of a person or entity in competition with other entities- to move up in the world. Open up – when a person has been silent about something for a long time, as if holding a secret, finally reveals the secret and begins talking. Own up – to confess to one’s sins under pressure and reluctantly. Pass up – to miss an opportunity, often a good one. Patch up – to put together a broken thing or relationship. Pay up – to pay, usually a debt, often imperative to demand payment of a debt, to pay all of what one owes so you don’t owe anymore. Pick up – to grasp an object and lift it higher, to seduce someone sexually or to acquire a new skill, usually rapidly. Play up – to dramatize. Pop up – for s.t. to appear suddenly, often out of nowhere. Put up – to hang, to tolerate, often grudgingly, or to put forward a new image. Read up – to read intensively as in studying. Rev up – to turn the RPM’s higher on a stationary engine. Ring up – to telephone someone or to charge someone on a cash register. Rise up – for an oppressed group to arouse and fight back against their oppressors. Roll up – to roll s.t. into a ball, to drive up to someone in a vehicle or to arrest all the members of an illegal group. The police rolled up that Mafia cell quickly. Run up – to tally a big bill, often foolishly or approach s.t. quickly. Shake up – to upset a paradigm, to upset emotionally. Shape up – usually imperative command ordering someone who is disorganized or slovenly to live life in a more orderly and proper fashion. Shoot up – to inject, usually illegal drugs, or to fire many projectiles into a place with a gun. Show up – to appear somewhere, often unexpectedly. Shut up – to silence, often imperative, fighting words. Sit up – to sit upright. Slip up – to fail. Speak up – to begin speaking after listening for a while, often imperative, a request for a silent person to say what they wish to say. Spit up – to vomit, usually describing a child vomiting up its food. Stand up – to go from a sitting position to a standing one quickly. Start up – to initialize an engine or a program, to open a new business to go back to something that had been terminated previously, often a fight; a recrudescence. Stay up – to not go to bed. Stick up – to rob someone, usually a street robbery with a weapon, generally a gun. Stir up – stir rapidly, upset a calm surrounding or scene or upset a paradigm. Stop up – to block the flow of liquids with some object(s). Straighten up – to go from living a dissolute or criminal life to a clean, law abiding one. Suck up – to ingratiate oneself, often in an obsequious fashion. Suit up – to get dressed in a uniform, often for athletics. Sweep up – to arrest all the members of an illegal group, often a criminal gang. Take up – to cohabit with someone – She has taken up with him. Or to develop a new skill, to bring something to a higher elevation, to cook something at a high heat to where it is assimilated. Talk up – to try to convince someone of something by discussing it dramatically and intensively. Tear up – to shred. Think up – to conjure up a plan, often an elaborate or creative one. Throw up – to vomit. Touch up – to apply the final aspects of a work nearly finished. Trip up – to stumble mentally over s.t. confusing. Turn up – to increase volume or to appear suddenly somewhere. Vacuum up – to vacuum. Use up – to finish s.t. completely so there is no more left. Wait up – to ask other parties to wait for someone who is coming in a hurry. Wake up – to awaken. Walk up – to approach someone or something. Wash up – to wash. Whip up – to cook a meal quickly or for winds to blow wildly. Work up – to exercise heavily, until you sweat to work up a sweat. Or to generate s.t. a report or s.t. of that nature done rather hurriedly in a seat of the pants and unplanned fashion. We quickly worked up a formula for dealing with the matter. Wrap up – To finish something up, often something that is taking too long. Come on, let us wrap this up and getting it over with. Also, to bring to a conclusion that ties the ends together. The story wraps up with a scene where they all get together and sing a song. Write up – often to write a report of reprimand or a violation. The officer wrote him for having no tail lights.

Here are  phrasal verbs using the preposition down:

Back down – to retreat from a challenge or a threat. Be down  – to be ready to ready to do something daring, often s.t. bad, illegal or dangerous, such as a fight or a crime. Are you down? Blow down – to knock something down via a strong wind. Break down – to take anything apart in order to reveal its component parts. Burn down – reduce s.t. to ashes, like a structure. Chop down – to fell a tree with an ax. Clamp down – to harshly police something bad in order to reduce its incidence, especially s.t. that had been ignored in the past. Climb down – to retract a poorly made statement. Cook down – to reduce the liquid content in a cooked item. Crack down – To police harshly against people doing bad things. Cut down – to fell a tree by any means or to reduce the incidence of anything, especially something bad. Drink down – to consume all of s.t. Drive down – to harshly bring down the price of something, often through brutal means. Investors drove down the price of the stock after the company’s latest product failed badly. Dress down – to deliberately dress more poorly than expected, often as a trendy fashion statement. Get down – to have fun and party, or to lie prone and remain there or to reduce something to bare essentials. Get down on the floor or Getting down to brass tacks, how can we possibly explain this anomaly other than in this particular manner? Hang down – to let one’s hair fall down in front of one’s eyes or to hang s.t. often a banner, from a building or structure. Hike down – to lower one’s pants. The gangsters hike their pants down to look tough. Hold down – to hold someone or s.t. on the floor so they cannot rise or get up. Keep down – to prevent a group, often a repressed group, from achieving via oppression by a ruling group. The Whites are keeping us Black people down. Kick down – Drug slang meaning to contribute your drugs to a group drug stash so others can consume them with you, to share your drugs with others. Often used in a challenging sense. Knock down – to hit or strike something so hard that it falls to the ground or collapses. Let down – to be discouraged by something one had high hopes for. Live down – to recover from a humiliating experience. After he was publicly humiliated, he was never able to live down his rejection by the people. Look down – to regard someone in a negative or condemnatory way from a the point of a superior person. Mark down – to discount the price of s.t., often significantly. Party down – to have fun and party Pass down – to leave s.t. of value to someone as an inheritance after a death or to inherit a saying or custom via one’s ancestors through time. It was passed down through the generations. Pat down – to frisk. Pay down – to reduce a bill, often a large bill, by making payments, often significant payments. We are slowly paying down that bill. Play down – to reduce the significance of s.t. often s.t. negative, often in order to deceive people into thinking s.t. is better than it really is. Put down – to criticize someone in a condescending way as a superior person, to insult. Play down – to deemphasize. Rip down – to tear s.t. off of a wall such as a sheet or poster. Run down – to run over something or someone with a vehicle, to review a list or to attack someone verbally for a long time. Set down – to postulate a set of rules for something. Shake down – to rob someone purely through the use of verbal or nonphysical force or power. Shoot down – to shoot at a flying object like a plane, hitting it so it crashes to the ground or to reject harshly a proposal. Shut down – to close operations of an entity. Speak down – to talk to someone in a condescending way from the point of view of a superior person. Take down – to demolish s.t. like a building, to tackle someone, or to raid and arrest many members of an illegal organization. Talk down – to speak to someone in an insulting manner as if one was superior or to mollify a very angry person to keep them from causing future damage. The police were able to talk down the shooter until he laid down his fun and set the hostages free. Tear down – to demolish or destroy someone verbally or to destroy s.t. by mechanical means. Throw down – to throw money or tokens into the pile in the center when gambling. Turn down – to reduce the volume of something or to reject an offer. Write down – to write on a sheet of paper

There are figures of speech and idioms everywhere (some estimate that up to 2

The spelling is insane and hardly follows any rules at all. The English spelling system in some ways is frozen at about the year 1500 or so. The pronunciation has changed but the spelling has not. Careful studies have shown that English-speaking children take longer to read than children speaking other languages (Finnish, Greek and various Romance and other Germanic languages) due to the difficulty of the spelling system. Romance languages were easier to read than Germanic ones.

This may be why English speakers are more likely to be diagnosed dyslexic than speakers of other languages. The dyslexia still exists if you speak a language with good sound-symbol correspondence, but it’s covered up so much by the ease of the orthography that it seems invisible, and the person can often function well. But for a dyslexic, trying to read English is like walking into a minefield.

Letters can make many different sounds, a consequence of the insane spelling system. A single sound can be spelled in many different ways: e can be spelled e, ea, ee, ei, eo, ey, ae, i, ie, and y. The k sound can spelled as c, cc, ch, ck, k, x, and q.

The rules governing the use of the indefinite, definite and zero article are opaque and possibly don’t even exist. There are synonyms for almost every word in a sentence, and the various shades of meaning can be difficult to discern. In addition, quite a few words have many different meanings. There are strange situations like read and read, which are pronounced differently and mean two different things.

English word derivation is difficult to get your mind around because of the dual origins of the English language in both Latin/French and German.

See and hear and perceptible and audible mean the same thing, but the first pair is derived from German, and the second pair is derived from Latin.

English word derivation is irregular due for the same reason:

assumeassumption (Latin) childchildish (German) buildbuilding (German)

In English we have at least 12 roots with the idea of two in them:

two twenty twelve second double dual twin pair half both dupl- semi- hemi bi- di-

However, English regular verbs generally have only a few forms in their normal paradigm. In this arrangement, there are only five forms of the verb in general use for the overwhelming majority of verbs:

present except 3rd singular  steal
3rd person singular          steals
progressive                  stealing
past                         stole
perfect                      stolen

Even a language like Spanish has many more basic forms than that. However, coming from an inflected language, the marking of only the 3rd singular and not marking anything else may seem odd.

The complicated part of English verbs is not their inflection – minimal as it is – but instead lies in the large number of irregular verbs.

There is also the oddity of the 2nd person being the same in both the singular and the plural – you. Some dialects such as US Southern English do mark the plural – you all or y’all.

English prepositions are notoriously hard, and few second language learners get them down right because they seem to obey no discernible rules.

One problem that English learners complain of is differential uses of have.

  1. Perfect tense. I have done it.
  2. Deontic (must). I have to do it.
  3. Causative. I had it done.

While English seems simple at first – past tense is easy, there is little or no case, no grammatical gender, little mood, etc., that can be quite deceptive. In European countries like Croatia, it’s hard to find a person who speaks English with even close to native speaker competence.

There are quite a few English dialects – over 100 have been recorded in London alone.

The problem with English is that it’s a mess! There are languages with very easy grammatical rules like Indonesian and languages with very hard grammatical rules like Arabic. English is one of those languages that is simply chaotic. There are rules, but there are exceptions everywhere and exceptions to the exceptions. Grammatically, it’s disaster area. It’s hard to know where to start.

However, it is often said that English has no grammatical rules. Even native speakers make this comment because that is how English seems due to its highly irregular nature. Most English native speakers, even highly educated ones, can’t name one English grammatical rule. Just to show you that English does have rules though, I will list some of them.

*Indicates an ungrammatical form.

Adjectives appear before the noun in noun phrases:

Small dogs barked. *Dogs small barked.

Adjectives are numerically invariant:

the small dog the small dogs The dog is small. The dogs are small.

Intensifiers appear before both attributive and predicative adjectives:

The very small dog barked. *The small very dog barked.

The dog was very small. *The dog was small very.

Attributive adjectives can have complements:

The dog was scared. The dog was scared of cats.

But predicative adjectives cannot:

The scared dog barked. *The scared of cats dog barked.

Articles, quantifiers, etc. appear before the adjective (and any intensifier) in a noun phrase:

The very small dog barked. *Very the small dog barked. *Very small the dog barked.

Every very small dog barked. *Very every small dog barked. *Very small every dog barked.

Relative clauses appear after the noun in a noun phrase:

The dog that barked. *The that barked dog.

The progressive verb form is the bare form with the suffix -ing, even for the most irregular verbs in the language:

being having doing

*wasing *aring *aming

The infinitive verb form is to followed by the bare form, even for the most irregular verbs in the language:

to be to have to do

*to was *to are *to am.

The imperative verb form is the bare form, even for the most irregular verb in the language:

Be! Have! Do!

*Was! *Are! *Am!

All 1st person present, 2nd person present, and plural present verb forms are equivalent to the bare form, except for to be.

All past tense verb forms of a given verb are the same regardless of person and number, except for to be.

Question inversion is optional:

You are leaving? Are you leaving?

But when inversion does occur in a wh-question, a wh-phrase is required to be fronted:

You’re seeing what? What are you seeing?

*Are you seeing what?

Wh-fronting is required to affect an entire noun phrase, not just the wh-word:

You are going to which Italian restaurant? Which Italian restaurant are you going to?

*Which are you going to Italian restaurant? *Which Italian are you going to restaurant? *Which restaurant are you going to Italian?

Wh-fronting only happens once, never more:

What are you buying from which store Which store are you buying what from?

*What which store are you buying from? *Which store what are you buying from?

The choice of auxiliary verb in compound past sentences does not depend on the choice of main verb:

I have eaten. I have arrived.

*I am eaten. *I am arrived.

cf. French

J’ai mangé. Je suis arrivé.

English can be seen as an inverted pyramid in terms of ease of learning. The basics are easy, but it gets a lot more difficult as you progress in your learning.

While it is relatively easy to speak it well enough to be more or less understandable most of the time, speaking it correctly is often not possible for a foreigner even after 20 years of regular use.

English only gets a 2.5 rating , somewhat difficult.

High German

German’s status is controversial. It’s long been considered hard to learn, but many learn it fairly easily.

Pronunciation is straightforward, but there are some problems with the müde, the Ach, and the two ch sounds in Geschichte. Although the first one is really an sch instead of a ch, English speakers lack an sch, so they will just see that as a ch. Further, there are specific rules about when to use the ss (or sz as Germans say) or hard s. The r in German is a quite strange ʁ, and of common languages, only French has a similar r. The çχ and ‘ü sounds can be hard to make. Consonant clusters like Herkunftswörterbuch or Herbstpflanze can be be difficult. German permits the hard to pronounce shp and shtr consonant clusters. Of the vowels, ö and ü seem to cause the most problems.

German grammar is quite complex. It recently scored as one of the weirdest languages in Europe on a study, and it also makes it onto worst grammars lists. The main problem is that everything is irregular. Nouns, plurals, determiners, adjectives, superlatives, verbs, participles – they are all irregular. It seems that everything in the language is irregular.

There are six different forms of the depending on the noun case:

der die das den dem des

but 16 different slots to put the six forms in, and the gender system is irrational. In a more basic sense and similar to Danish, there are three basic forms of the:

der die das

Each one goes with a particular noun, and it’s not very clear what the rules are.

One problem with German syntax is that the verb, verbs or parts of verbs doesn’t occur until the end of the sentence. This sentence structure is known as V2 syntax, and it is quite alien for English speakers. There are verbal prefixes, and they can be modified in all sorts of ways that change meanings in a subtle manner. There are dozens of different declension types for verbs, similar to Russian and Irish. There are also quite a few irregular verbs that do not fit into any of the paradigms.

German also has Schachtelsätze, box clauses, which are like clauses piled into other clauses. In addition, subclauses use SOV word order. Whereas in Romance languages you can often throw words together into a sentence and still be understood if not grammatical, in German, you must learn the sentence structure – it is mandatory and there is no way around it. The syntax is very rigid but at least very regular.

German case is also quite regular. The case exceptions can be almost counted on one hand. However, look at the verb:

helfenhelp

in which the direct object is in dative rather than the expected absolutive.

An example of German case (and case in general) is here:

The leader of the group gives the boy a dog.

In German, the sentence is case marked with the four different German cases:

Der Führer (nominative) der Gruppe (genitive) gibt dem Jungen (dative) einen Hund (accusative).

There are three genders, masculine, feminine and neutral. Yet it is difficult to tell which gender any particular noun is based on looking at it, for instance, petticoat is masculine! Any given noun inflects via the four cases and the three genders. Furthermore, the genders change between masculine and feminine in the same noun for no logical reason. Gender seems to be one of the main problems that German learners have with the language. Figuring out which word gets which gender must simply be memorized as there are no good clues.

Phonology also changes strangely as the number of the noun changes:

Haushouse (singular) Haeuserhouses (plural with umlaut)

But to change the noun to a diminutive, you add -chen:

Haueschen – little house (singular, yet has the umlaut of the plural)

This is part of a general pattern in Germanic languages of roots changing the vowel as verbs, adjectives and nouns with common roots change from one into the other. For instance, in English we have the following vowel changes in these transformed roots:

foul filth
tell tale
long length
full fill
hot  heat
do   does

Much of this has gone out of English, but it is still very common in German. Dutch is in between English and German.

German:

For sick, we have:

krank      sick
kränker    sicker
kränklich  sickly
krankhaft  pathological
kranken an to suffer from
kränken    to hurt
kränkeln   to be ailing
erkranken  to fall ill

For good, we have:

gut     good
Güte    goodness
Gut     a good
Güter   goods
gütig   kind
gütlich amicable

German also has a complicated preposition system.

German also has a vast vocabulary, the fourth largest in the world. This is either positive or negative depending on your viewpoint. Language learners often complain about learning languages with huge vocabularies, but as a native English speaker, I’m happy to speak a language with a million words. There’s a word for just about everything you want to say about anything, and then some!

On the plus side, word formation is quite regular.

Pollution is Umweltverschmutzung. It consists, logically, of two words, Umwelt and Verschmutzung, which mean environment and dirtying.

In English, you have three words, environment, dirtying and pollution, the third one, the combination of the first two, has no relation to its semantic roots in the first two words.

Nevertheless, this has its problems, since it’s not simple to figure out how the words are stuck together into bigger words, and meanings of morphemes can take years to figure out.

German has phrasal verbs as in English, but the meaning is often somewhat clear if you take the morphemes apart and look at their literal meanings. For instance:

vorschlagento suggest parses out to er schlägt vorto hit forth

whereas in English you have phrasal verbs like to get over with which even when separated out, don’t make sense literally.

German, like French and Italian, has two auxiliary tenses – habe and bin. However, their use is quite predictable and the tenses are not inflected so the dual auxiliary is easier in German than in French or especially Italian.

Reading German is actually much easier than speaking it, since to speak it correctly, you need to memorize not only genders but also adjectives and articles.

German is not very inflected, and the inflection that it does take is more regular than many other languages. Furthermore, German orthography is phonetic, and there are no silent letters.

German, like Dutch, is being flooded with English loans. While this helpful to the English speaker, others worry that the language is at risk of turning into English.

Learning German can be seen as a pyramid. It is very difficult to grasp the basics, but once you do that, it gets increasingly easy as the language follows relatively simple rules and many words are created from other words via compound words, prefixes and suffixes.

Rating German is hard to do. It doesn’t seem to deserve to a very high rating, but it makes a lot of people’s “hardest language you ever tried to learn” list for various reasons.

German gets a 3.5 rating, moderately difficult.

Low Franconian Dutch

While Dutch syntax is no more difficult than English syntax, Dutch is still harder to learn than English due to the large number of rules used in both speaking and writing. The Dutch say that few foreigners learn to speak Dutch well. Part of the problem is that some words have no meaning at all in isolation (meaning is only derived via a phrase or sentence). Word order is somewhat difficult because it is quite rigid. In particular, there are complex and very strange rules about the order of verbs in verbal clusters. It helps if you know German as the rule order is similar, but Dutch word order is harder than German word order. Foreigners often seem to get the relatively lax Dutch rules about word order wrong in long sentences.

Verbs can be difficult. For instance, there are no verbs get and move. Instead, get and move each have about a dozen different verbs in Dutch. A regular Dutch verb has six different forms.

Dutch spelling is difficult, and most Dutch people cannot even spell Dutch correctly. There are only two genders – common and neuter – as opposed to three in German – feminine, neuter and masculine. In Dutch, the masculine and feminine merged in the common gender. But most Dutch speakers cannot tell you the gender of any individual word, in part because there are few if any clues to the gender of any given noun.

There are remnants of the three gender system in that the Dutch still use masculine/feminine for some nouns. In the Netherlands now, most Dutch speakers are simply using masculine (common) for most nouns other than things that are obviously feminine like the words mother and sister.

However, in Belgium, where people speak Flemish, not Dutch, most people still know the genders of words. Not only that but the 3-gender system with masculine, feminine and neuter remains in place in Flemish. In addition, in Flemish, the definite article still makes an obvious distinction between masculine and feminine, so it is easy to figure out the gender of a noun:

ne man, nen boom, nen ezel, nen banaan (masculine) een vrouw, een koe, een wolk, een peer (feminine)

In addition, most Dutch speakers cannot tell you what pronoun to use in the 3rd person singular when conjugating a verb.

This is because there are two different systems in use for conjugating the 3sing.

The basic paradigm is:


hij      he
zij (ze) she
het      it

System 1
male persons    hij
female persons  zij
neuter words    het
animals         hij, unless noun = neuter
objects         hij, "       "
abstractions    zij, "       "
substances      hij, "       "

System 2
male persons      hij
female persons    zij
all animals       hij
all objects       hij
all abstractions  zij
all substances    het

For instance, melk is a common noun. Under system 1, it would be hij. But under system 2, it would be het because it is a substance.

The er word is tricky in Dutch. Sometimes it is translated as English there, but more often then not it is simply not translated in English translations because there is no good translation for it. There are two definite articles, de and het, and they are easily confused.

Dutch has something called modal particles, the meanings of which are quite obscure.

Some say Dutch is irregular, but the truth is that more than Dutch has a multitude of very complex rules, rules that are so complicated that is hard to even figure them out, much less understand them. Nevertheless, Dutch has 200 irregular verbs.

In some respects, Dutch is a more difficult language than English. For instance, in English, one can simply say:

The tree is in the garden.

But in Dutch (and also in German) you can’t say that. You have to be more specific. What is the tree doing in the garden? Is it standing there? Is it lying on the grass? You have to say not only that the tree is in the garden, but what it is doing there.

In Dutch, you need to say:

Daar ligt een boom in de tuin. The tree is standing in the garden.

Daar ligt een boom in de tuin. The tree is lying in the garden.

Dutch pronunciation is pretty easy, but the ui, euij, au, ou, eeuw and uu sounds can be hard to make. Dutch speakers say only Germans learn to pronounce the ui correctly.

Dutch was listed as one of the top weirdest languages in Europe in a recent study.

Dutch is almost being buried in a flood of English loans. While this helps the English speaker, others worry that the Dutch nature of the language is at risk.

Dutch seems to be easier to learn than German. Dutch has fewer cases, thus fewer articles and and adjective endings. There are two main ways of pluralizing in Dutch: adding -‘s and adding -en. Unfortunately, in German, things are much more complex than that. Dutch has only two genders (and maybe just a trace of a third) but German definitely has three genders. Verb conjugation is quite similar in both languages, but it is a bit easier in Dutch. Word order is the same: complex in both languages. Both languages are equally complex in terms of pronunciation. Both have the difficult ø and y vowels.

Dutch gets a 3 rating, average difficulty.

Afrikaans is just Dutch simplified.

Where Dutch has 200 irregular verbs, Afrikaans has only six. A Dutch verb has six different forms, but Afrikaans has only two. Afrikaans has two fewer tense than Dutch. Dutch has two genders, and Afrikaans has only one. Surely Afrikaans ought to be easier to learn than Dutch.

Afrikaans gets a 2 rating, very easy to learn.

North Germanic West Scandinavian

Icelandic is very hard to learn, much harder than Norwegian, German or Swedish. Part of the problem is pronunciation. The grammar is harder than German grammar, and there are almost no Latin-based words in it. The vocabulary is quite archaic. Modern loans are typically translated into Icelandic equivalents rather than borrowed fully into Icelandic.

There are four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive – as in German – and there are many exceptions to the case rules, or “quirky case,” as it is called. In quirky case, case can be marked on verbs, prepositions and and adjectives. The noun morphology system is highly irregular. Articles can be postfixed and inflected and added to the noun. In fact, Icelandic in general is highly irregular, not just the nouns.

Verbs are modified for tense, mood, person and number, as in many other IE languages (this is almost gone from English). There are up to ten tenses, but most of these are formed with auxiliaries as in English. Icelandic also modifies verbs for voice – active, passive and medial. Furthermore, there are four different kinds of verbs – strong, weak, reduplicating and irregular, with several conjugation categories in each division.  Many verbs just have to be memorized.

Adjectives decline in an astounding 130 different ways, but many of these forms are the same.

The language is generally SVO, but since there is so much case-marking, in poetry all possibilities – SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS – are allowed. There is also something odd called “long distance reflexives,” which I do not understand.

In addition, Icelandic has the typical Scandinavian problem of a nutty orthography.

Icelandic verbs are very regular but the sounds change so much, especially the vowels, that the whole situation gets confusing pretty fast. In addition, there are three different verbal paradigms depending on the ending of the verb:

-er -ir -re

Icelandic verbs are commonly cited as some of the hardest verb systems around, at least in Europe. Even Icelandic people say their own verbs are difficult.

Icelandic has a voiceless lateral l. This can be a hard sound to make for many learners, especially in the middle of a word. In addition, there are two alveolar trills (the rolled r sound in Spanish), and one of them is voiced while the other is voiceless. Learners say they have problems with both of these sounds. In addition to voiceless l‘s and r‘s, Icelandic also has four voiceless nasals – , , ɲ̊, and ŋ̊ – the n, m, ny (as in Spanish nina), and ng sounds.

There are also contrasts between aspirated and nonaspirated stops including the odd palatal stops and c. In addition, there is a strange voiceless palatal fricative ç (similar to the h in English huge). In addition, Icelandic has a hard to pronounce four consonant cluster strj- that occurs at the beginning of a word.

Icelandic does have the advantage of being one of the few major languages with no significant dialects, so this is a plus. Icelandic has been separated from the rest of Scandinavian for 1,100 years. Icelandic is spoken over a significant region, much of which has inhabited places separated by large expanses of uninhabitable land such as impassable glaciers, volcanoes, lava flows,  geysers and almost no food. How Icelandic managed to not develop dialects in this situation is mysterious.

Icelandic has traditionally been considered to be one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn.

Icelandic gets a 5 rating, extremely difficult to learn.

Faroese is said to be even harder to learn than Icelandic, with some very strange vowels not found in other North Germanic languages.

Faroese has strong, weak and irregular verbs. It also has a strange supine tense.

The Faroese orthography is as irrational as Icelandic’s. There are so many rules to learn to be able to write Faroese properly. Faroese, like Icelandic, prefers to coin new words rather than borrow words wholesale into its language. Therefore the English speaker will not see a lot of obvious borrowings to help them out. Some argue against this nativization process, but maybe it is better than being buried in English loans like German and Dutch are at the moment.

computertelda (derived from at telja – to count. Icelandic has a similar term. helicoptertyrla (derived from tyril – a spinning tool for making wool or loom. musictónleikur pocket calculatortelduhvølpur (Lit. computer puppy), roknimaskina (Lit. calculating machine)

Faroese has the advantage of having no verbal aspect, and verbal declension does not differ much according to person. However, Faroese has a case system like Icelandic.

Faroese gets a 5 rating,extremely difficult.

Norwegian is fairly easy to learn, and Norwegian is sometimes touted as the easiest language on Earth to learn for an English speaker.

This is confusing because Danish is described below as a more difficult language to learn, and critics say that Danish and Norwegian are the same, so they should have equal difficulty. But only one Norwegian writing system is almost the same as Danish the Danish writing system. Danish pronunciation is quite a bit different from Norwegian, and this is where the problems come in.

Even Norwegian dialects can be a problem. Foreigners get off the plane having learned a bit of Norwegian and are immediately struck by the strangeness of the multiplicity of dialects, which for the most part are easy for Norwegians to understand but can be hard for foreigners. Norwegians often only understand their many dialects due to bilingual learning and much exposure and there are definitely Norwegian dialects that even Norwegians have a hard time understand like Upper and Lower Sogn and Trondnersk.

There is also the problematic en and et alternation, as discussed with Danish. Norwegian has an irrational orthographic system, like Swedish, with silent letters and many insensible sounds, both consonants and vowels. It has gone a long time without a spelling reform. It has the additional orthographic issues of two different writing systems and a multitude of dialects. Norwegian, like Danish and Swedish, has a huge vowel inventory, one of the larger ones on Earth. It can be confusing and difficult to make all of those odd vowel sounds: 18 contrasting simple vowels, nine long and nine short , , ɛː, ɑː, , , ʉ̟ː, , øː, ɪ, ɛ, a, ɔ, ʊ, ɵ, ʏ and œ.

Norwegian has very little inflection in its words, but the syntax is very difficult. Norwegian also has “tonemes” which distinguish between homophones.

tankenthe tank tankenthe thought

have two different meanings, even though the stress and pronunciation are the same. The words are distinguished by a toneme.

For some reason, Norwegian scored very high on a study of weirdest languages on Earth, but Swedish and Danish also got high scores.

However, Norwegian is a very regular language.

Norwegian gets a 2 rating, moderately easy to learn.

East Scandinavian

Danish is a harder language to learn than one might think. It’s not hard to read or even write, but it’s quite hard to speak. However, like English, Danish has a non-phonetic orthography, so this can be problematic. It has gone a long time without a spelling reform, so there are many silent letters and sounds, both vowels and consonants, that make no sense. Danish makes it on lists of most irrational orthographies of all.

In addition, there are d words where the d is silent and other d words where it is pronounced, and though the rules are straightforward, it’s often hard for foreigners to get the hang of this. The d in hund is silent, for instance. In addition, the b, d, and g sounds are somehow voiceless in many environments. There are also the strange labiodental glide and alveopalatal fricative sounds. In certain environments, d, g, v, and r turn into vowels.

There are three strange vowels that are not in English, represented by the letters æ, ø and å. They are all present in other Scandinavian languages – æ is present in Icelandic and Norwegian, ø is part of Norwegian, and å is part of Norwegian and Swedish, but English speakers will have problems with them. In addition, Danish has creaky-voiced vowels, which is very strange for an IE language. Danish language learners often report having a hard time pronouncing Danish vowels or even telling one apart from the other. Danish makes it onto lists of the wildest phonologies on Earth,and it made it high on a list of weirdest languages on Earth.

One advantage of all of the Scandinavian languages is that their basic vocabulary (the vocabulary needed to converse at a basic level and be understood) is fairly limited. In other words, without learning a huge number of words, it is possible to have a basic conversation in these languages. This is in contrast to Chinese, where you have to learn a lot of vocabulary just to converse at a basic level.

As with Maltese and Gaelic, there is little correlation between how a Danish word is written and how it is pronounced.

Pronunciation of Danish is difficult. Speech is very fast and comes out in a continuous stream that elides entire words. Vowels in the middle and at the end of words are seldom expressed. There are nine vowel characters, and each one can be pronounced in five or six different ways. There is nearly a full diphthong set, and somehow pharyngealization is used as an accent. Danish has a huge set of vowels, one of the largest sets on Earth. The sheer number of vowels is one reason that Danish is so hard to pronounce. Danish has 32 vowels, 15 short, 13 long and four unstressed: ɑ, ɑː, a, æ, æː, ɛ, ɛː, e, e̝ː, i, , o, , ɔ, ɔː, u, , ø, øː, œ, œː, ɶ, ɶː, y, , ʌ, ɒ, ɒː, ə, ɐ, ɪ, and ʊ.

There is also a strange phonetic element called a stød, which is a very short pause slightly before the vowel(s) in a word. This element is very hard for foreigners to get right.

Just about any word has at least four meanings, and can serve as noun, verb, adjective or adverb. Danish has two genders (feminine and masculine have merged into common gender), and whether a noun is common or neuter is almost impossible to predict and simply must be memorized.

Suggesting that Danish may be harder to learn than Swedish or Norwegian, it’s said that Danish children speak later than Swedish or Norwegian children. One study comparing Danish children to Croatian tots found that the Croat children had learned over twice as many words by 15 months as the Danes. According to the study:

The University of Southern Denmark study shows that at 15 months, the average Danish toddler has mastered just 80 words, whereas a Croatian tot of the same age has a vocabulary of up to 200 terms.

[…] According to the study, the primary reason Danish children lag behind in language comprehension is because single words are difficult to extract from Danish’s slurring together of words in sentences. Danish is also one of the languages with the most vowel sounds, which leads to a ‘mushier’ pronunciation of words in everyday conversation.

Danish gets a 3 rating, average difficulty.

Swedish has the disadvantage of having hundreds of irregular verbs. Swedish also has some difficult phonemes, especially vowels, since Swedish has nine vowels, not including diphthongs. Pronunciation of the ö and å (and sometimes ä, which has a different sound) can be difficult. Swedish also has pitch accent. Pronunciation is probably the hardest part of Swedish.

Words can take either an -en or an –ett ending, and there don’t seem to be any rules about which one to use. The same word can have a number of different meanings.

Swedish, like German, has gender, but Swedish gender is quite predictable by looking at the word, unlike German, where deciding which of the three genders to use seems like a spin of the Roulette wheel.

Word order is comparatively free in that one can write a single sentence multiple ways while changing the meaning somewhat. So I didn’t know that. can be written the following ways:

Det visste jag inte. Det visste inte jag. Jag visste inte det. Jag visste det inte. Inte visste jag det.

For some reason, Swedish got a very high score on a study of the weirdest languages on Earth.

The different ways of writing that sentence depend on context. In particular, the meaning varies in terms of topic and focus.

There is a 3-way contrast in deixis:

den den här den där

Swedish also has the same problematic phrasal verbs that English does:

att slå -  beat/hit

slå av     turn off
slå fast   settle/establish
slå igen   close/shut
slå igenom become known/be a success
slå in     wrap in, come true
slå ner    beat down
slå på     turn on
slå runt   overturn
slå till   hit/strike/slap, strike a deal
slå upp    open (a book), look s.t. up

Swedish orthography is difficult in learning how to write it, since the spelling seems illogical, like in English. The sj sound in particular can be spelled many different ways. However, Swedish spelling is probably easier than English since Swedish lacks a phonemic schwa, and schwa is the source of many of the problems in English. Where allophonic schwa does appear, it seems to be predictable.

One nice thing about Swedish grammar is that it is similar to English grammar in many ways.

Swedish can be compared to a tube in terms of ease of learning. The basics are harder to learn than in English, but instead of getting more difficult as one progresses as in English, the difficulty of Swedish stays more or less the same from basics to the most complicated. But learning to speak Swedish is easy enough compared to other languages.

Swedish gets a 2.5 rating, easy to average difficulty.

Celtic

Any Gaelic language is tough. Celtic languages are harder to learn than German or Russian.

Insular Celtic Goidelic

Old Irish was the version of Irish written from 650 to 900 AD. It was used only by the educated and aristocratic elites. The rest of the population spoke a simplified version that was already on its way to becoming Middle Irish.

The verbal system in Old Irish was one of most complicated of all of the classical languages.

The persons were 1st, 2nd, 3rd and plural. The tenses were present, preterite, imperfect, perfect, future and an odd tense called secondary future. There were imperative and subjunctive moods. There was no infinitive – instead it was formed rather erratically as a verbal noun derived from the verb. This gerund underwent 10 different declensions and often looked little like the verb it is derived from.

cingidto step -> céimstepping

There were both strong and weak verbs, and each had both simple and compound forms.

Bizarrely, every verb had not one but two different paradigms – the conjunct and the absolute. You used the conjunct when the verb is preceded by a conjunct particle such as (not) or in (the question particle). You used the absolute when there was no conjunct particle in front of the verb.

Hence, the present indicative of glenaid (sticks fast), is:

Absolute   Conjunct

glenaim    :glenaim
glenai     :glenai
glenaid    :glen
glenmai    :glenam
glenthae   :glenaid
glenait    :glenat

The colon before the conjunct verbs indicates that a conjunct particle preceded the verb.

The phonological changes were some of the most complicated you could imagine. An attempt was made to orthographically portray all of these convoluted changes, but the orthography ended up a total mess.

Each consonant had four different values depending on where it was in the word and whether or not it was palatal. Hence, even though the 1st person absolute and conjunct look identical above (both are spelled glenaim), they were pronounced differently. The absolute was pronounced glyenum, and the conjunct was pronounced glyenuv.

The grammar was unbelievably complex, probably harder than Ancient Greek. There was even a non-IE substratum running underneath the language.

Old Irish gets a 5 rating, extremely difficult.

Irish students take Irish for 13 years, and some take French for five years. These students typically know French better than Irish. There are inflections for the inflections of the inflections, a convoluted aspiration system, and no words for yes or no. The system of initial consonant mutation is quite baffling. Noun declension is mystifying. Irish has irregular nouns, but there are not many of them:

the womanan bhean the womenna mná

and there are only about 10 irregular verbs. There are dozens of different declension types for verbs. The various phonological gradations, lenitions and eclipses are not particularly regular. There are “slender” and “broad” variants of many of the consonants, and it is hard to tell the difference between them when you hear them. Many learners find the slender/broad consonants the hardest part of Irish. The orthography makes many lists of worst orthographies on Earth.

Irish gets a 4.5 ratings, very difficult.

Both Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are written with non-phonetic spelling that is even more convoluted and irrational than English. This archaic spelling is in drastic need of revision, and it makes learners not want to learn the language. For instance, in Scots Gaelic, the word for taxi is tacsaidh, although the word is pronounced the same as the English word. There are simply too many unnecessary letters for too few sounds. Of the two, Scots Gaelic is harder due to many silent consonants.

Irish actually has rules for its convoluted spelling, and once you figure out the rules, it is fairly straightforward, as it is quite regular and it is actually rational in its own way. In addition, Irish recently underwent a spelling reform. The Irish spelling system does make sense in an odd way, as it marks things such as palatalization and velarization.

Scottish Gaelic and Manx have gone a long time with no spelling reforms.

Scottish Gaelic gets a 4.5 ratings, very difficult.

Manx is probably the worst Gaelic language of all in terms of its spelling since it has Gaelic spelling yet uses an orthography based on English which results in a crazy mix that makes many lists of worst scripts.

Manx gets a 4.5 rating, very difficult.

Common Byrthonic

Welsh is also very hard to learn, although Welsh has no case compared to Irish’s two cases. And Welsh has a mere five irregular verbs. The Byrthonic languages like Welsh and Breton are easier to learn than Gaelic languages like Irish and Scots Gaelic. One reason is because Welsh is written with a logical, phonetic alphabet. Welsh is also simpler grammar-wise, but things like initial consonant mutations can still seem pretty confusing and are difficult for the non-Celtic speaker to master and understand. Verbal declension is irregular.

caraf   I love
carwn   we love

cerais  I loved
carasom we loved

The problem above is that one cannot find any morpheme that means 1st person, 3rd person, or past tense in the examples. Even car- itself can change, and in connected speech often surfaces as gar-/ger-. And carwn can mean I was loving (imperfect) in addition to we love. There are no rules here, and you simply have to memorize the different forms.

Welsh gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Breton is about in the same ballpark as Welsh. It has a flexible grammar, a logical orthography and only four irregular verbs.

On the other hand, there are very few language learning materials, and most of those available are only written in French.

Breton gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Hellenic

Greek is a difficult language to learn, and it’s rated the second hardest language to learn by language professors. It’s easy to learn to speak simply, but it’s quite hard to get it down like a native. It’s the rare second language learner who attains native competence. Like English, the spelling doesn’t seem to make sense, and you have to memorize many words. Further, there is the unusual alphabet. However, the orthography is quite rational, about as good as that of Spanish. Whether or not Greek is an irregular language is controversial. It has that reputation, but some say it is not as irregular as it seems.

Greek has four cases: nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative (used when addressing someone). There are three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Nouns have several different declension patterns determined by the ending on the noun. Verb conjugations are about as complicated as in Romance. Greek does retain the odd aorist tense. In addition, it has the odd middle voice and optative mood. Greek syntax is quite complicated.

Greek gets a 5 rating, extremely difficult to learn.

Classic or Ancient Greek was worse, with a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, a pitch accent system and a truly convoluted, insanely irregular system of noun and verb inflection. It had a dual number in addition to singular and plural and a very difficult optative case. Irregular verbs had one of six different stem types. The grammar was one of the most complex of all languages, and the phonology and morphology were truly convoluted.

Ancient Greek is said to have had four different genitive cases, but it actually had four different uses of the genitive:

  1. Objective Genitive – “for obedience to faith”
  2. Subjective Genitive – “faith’s obedience” or faithful obedience
  3. Attributive Genitive – “obedience of faith”
  4. Genitive of Apposition – obedience, i.e. faith

How confusing!

Classic Greek gets a 5.5 rating, nearly hardest of all to learn.

Armenian

An  obscure branch of Indo-European, Armenian, is very hard to learn. Armenian is a difficult language in terms of grammar and phonetics, not to mention the very odd alphabet. The orthography is very regular, however there are some irregularities. For instance:

գրել , written grel but spoken gərel (schwa removed in orthography) խոսել, written xosel but spoken xosal  (a changed to e in orthography)

However, the alphabet itself presents many problems. Print and cursive can be very different, and upper case and lower case can also be quite different. Here are some pairs of letters in upper and lower case:

Ա ա Յ յ Փ փ

All in all, this means you have to memorize as many as four different shapes for each letter. However, the grammar is very regular.

In addition, many letters very closely resemble other letters, which makes it very easy to get them mixed up:

գ and զ ե and է դ and ղ ո and ռ

There are voiced consonants and an alternation between aspirated and unaspirated unvoiced consonants, so some mix up the forms for b, p and , for instance. Nevertheless, there are many things about the grammar that seem odd compared to other IE languages. For instance, Armenian has agglutination, and that is a very strange feature for an IE language.

Part of the problem is that due to its location in the Caucasus, Armenian has absorbed influences from some of the wild nearly Caucasian languages. For instance, an extinct NE Caucasian Nakh language called Tsov is thought to have contributed to the Hurro-Ururtian substratum in Armenian. So in a sense when you learn Armenian, you are also learning a bit of Chechen at the same time. For some reason, Armenian scored very high on a weirdest languages survey.

People who have learned both Arabic and Armenian felt that Armenian was much easier, so Armenian seems to be much easier than Arabic.

Armenian is rated 4, very hard to learn.

Albanian

Albanian is another obscure branch of Indo-European. Albanian nouns have two genders (masculine and feminine), five cases including the ablative, lost in all other IE. Both definite and indefinite articles are widely used, a plus for English speakers. Most inflections were lost, and whatever is left doesn’t even look very IE. The verbal system is complex, having eight tenses including two aorists and two futures, and several moods, including indicative, imperative, subjunctive, conjunctive, optative and admirative. The last three are odd cases for IE. The optative only exists in IE in Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and Manx. Oddly enough, there is no infinitive. Active and passive voices are used.

Similarly to Gaelic, Albanian is even harder to learn than either German or Russian. Albanian may be even harder to learn than Polish.

Albanian is rated 5,extremely difficult.

Slavic

All Slavic languages have certain difficulties. For instance, the problematic perfect/imperfect tenses discussed below in Czech and Slovak are present in all of Slavic. The animate/inanimate noun class distinction is present in all of Slavic also. Slavic languages also add verb prefixes to verbs, completely changing the meaning of the verb and creating a new verb (see Italian above).

East Slavic

People are divided on the difficulty of Russian, but language teachers say it’s one of the hardest to learn. Even after a couple of years of study, some learners find it hard to speak even a simple sentence correctly.

It has six basic cases – nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, instrumental and prepositional – and analyses have suggested up to 10 other cases. The most common of the extra cases are locative, partitive and several forms of vocative. All of these extra cases either do not apply to all nouns (“incomplete” cases) or seem to be identical to an existing case. At any rate, the vocative is only used in archaic prose. And there is also a locative case, which is what the exceptions to the prepositional case are referred to. Russian has two genitive cases, the so-called Genitive 1 and Genitive 2. The first one is standard genitive and the second is the genitive-partitive (see above), which is now only used in archaic prose.

The grammar is fairly easy for a Slavic language. The problem comes with the variability in pronunciation. The adjectives and endings can be difficult. In addition, Russian has gender and lots of declensions. Like Lithuanian, almost everything in the language seems to decline. The adjectives change form if the nouns they describe have different endings. Adjectives also take case somehow.

Verbs have different forms depending on the pronouns that precede them. Russian has the same issues with perfective and imperfective forms as Polish does (see the Polish section below). There are dozens of different declension types for verbs and many verbs that are irregular and don’t fit into any of the declension types. In addition, there are many irregular nouns, syncretisms, and an aspectual system that is morphologically unpredictable.

Word order is pretty free. For instance, you can say:

I love you by saying

I love you. You love I. Love you I. I you love. Love I you. You I love.

Pronunciation is strange, with one vowel that is between an ü and i. Many consonants are odd, and every consonant has a palatalized counterpart, which will be difficult to speakers whose languages lack phonemic palatalized consonants. These are the soft and hard consonants that people talk about in Russian. The bl sound is probably the hardest to make, but the trilled r is also problematic.

Russian has several words that, bizarrely, are made up of only a single consonant:

s with, off of kto, towards vin, into b – subjunctive/conditional mood particle (would) Z – emphatic particle

In addition, Russian has some very strange words that begin with a doubled consonant sound:

вводить ввести ссылка

The orthography system is irregular, so there are quite a few silent letters and words that are pronounced differently than they are spelled.

Word Silent Letters Example
здн  [знпраздник
рдц  [рцсердце
лнц  [нцсолнце
стн  [снлестница
вств [ств]          чувство
жч   [щ]            мужчина
зч   [щ]            извозчик
сч   [щ]            счастье
чт   [штчто
чн   [шнконечно
тц   [ц]            вкратце
дц   [ц]            двадцать
тч   [ч]            лётчик
дч   [ч]            докладчик
тся  [цца]          учится
ться [цца]          учиться

Stress is quite difficult in Russian since it seems arbitrary and does not appear to follow obvious rules:

дóмаat home домábuildings

One problem is that phonemic stress, not written out, changes the way the vowel is pronounced. For instance:

узнаюI’m finding out узнаюI will find out

The two are written identically, so how you tell them apart in written Russian, I have no idea. However in speech you can tell one from the other because the two forms have different stress.

Russian also has vowel reduction that is not represented in the orthography. The combination of stress and vowel reduction means that even looking at a Russian word, you are not quite sure how to pronounce it.

Like German, Russian builds morphemes into larger words. Again like German, this is worse than it sounds since the rules are not so obvious. In addition, there is the strange Cyrillic alphabet, which is nevertheless easier than the Arabic or Chinese ones. Russian also uses prepositions to combine with verbs to form the nightmare of phrasal verbs, but whereas English puts the preposition after the verb, Russian puts it in front of the verb.

All of Slavic has a distinction between animate and inanimate nouns as a sort of a noun class. Russian takes it further and even has a distinction between animate and inanimate pronouns in the male gender:

dvoje muzhchin     two men
troje muzhchin     three men
chetvero muzhchin  four men
pyatero muzhchin   five men
shestero muzhchin  six men
semero muzhchin    seven men

Compare to:

dva duba      two oaks 
tri duba      three oaks 
chetyre duba  four oaks

However, Russian only has the animate/inanimate distinction in pronouns and not in nouns in general.

Like Polish below, you use different verbs depending if you are going somewhere on foot or other than on foot. Second there is a distinction between going somewhere with a goal in mind and going somewhere with no particular goal in mind. For instance, to go:

idti (by foot, specific endpoint) xodit’ (by foot, no specific endpoint) exat’ (by conveyance, specific endpoint) ezdit’ (by conveyance, no specific endpoint)

The verb to carry also has four different forms with the same distinctions as above.

In addition, there are various prefixes you can put on a verb:

into                  v-
out of                vy-
towards               po-
away from             u-
up to the edge of     pod-
away from the edge of ot-
through               pro-
around                ob-

These prefixes look something like “verbal case.” You an add any of those prefixes to any of the going or carrying verbs above. Therefore, you can have:

poiti  –walk up to something obezdit’drive around with no goal uxodit’ –  walk away from something with no goal in mind

The combination of paths and goals results in some very specific motion verbs.

Russian is harder to learn than English. We know this because Russian children take longer to learn their language than English speaking children do. The reason given was that Russian words tended to be longer, but there may be other reasons.

Russian has the advantage of having quite a bit of Romance and Greek loans for a Slavic language, but unfortunately, you will not typically hear these words in casual conversion. Russian also has no articles. English speakers will find this odd, but others regard it as a plus.

Russian is less difficult than Czech, Polish or Serbo-Croatian.

Russian gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

West Slavic Czech and Slovak

Czech and Slovak are notoriously hard to learn; in fact, all Slavic languages are. Language professors rate the Slavic languages the third hardest to learn on Earth. Czech is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the hardest language to learn. Even the vast majority of Czechs never learn to speak their language correctly. They spend nine years in school studying Czech grammar, but some rules are learned only at university. Immigrants never seem to learn Czech well, however, there are a few foreigners who have learned Czech very well – say, three or fewer errors in a 30 minute monologue, so it is possible to learn Czech well even if it is not very common.

Writing Czech properly is even more difficult than speaking it correctly, so few Czechs write without errors. In fact, an astounding 1/3 of the population makes at least on grammatical or spelling mistake in every sentence they write! The younger generation is now even worse as far as this goes, as Czech language teaching for natives has become more lax in recent years and drills have become fewer. Nevertheless, the Czech and Slovak orthographies are very rational. There is nearly a 1-1 sound/symbol correspondence.

Even natives often mess up the conditional (would). The 3rd conditional (past conditional) has nearly gone out of modern Czech and has merged with the present conditional:

3rd conditional – If I “would have known” it, I would not have asked has merged with 2nd conditional – If I “would know” it, I would not ask.

This means conditional events in the present are no longer distinguished between those in the past, and the language is impoverished.

Native speakers also mix up a specific use of the gerund:

English:

She looked at me smiling. He walked along whistling. He was in his bed reading a book.

This is easy to say in English, and the use of these forms is rather common. However, it is very hard to make those sentences in Czech, and possibly only

Czech:

She looked at me, and she smiled. He was in his bed, and he was reading.

Czech is full of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions. It is said that there are more exceptions than there are rules. Czech has seven cases in singular and seven more cases in plural for nouns, for a total of 59 different “modes” of declension. There are also words that swing back and forth between “modes.” Adjectives and pronouns also have seven cases in the singular and plural. Czech is one of the few languages that actually has two genitive cases – one more or less possessive and the other more or less partitive. There are six genders, three in the singular and three in the plural.

When you put all that together, each noun can decline in 59 different ways. Further, these 59 different types of nouns each have 14 different forms depending on case. Verbs also decline. The verbs have both perfective and imperfective and have 45 different conjugation patterns. Czech learners often confuse the perfect and imperfect verbs. Verbs of motion can also be quite tricky.

One of the problems with Czech is that not only nouns but also verbs take gender, but they only do so in the past tense. In addition, Czech has a complicated aspect system that is often quite irregular and simply must be memorized to be learned.

This conjugation is fairly regular:

viděl continuous past – he saw uviděl punctual – once he suddenly saw vídával repetitive – he used to see (somebody/something) repeatedly

Others are less regular:

jedl continuous – he ate snědl dojedlhe ate it all up ujedlhe ate a bit of it pojedlhe finished eating jídával repetitive – he used to eat repeatedly

Czech also has an evidential system. The particle prý is used to refer to hearsay evidence that you did not personally witness.

Prý je tam zima. Someone said/People say it’s cold outside.

Truth is that almost every word in the language is subject to declension. The suffixes on nouns and verbs change all the time in strange ways.

There are some difficult consonants such as š, č, ť, ž, ľ, ď, dz, , ĺ and ŕ. It’s full of words that don’t seem to have vowels.

Entire Czech sentences can have extreme consonant clusters that appear to lack vowels:

Strč prst skrz krk. Stick a finger through your neck.

Smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh. A morel full of spots welted from fogs…

Mlž pln skvrn zvh.

However, the letters r and l are considered “half-vowels” in Czech, so the sentences above are easier to pronounce than you might think.

The letters ř and r (Czech has contrasting alveolar trills) are hard to pronounce, and ř is often said to exist in no longer language, including other Slavic languages. It is only found in one other language on Earth –  the Papuan language Kobon, which pronounces it a bit differently. Even Czechs have a hard time making these sounds properly (especially the ř), and many L2 speakers never get them right. There is also a hard and soft i which is hard to figure out.

As with other Slavic languages like Russian, it has the added problem of fairly loose word order. In addition, there are significant differences between casual and formal speech where you use different forms for someone you are familiar with (are on a first name basis with) as opposed to someone you do not know well. In addition, females use different endings for the past tense than men do.

On the plus side, Czech stress, like that of Polish, is regular as the accent is always on the first syllable. But if you come from a language such as Spanish where the accent is typically on the second syllable, this might present an obstacle.

Czech gets a 5.5 rating, nearly hardest of all.

Slovak is closely related to Czech, and it is controversial which one is harder to learn. Slovak is definitely more archaic than Czech. Some say that Slovak is easier because it has a more regular grammar. Slovak has the additional problem is marking acute accents: á, é, í, ĺ, ó, ŕ, ú and ý. Slovak fortunately lacks the impossible Czech ř sound. Instead it has something called a “long r,” (ŕ) which is not very easy to make either. This is something like the er sound in English her.

Slovak, like Czech, has retained the vocative, but it almost extinct as it is restricted to only a few nouns. Like Polish and Sorbian, Slovak also has an animate/inanimate distinction in gender for plural nouns. So Slovak has five genders: masculine, feminine and neuter in the singular and animate and inanimate in the plural.

Some say that Slovak is even harder than Polish, and there may be a good case that Czech and Slovak are harder than Polish.

Slovak gets a 5.5 rating, nearly hardest of all.

Lechitic

Polish is similar to Czech and Slovak in having words that seem to have no vowels, but in Polish at least there are invisible vowels. That’s not so obviously the case with Czech. Nevertheless, try these sentences:

  1. Wszczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie.
  2. Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu.
  3. W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie.

I and y, s and z, je and ě alternate at the ends of some words, but the rules governing when to do this, if they exist, don’t seem sensible. The letter ť is very hard to pronounce. There are nasal vowels as in Portuguese. The ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, sz, cz, dz, , sounds are hard for foreigners to make. There are sounds that it is even hard for native speakers to make as they require a lot tongue movements. A word such as szczescie is hard to Polish L2 speakers to pronounce. Polish written to spoken pronunciation makes little sense, as in English – h and ch are one sound – h, ó and u are the same sound, and u may form diphthongs where it sounds like ł, so u and ł can be the same sound in some cases.

The confusing distinction between h/ch has gone of most spoken Polish. Furthermore, there is a language committee, but like the French one, it is more concerned with preserving the history or the etymology of the word and less with spelling the word phonemically. Language committees don’t always do their jobs!

Polish orthography, while being regular, is very complex. Polish uses a Latin alphabet unlike most other Slavic languages which use a Cyrillic alphabet. The letters are: A Ą B C Ć D E Ę F G H I J K L Ł M N Ń O Ó Q P R S T U V W X  Y Z Ź Ż. Even Poles say that their orthography is very complicated.

Polish is even complex in terms of pronunciation. There are apparently rules for regarding comma use, but the rules are so complex that even native speakers can’t make sense of them.

Further, native speakers speak so fast it’s hard for non-natives to understand them. Due to the consonant-ridden nature of Polish, it is harder to pronounce than most Asian languages. Listening comprehension is made difficult by all of the sh and ch like sounds. Furthermore, since few foreigners learn Polish, Poles are not used to hearing their language mangled by second-language learners. Therefore, foreigners’ Polish will seldom be understood.

Polish grammar is said to be more difficult than Russian grammar. Polish has the following:

There are five different tenses: zaprzeszły, przeszły, teraźniejszy, przyszły prosty, and przyszły złozony.

There are seven different genders: masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter in the singular and animate and inanimate in the plural. However, masculine animate and masculine inanimate and the plural genders are only distinguished in accusative. Masculine animate, masculine inanimate and neuter genders have similar declensions; only feminine gender differs significantly.

Masculine nouns have five patterns of declension, and feminine and neuter nouns have six different patterns of declension. Adjectives have two different declension patterns. Numbers have five different declension patterns: główne, porządkowe, zbiorowe, nieokreślone, and ułamkowe. There is a special pattern for nouns that are only plural.

There are seven different cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative. Only the genitive locative cases are irregular, the latter only in the singular. Verbs have nine different persons in their declensions: ja, ty, on, ona, ono, my, wy, oni, one. There are different conjugation patterns for men and women. There are 18 different conjugation patterns in the verb (11 main ones). There are five different polite forms: for a man, a woman, men, women and men and women combined.

There are four different participle forms, three of which inflect. Some of these are active and others are passive, but the whole system is incredibly complex. All of the participles decline like nouns, each gender adds its bit to each pattern which in turn change more according to tense.

Polish has seven cases, including the vocative which has gone out of most Slavic. The vocative is often said to be dying out, becoming less common or only used in formal situations, but the truth is that it is still commonly used.

In an informal situation, a Pole might be more like to use nominative rather than vocative:

Cześć Marek! (Nom.), rather than Cześć Marku! (Voc.)

However, in a more formal situation, the vocative is still likely to be used:

Dzień dobry panie profesorze/doktorze! (Voc.). Dzień dobry pan profesor/doktor! (Nom.) would never be used, even in casual conversation.

Case declension is very irregular, unlike German. Polish consonant gradation is called oboczność (variation).

The genders of nouns cause the adjectives modifying them to inflect differently.

Noun
matka    mother (female gender)
ojciec   father (male gender)
dziecko  child (neuter gender)

Modifying Adjective
brzydkiugly ugly

Singular
brzydka matka     ugly mother
brzydki ojciec    ugly father
brzydkie dziecko  ugly child

Plural
brzydkie matki    ugly mothers
brzydcy ojcowie  ugly fathers
brzydkie dzieci   ugly children

Gender even effects verbs.

I ate (female speaker) Ja zjadłam
I ate (male speaker)   Ja zjadłem

There are two different forms of the verb kill depending on whether the 1st person singular and plural and 2nd person plural killers are males or females.

I killed     zabiłem/zabiłam
We killed    zabiliśmy/zabiłyśmy
They killed  zabili/zabiły

The perfective and imperfective tenses create a dense jungle of forms:

kupować - to buy

Singular  Simple Past         Imperfect
I (f.)    kupiłam             kupowałam
I (m.)    kupiłem             kupowałem
you (f.)  kupiłaś             kupowałaś
you (m.)  kupiłeś             kupowałeś
he        kupił               kupował
she       kupiła              kupowała
it        kupiło              kupowało

Plural
we (f.)   kupiłyśmy           kupowałyśmy
we (m.)   kupiliśmy           kupowaliśmy
you (f.)  kupiłyście          kupowałyście 
you (m.)  kupiliście          kupowaliście
they (f.) kupiły              kupowały
they (m.) kupili              kupowali

The verb above forms an incredible 28 different forms in the perfect and imperfect past tense alone.

The existence of the perfective and imperfective verbs themselves is the least of the problem. The problem is that each verb – perfective or imperfective – is in effect a separate verb altogether, instead of just being conjugated differently.

The verb to see has two completely different verbs in Polish:

widziec zobaczyc

WidziałemI saw (repeatedly in the past, like I saw the sun come up every morning). ZobaczyłemI saw (only once; I saw the sun come up yesterday).

Some of these verbs are obviously related to each other:

robić/zrobić czytać/przeczytać zachowywać/zachować jeść/zjeść

But others are very different:

mówić/powiedzieć widzieć/zobaczyć kłaść/położyć

This is not a tense difference – the very verbs themselves are different! So for every verb in the language, you effectively have to learn two different verbs. The irregular forms may date from archaic Polish.

In addition, the future perfect and future imperfect often conjugate completely differently, though the past forms usually conjugate in the same way – note the -em endings above. There is no present perfect as in English, since in Polish the action must be completed, and you can’t be doing something at this precise moment and at the same time have just finished doing it. 9

It’s often said that one of the advantages of Polish is that there are only three tenses, but this is not really case, as there are at least eight tenses:

Indicative         grac       to play
Present            gram       I play 
Past               gralem     I played
Conditional        gralbym    I would play
Future             będę grać  I will play
Continuous future  będę grał  I will be playing
Perfective future  bogram     I will have played*
Perf. conditional  pogralbym  I would have played

*Implies you will finish the action

There is also an aspectual distinction made when referring to the past. Different forms are used based on whether or not the action has been completed.

Whereas in English we use one word for go no matter what mode of transportation we are using to get from one place to another, in Polish, you use different verbs if you are going by foot, by car, by plane, by boat or by other means of transportation.

In addition, there is an animate-inanimate distinction in gender. Look at the following nouns:

hat      kapelusz
computer komputer
dog      pies
student  uczen

All are masculine gender, but computer and hat are inanimate, and student and dog are animate, so they inflect differently.

I see a new hatWidze nowy kapelusz I see a new studentWidze nowego ucznia

Notice how the now- form changed.

In addition to completely irregular verbs, there are also irregular nouns in Polish:

człowiek -> ludzie

Let us look at pronouns. English has one word for the genitive case of the 1st person singular – my. In Polish, depending on the context, you can have the following 11 forms, and actually there are even more than 11:

mój moje moja moją mojego mojemu mojej moim moi moich moimi

Numerals can be complex. English has one word for the number 2 – two. Polish has 21 words for two, and  all of them are in common use.

dwa (nominative non-masculine personal male and neuter and non-masculine personal accusative) dwaj (masculine personal nominative) dwie (nominative and accusative female) dwóch (genitive, locative and masculine personal accusative) dwom (dative) dwóm (dative) dwu (alternative version sometimes used for instrumental, genitive, locative and dative) dwoma (masculine instrumental) dwiema (female instrumental) dwoje (collective, nominative + accusative) dwojga (collective, genitive) dwojgu (collective, dative + locative) dwójka (noun, nominative) dwójkę (noun, accusative) dwójki (noun, genitive) dwójce (noun, dative and locative) dwójką (noun, instrumental) dwójko (vocative) dwojgiem (collective, instrumental) dwójkach dwójek dwója dwójkami

Polish also has the paucal form like Serbo-Croatian. It is the remains of the old dual. The paucal applies to impersonal masculine, feminine and neuter nouns but not to personal masculine nouns.

Personal Masculine

one boy     jeden chłopiec
two boys    dwóch chłopców
three boys  trzech chłopców
four boys   czterech chłopców
five boys   pięciu chłopców
six boys    sześciu chłopców
seven boys  siedmiu chłopców
eight boys  ośmiu chłopców

Impersonal Masculine

one dog     jeden pies
two dogs    dwa psy
three dogs  trzy psy
four dogs   cztery psy
five dogs   pięć psów
six dogs    sześć psów
seven dogs  siedem psów
eight dogs  osiem psów

In the above, two, three and four dogs is in the paucal (psy), while two, three or four men is not and is instead in the plural (chłopców)

A single noun can change in many ways and take many different forms. Compare przyjacielfriend

                             Singular         Plural
who is my friend             przyjaciel       przyjaciele
who is not my friend         przyjaciela      przyjaciół
friend who I give s.t. to    przyjacielowi    przyjaciołom
friend who I see             przyjaciela      przyjaciół
friend who I go with         z przyajcielem   z przyjaciółmi
friend who I dream of        o przyjacielu    o przyjaciołach
Oh my friend!                Przyajcielu!     Przyjaciele!

There are 12 different forms of the noun friend above.

Plurals change based on number. In English, the plural of telephone is telephones, whether you have two or 1,000 of them. In Polish, you use different words depending on how many telephones you have:

two, three or four telefony, but five telefonów.

Sometimes, this radically changes the word, as in hands:

four ręce, but five rąk.

There are also irregular diminutives such as

psiaczek  -> słoneczko

Polish seems like Lithuanian in the sense that almost every grammatical form seems to inflect in some way or other. Even conjunctions inflect in Polish.

In addition, like Serbo-Croatian, Polish can use multiple negation in a sentence. You can use up to five negatives in a perfectly grammatical sentence:

Nikt nikomu nigdy nic nie powiedział. Nobody ever said anything to anyone.

Like Russian, there are multiple different ways to say the same thing in Polish. However, the meaning changes subtly with these different word combinations, so you are not exactly saying the same thing with each change or word order. Nevertheless, this mess does not seem to be something that would be transparent to the Polish learner.

In English, you can say Ann has a cat, but you can’t mix the words up and mean the same thing. In Polish you can say Ann has a cat five different ways:

Ania ma kota. Kota ma Ania. Ma Ania kota. Kota Ania ma. Ma kota Ania.

The first one is the most common, but the other four can certainly be used. The truth that while the general meaning is the same in each sentence, the deep meaning changes with each sentence having a slightly different nuanced interpretation.

In addition, Polish has a wide variety of dialects, and a huge vocabulary. Although Polish grammar is said to be irregular, this is probably not true. It only gives the appearance of being irregular as there are so many different rules, but there is a method to the madness underneath it all. The rules themselves are so complex and numerous that it is hard to figure them all out.

Polish appears to be more difficult than Russian. For example, in Russian as in English, the 1st through 3rd person past tense forms are equivalent, whereas in Polish, they are each different:

          English   Russian     Polish

1st past  I went    ya pashou   ja poszedłem 
2nd past  you went  ty pashou   ty poszedłeś
3rd past  he went   on pashou   on poszedł

Even adult Poles make a lot of mistakes in speaking and writing Polish properly. However, most Poles are quite proud of their difficult language (though a few hate it) and even take pride in its difficult nature.

On the positive side, in Polish, the stress is fixed, there are no short or long vowels nor is there any vowel harmony, there are no tones and it uses a Latin alphabet.

Polish is one of the most difficult of the Slavic languages. Even Poles say it is very hard to learn. Most Poles do not learn to speak proper Polish until they are 16 years old! Although most Poles know how to speak proper Polish, they often use improper forms when speaking formally, not because they do not know how to speak correctly but simply because they feel like it.do

It is harder than Russian and probably also harder than Czech, though this is controversial. There is a lot of controversy regarding which is harder, Czech or Polish.

Polish gets a 5 rating, extremely difficult.

South Slavic Eastern

It’s controversial whether Bulgarian is an easy or hard language to learn. The truth is that it may be the easiest Slavic language to learn, but all Slavic language  are hard. Though it is close to Russian, there are Russians who have been living there for 20 years and still can’t understand it well.

It has few cases compared to the rest of Slavic. There are three cases, but they are present only in pronouns. The only case in nouns is vocative. This is odd because most Slavic languages have either lost or are in the process of losing the vocative, and in Bulgarian it is the only case that has been retained. Compared to English, Bulgarian is well structured and straightforward with little irregularity. In addition, Bulgarian has more Romance (mostly French) and Greek borrowings than any other Slavic languages. Romance came in via the Vlahs who lived there before the Slavs moved in and Greek from the Byzantine period. In recent years, many English borrowings have also gone in.

Bulgarian has a suffixed general article that is not found in the rest of Slavic but is apparently an areal feature borrowed from Albanian. The stress rules are nightmarish, and it seems as if there are no rules.

Bulgarian has grammatical gender, with three genders – masculine, feminine and neuter. In addition, adjectives must agree with the gender of the noun they are modifying. In English, adjectives are invariable no matter what the noun is:

pretty man pretty woman pretty horse pretty table

However, the Bulgarian alphabet is comparatively simple compared to other Slavic alphabets. Since 1945, it has only had 30 letters. Compare this to the 70 letters in Polish. There are only six vowels, and it has the easiest consonant clusters in Slavic. The orthography is very regular, with no odd spellings. The Cyrillic alphabet is different for those coming from a Latin alphabet and can present problems. For one thing, letters that look like English letters are pronounced in different ways:

В is pronounced v in Bulgarian E is pronounced eh in Bulgarian P is pronounced r in Bulgarian

There are a number of Bulgarian letters that look like nothing you have ever seen before: Ж, Я, Ь, Ю, Й, Щ, Ш, and Ч. Bulgarian handwriting varies to a great degree and the various styles are often difficult to map back onto the typewritten letters that they represent.

While Bulgarian has the advantage of lacking much case, Bulgarian verbs are quite complex even compared to other Slavic languages. Each Bulgarian verb can have up to 3,000 forms as it changes across person, number, voice, aspect, mood, tense and gender. Bulgarian has two aspects (perfect and imperfect), voice, nine tenses, five moods and six non infinitival verbal forms.

For instance, each verb has at two aspects – simple and continuous – for each of the tenses, which are formed in different ways. Onto this they add a variety of derivatives such as prefixes, suffixes, etc. that change the meaning in subtle ways:

Aorist or Perfect:

да прочитамto read in whole a single text/book/etc (viewed as fact, that is the duration of the action does not interest us) да изчитам – to read every book there is on the subject (viewed as fact, that is the duration of the action does not interest us) да дочетаto finish reading something (viewed as fact, that is the duration of the action does not interest us)

Continuous or Imperfect:

да четаto be reading (viewed as an action in progress) да прочитамto read in whole a single text/book/etc (viewed as an action in progress) да изчитамto read every book there is on the subject (viewed as an action in progress)

Mood is very complicated. There are different ways to say the same idea depending on how you know of the event. If you know about it historically, you mark the sentence with a particular mood. If you doubt the event, you mark with another mood.

If you know it historically but doubt it, you use yet another mood. And there are more than that. These forms were apparently borrowed from Turkish. These forms are rare in world languages. One is Yamana, a Patagonian language that has only one speaker left.

In Bulgarian, you always know if something is a noun, a verb or an adjective due to its marking. You will never have the same word as an adjective, noun and verb. In English, you can have words that act as verbs, adjectives and nouns.

Let’s dance! Let’s go to the dance. Let’s go to dance lessons.

Bulgarian is probably the easiest Slavic language to learn.

Bulgarian gets a 3.5 rating, above average difficulty.

Macedonian is very close to Bulgarian, and some say it is a dialect of Bulgarian. However, I believe that is a separate language closely related to Bulgarian. Macedonian is said the be the easiest Slavic language to learn, easier than Bulgarian. This is because it is easier to pronounce than Bulgarian. Like Bulgarian, Macedonian has lost most all of its case. But there are very few language learning materials for Macedonian.

Macedonian gets a 3.5 rating, above average difficulty.

Western

Serbo-Croatian, similar to Czech, has seven cases in the singular and seven in the plural, plus there are several different declensions. The vocative is still going strong in Serbo-Croatian (S-C), as in Polish, Ukrainian and Bulgarian. There 15 different types of declensions: seven tenses, three genders, three genres or moods, and two aspects. Whereas English has one word for the number 2 – two, Serbo-Croatian has 17 words or forms.

Case abbreviations below: N = NAV – nominative, accusative, vocative G = Genitive D = Dative L =Locative I = Instrumental

Masculine inanimate gender N dva G dvaju D L I dvama

Feminine gender N dve G dveju D L I dvema

Mixed gender N dvoje G dvoga D L I dvoma

Masculine animate gender N dvojica G dvojice D L dvojici I dvojicom

“Twosome” N dvojka G dvojke D L dvojci I dvojkom

The grammar is incredibly complex. There are imperfective and perfective verbs, but when you try to figure out how to build one from the other, it seems irregular. This is the hardest part of Serbo-Croatian grammar, and foreigners not familiar with other Slavic tongues usually never get it right.

Serbian has a strange form called the “paucal.” It is the remains of the old dual, and it also exists in Polish and Russian.  The paucal is a verbal number like singular, plural and dual. It is used with the numbers dva (2), tri (3), četiri (4) and oba/obadva (both) and also with any number that contains 2, 3 or 4 (22, 102, 1032).

gledalac            viewer
pažljiv(i)          careful
gledalac pažljiv(i) careful viewer

1 careful viewer  jedan pažljivi gledalac 
2 careful viewers dva pažljiva gledaoca   
3 careful viewers tri pažljiva gledaoca   
5 careful viewers pet pažljivih gledalaca

Above, pažljivi gledalac is singular, pažljivih gledalaca is plural and pažljiva gledaoca is paucal.

As in English, there are many different ways to say the same thing. Pronouns are so rarely used that some learners are surprised that they exist, since pronimalization is marked on the verb as person and number. Word order is almost free or at least seems arbitrary, similar to Russian.

Serbo-Croatian, like Lithuanian, has pitch accent – low-rising, low-falling, short-rising and short-falling. It’s not the same as tone, but it’s similar. In addition to the pitch accent differentiating words, you also have an accented syllable somewhere in the word, which as in English, is unmarked. And when the word conjugates or declines, the pitch accent can jump around in the word to another syllable and even changes its type in ways that do not seem transparent. It’s almost impossible for foreigners to get this pitch-accent right.

The “hard” ch sound is written č, while the “soft” ch sound is written ć. It has syllabic r and l. Long consonant clusters are permitted. See this sentence:

Na vrh brda vrba mrda.

However, in many of these consonant clusters, a schwa is present between consonants in speech, though it is not written out.

S-C, like Russian, has words that consist of only a single consonant:

swith

Serbo-Croatian does benefit from a phonetic orthography.

It is said that few if any foreigners ever master Serbo-Croatian well. Similar to Czech and Polish, it is said that many native speakers make mistakes in S-C even after decades of speaking it, especially in pitch accent.

Serbo-Croatian is often considered to be one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. It is harder than Russian but not as hard as Polish.

Serbo-Croatian gets a 4.5 rating, very difficult.

Slovenian or Slovene is also a very hard language to learn, probably on a par with Serbo-Croatian. It has three number distinctions, singular, dual and plural. It’s the only major IE European language that has retained the dual. Sorbian has also retained the dual, but it is a minor tongue. However, the dual may be going out in Slovenia. In Primorska it is not used at all, and in the rest of Slovenia, the feminine dual is not used in casual speech (plural is used instead), but the masculine dual is still used for masculine nouns and mixed pairs of masculine and feminine nouns.

In addition, there are six cases, as Slovene has lost the vocative. There are 18 different declensions of the word son, but five of them are identical, so there are really only 13 different forms.

   Singular Dual       Plural 
1. Sin      Sina       Sini
2. Sina     Sinov      Sinov
3. Sinu     Sinovoma   Sinovom
4. Sina     Sinova     Sinove
5. O sinu   O sinovoma O sinovih
6. S sinom  Z sinovoma Z sini

There are seven different ways that nouns decline depending on gender, but there are exceptions to all of the gender rules. The use of particles such as pa is largely idiomatic. In addition, there is a lack of language learning materials for Slovene.

Some sounds are problematic. Learners have a hard time with the č and ž sounds. There are also “open” and “closed” vowels as in Portuguese.

Here is an example of a word that can be difficult to pronounce:

križiščecrossroads

However, Slovene has the past perfect that is the same as the English tense, lost in the rest of Slavic. In addition, via contact with German and Italian, many Germanic and Romance loans have gone in. If you know some German and have some knowledge of another Slavic language, Slovene is not overwhelmingly difficult.

Some people worry that Slovene might go extinct in the near future, as it is spoken by only 2 million people. However, even this small language has 356, 881 headwords in an online dictionary. So it is clear that Slovene has plenty enough vocabulary to deal with the modern world.

Slovene is easier than Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Czech or Slovak.

Slovenian gets a 4 rating, very hard.

Baltic

Eastern Baltic

Lithuanian, an archaic Indo-European Baltic tongue, is extremely difficult to learn. There are many dialects, which is interesting for such a small country, and the grammar is very difficult, with many rules. There is grammatical gender for nouns, and in addition, even numerals have gender in all cases. The language is heavily inflectional such that you can almost speak without using prepositions.

A single verb has 16 participial forms, and that is just using masculine gender for the participles. You can also add feminine forms to that verb. There are two main genders or giminės, masculine and feminine, but there is also neutral gender (bevardė giminė), which has three different forms. Verbs further decline via number (singular, dual and plural) and six different cases. There are five classes of verbs and six modes of declension for nouns (linksniai). However, Lithuanian verb tense is quite regular. You only need to remember infinitive, 3rd person present and 3rd person past, and after that, all of the conjugations are regular.

Here is an example of the Lithuanian verb:

Eiti – “to go. Ei is the verb root, and ti is in infinitival suffix.

Verbs decline according to:

Person and number
1st singular einu   I go  
3rd dual     einava we two go
1st plural   einame we go

The four tenses

2nd pl. past       Ėjote    you (guys) went
2 sing. imperfect  eidavote you used to go
2 sing. indicative einate   you go
2 sing. future     eisite   you will go

They also change according to something called “participants.” The participant paradigm has three tenses and all three genders. Participants are further divided into direct and indirect.

Regular direct participant (3 tenses, 3 genders)

Male
Ėjęs   while he himself went
einąs  while he himself is going
eisiąs while he himself will be going

Female
Ėjusi  while she herself went

Neuter
buvo einama while it itself went
einama      while it itself was going
bus einama  while it itself will be going

Regular indirect participant (3 tenses, 3 genders)

Male
past    eidytas     one that was forced to go
present eidomas     one that is being forced to go
future  bus eidomas one that will be forced to go

Semi participant (no tenses, 2 genders)

Male
eidamas while going himself

Female
eidama  while going herself

Active participant (2 tenses, no genders)

past    Ėjus   while going (in the past)
present einant while going now

2nd infinitive or budinys (no tenses)

eite in a way of going

Plusquamperfect (be + regular participants)

Paradigm
indicative būti   to have been gone
present    yra    has been gone
past       buvo   had been gone 
imperfect  būdavo used to have been gone 
future     bus    will have been gone

past 3pl   buvo ėję they had been gone 

Additional moods 

Imperative (all persons) 

Eik!             Go! 
Eikime!          Let's go! 
Teeina/Lai eina! Let him/her go! 

Subjunctive (all persons) 
eičiau I would go 
eitum  thou would go

In addition, while most verb marking is done via suffixes, Lithuanian can make aspect via both suffixes and prefixes, bizarrely enough (Arkadiev 2011).

Determining whether a noun is masculine or feminine is easier than in German where you often have to memorize which noun takes which gender. Lithuanian is similar to Spanish in that the ending will often give you a hint about which gender the noun takes.

Here is an example of the sort of convolutions you have to go through to attach the adjective good to a noun.

geras - good

             Masculine          Feminine

             Singular  Plural   Singular  Plural
Nominative   geras     geri     gera      geros
Genitive     gero      gerų     geros     gerų
Dative       geram     geriems  gerai     geroms
Accusative   gerą      gerus    gerą      geras
Instrumental geru      gerais   gera      geromis
Locative     gerame    geruose  geroje    gerose

The noun system in general of Lithuanian is probably more complicated even than the complex Russian noun system. Lithuanian is possibly more irregular and may have more declensions than even Polish. Learners often feel that the grammar is illogical.

Furthermore, while it does not have lexical tone per se, it does have pitch accent – there are three different pitches or degrees (laipsniai), which sound like tones but are not tones. Stress is hardly predictable and nearly needs to be learned word by word. It’s almost impossible for foreigners to get the accent right, and the accents tend to move around a lot across words during declension/conjugation such that the rules are opaque if they exist at all. It was formerly thought to be nearly random, but it has now been found that Lithuanian stress actually falls into four paradigms, so there is a system there after all.

You cannot really forget about lexical tone when learning Lithuanian, as stress is as fundamental to Lithuanian as tone is to Mandarin.

Often you need a dictionary to figure out where the accent should be on a word. Lithuanian pronunciation is also difficult. For example, look at rimti (to get calm) and rimti (serious – plural, masculine, nominative). There is a short i sound that is the same in both words, but the only difference is where the stress or pitch accent goes. Consonants undergo some complicated changes due to palatalization. Lithuanian has soft and hard (palatalized and nonpalatalized) consonants as in Russian.

Try these words and phrases:

šalna šąla šiandien ačiū už skanią vakarienę pasikiškiakopūsteliaudamasis ūkis malūnas čežėti šiauduose

Or this paragraph:

Labas, kaip šiandien sekasi? Aš esu iš Lietuvos, kur gyvenu visą savo gyvenimą. Lietuvių kalba yra sunkiausia iš visų pasaulyje. Ačiū už dėmesį.

Lithuanian is an archaic IE language that has preserved a lot of forms that the others have lost.

In spite of all of that, picking up the basics of Lithuanian may be easier than it seems, and while foreigners usually never get the pitch-accent down, the actual rules are fairly sensible. Nevertheless, many learners never figure out these rules and to them, there seem to be no rules for pitch accent.

Learning Lithuanian is similar to learning Latin. If you’ve been able to learn Latin, Lithuanian should not be too hard. Also, Lithuanian is very phonetic; words are pronounced how they are spelled.

Some languages that are similar to English, like Norwegian and Dutch, can be learned to a certain extent simply by learning words and ignoring grammar. I know Spanish and have been able to learn a fair amount of Portuguese, French and Italian without learning a bit of grammar in any of them.

Lithuanian won’t work that way because due to case, base words change form all the time, so it will seem like you are always running into new words, when it fact it’s the same base word declining in various case forms. There’s no shortcut with Latin and Lithuanian. You need to learn the case grammar first, or little of it will make sense.

Some say that Lithuanian is even harder to learn than the hardest Slavic languages like Polish and Czech. It may be true.

Lithuanian gets a 5 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Latvian is another Baltic language that is somewhat similar to Lithuanian. It’s also hard to learn. Try this:

Sveiki, esmu no Latvijas, un mūsu valoda ir skanīga, skaista un ar ļoti sarežģītu gramatisko sistēmu.

Latvian and Lithuanian are definitely harder to learn than Russian. They both have aspects like in Russian but have more cases than Russian, plus a lot more irregular verbs. Latvian, like Lithuanian, has a tremendous amount of inflection. The long vowels can be hard to pronounce.

Latvian is easier to learn than Lithuanian. The grammar is easier to figure out and the phonological system is much easier. Also, Latvian has lost many archaic IE features that Lithuanian has retained. Latvian has regular stress, always on the first syllable, as opposed to Lithuanian’s truly insane stress system. Latvian has fewer noun declensions, and fewer difficult consonant clusters.

Latvian gets a 4.5 rating, very hard.

References

Arkadiev, Peter. 2011. On the Aspectual Uses of the Prefix Be- in Lithuanian.
Baltic Linguistics 2:37-78.
Seymour, Philip H. K.; Aro, Mikko; Erskine, Jane M. and the COST Action A8 Network. 2003. Foundation Literacy Acquisition in European Orthographies. British Journal of Psychology 94:143–174.

This research takes a lot of time, and I do not get paid anything for it. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a a contribution to support more of this valuable research.

Some Interesting Spanish Accents

In this part of California, we get lots of tourists. In addition, there are so many Spanish speakers that one may as well be living in a Hispanophone country. I have to remind people now and again that this is actually the USA and not Mexico. I was in the drugstore the other day and I made an official complaint to the manager. There were two aisle signs saying something about products being on sale. Only the Spanish side of the sign was visible. The English side of the side was leaning up against a row of shelves.

I complained and said that both languages should be visible. If the sign’s in Spanish, you ought to be able to walk around to the other side of the sign and read the English. They indulged me, but it’s an uphill battle around here. I think most of these damned Hispanics around here would be pleased as Punch if everything in town was in Spanish and nothing was in English. The majority of them are illegals anyway, and they are basically Mexicans first and Americans second, if at all.

Getting on to the accents.

The first one I heard was in the mountains. It was a group of tourists going to Yosemite. Some of them looked sort of Black (more like the sort of “mulattos” you see more in Latin America than in the US), others seemed sort of like Mediterranean Whites, but they didn’t look like they were from Europe.

They were speaking a Romance language that at first I thought was Portuguese. I heard these Spanish words, but lots of Romance languages sound Spanish. Thing is, if you hear Spanish words with a weird accent, you don’t think it’s Spanish. You think it’s another language. I asked them if they were speaking Portuguese. They laughed and said they were speaking Puerto Rican Spanish. It was very different!

The mulatto-looking man was a Dominican, and he was a very handsome, quiet, polite and dignified fellow in a particular manner that not many US Blacks are.

A while later, I heard another strange language. Once again, I started hearing some Spanish words, but something said it wasn’t Spanish. It sounded more like…Italian. There were a group of them, and they looked somewhat like Mediterranean Whites from Europe. They had a very “European” air about them. I asked them what they were speaking, Was it Italian? They laughed and said they were speaking Colombian Spanish.

They were from all over Colombia, Barranquilla, Bogota, and they had a very sensual, friendly, warm manner that one often finds in Mediterranean Europeans. The young woman in particular was almost seductive, but I wondered if it were more her nature than a personal thing.

I once knew an upper class woman from Bogota who spoke the strangest yet most beautiful Spanish. It almost sounded like French or Catalan. It was one of the most sensual, seductive and sexy accents I have ever heard. I also spoke with some of her friends and relatives, and they were incredibly polite, and they also spoke with this odd accent. They showered praise and honorary adjectives on me that I don’t deserve. Upper class Colombians are some of the politest and most dignified people on Earth. What’s fascinating is that the nicest people around seem to spend most of their time slaughtering each other.

And just the other day, at the ATM, I heard another Romance language. An older couple, who looked a lot like Mediterranean Whites, were talking at the teller. The guy even wore a beret or fisherman’s cap like such men wear in Europe. I could not place the language, but once again it sounded like Portuguese or Italian, but I hadn’t the faintest idea what it was. I asked them what they were speaking, and the guy said Argentine Spanish. This is probably the weirdest Spanish or all. It sounds like Italian but with Spanish words!

Once again, the guy was effusive, friendly and warm in a way that we cold Nordics are not. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder and we had a nice talk.

Lots of funny Spanishes out there! All you have to do is open your ears.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans and Their Early Descendants: Proto-Languages and Homelands

The Indo-European languages include most of the languages of Europe, Iran and Northern India. For instance, English, Gaelic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Albanian, Armenian and Kurdish are some of the better-known IE languages of Europe and the Near East. In Iran, the major language, Farsi, is IE, as is the major language Pashto in Afghanistan. In India and Pakistan, the huge languages Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are all IE. They go back to a proto-language called Proto Indo-European, or PIE. In that the languages are all related, the truth is that the peoples are all related to for the greatest part. So Northern Indians, Pashtuns, Iranians, Kurds and Armenians are all closely related to Europeans since they all sprung in part from a common source, in the famous words of Sir William Jones, who discovered the IE languages in the late 1700’s. Going back 6,500 years, we can reconstruct Proto-Indo-European quite well. One of the best resources is Julius Pokorny‘s Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (or downloadable copy on the blog here (huge file). The homeland of the Indo-Europeans is the subject of much debate, but the modern consensus centers around putting the homeland at 6500 years before present (YBP) around Southern Russia. I have narrowed it to southern Russia, southeastern Ukraine and southwestern Kazakhstan north of the Caucasus. This is more or less the region in between the Black and Caspian Seas. An arid region called the Kuma-Manych Depression is in the middle of this region and seems to be a major center of PIE culture. I could not find a map of the Depression, but it separates the North Caucasus from the Russian Plain. There were also settlements in southeastern Ukraine near the Sea of Azov, about 50 miles north of the Caspian Sea in southwestern Kazakhstan and up around the Lower Volga Region near Samara. A good word for this general region is the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

The homeland of the Proto Indo Europeans, as of 6,500 YBP. I looked around for good maps of the PIE homeland but I could not find any, so I drew my own. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.
The homeland of the Proto Indo-Europeans, as of 6,500 YBP. I looked around for good maps of the PIE homeland but I could not find any, so I drew my own. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.
From there, it’s not really known how or when the Proto-Indo-Europeans spread out, but they show up in Europe some time later. A good map of their migrations or conquests is here. The PIE people had several advantages over their neighbors. They were already into the Bronze Age for one, and not only that, but there were horses running around Southern Russia. The PIE had managed to domesticate the horse. That’s quite an advantage, but the PIE people did one better. They even invented a wheel. Then they logically put the two together and made horse-drawn chariots. With these chariots, the PIE people apparently conquered much of Europe and later parts of Southwest Asia and South Asia. The people in Europe at this time were pre-PIE folks. We know little about their culture, but the master of PIE culture, the celebrated professor Marija Gimbutas (A woman!) calls it “Old Europe.” Old Europe is very little known or understood. A probable surviving language from Old Europe is Basque. Another, long extinct, is Etruscan. The very early people of the British Isles, whose descendants are now known as the Black Irish, populated the Isles between 9000-11000 YBP. They had dark hair, dark eyes and very pale skin. Genetically, they seem to resemble the Basques and may have come on boats from Spain. The Basques themselves and related peoples may have come from the Caucasus long, long ago. Although Basque is said to have no living relatives, I believe it is related to Caucasian languages like Chechen and Ingush. Throughout Europe one finds folks called Black this and Black that. I had a girlfriend who called herself a Black Swede and later on, a girlfriend named Linda of Polish heritage. Both had very dark, curly hair, dark eyes and very pale skin. As a guess, these types of Europeans may be the remains of Old Europe. Gimbutas is also the founder of the Kurgan Hypothesis, which is currently the best PIE theory out there. Gimbutas (photo) sort of lost it towards the end when she got into “Goddess worship” and whatnot, but it’s clear that this Lithuanian archeologist was one of the great scholars of our time. Some time after 6500 YBP, PIE began to break up, but no one knows quite how this occurred. At any rate, by 4200 YBP, a split had occurred in PIE and a separate language had broken off, Indo-Iranian. There are maps out there of the Indo-Iranian homeland, but I don’t like them all that much so I made my own. My best guess was to place it in the far north of Kazakhstan and just over the border into Russia. From there, after 3500 YBP, the Indo-Aryans moved out and migrated into Afghanistan, Pakistan, North India and Iran. Many people in these regions today speak Indo-Iranian languages descended from these people. These folks are thought to be the source of the famous Aryan Invasion of India at around this time.
A map of the Indo-Iranian Homeland in far northern Kazakhstan around 3,500 YBP. This is where the Iranians, Afghans, North Indians and many Pakistanis came from. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.
A map of the Indo-Iranian Homeland in far northern Kazakhstan around 3500 YBP. This is where the Iranians, Afghans, North Indians and many Pakistanis came from. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.
As I noted, the process whereby these languages split off, other than the Indo-Aryan split, is little known. However, assuming this tree diagram is correct, maybe it can shed some light on the matter.
A very interesting tree diagram of the IE language family.
A very interesting tree diagram of the IE language family. Click to enlarge.
Unfortunately, this chart is hard to read, so I will try to decipher it. The first thing to note is the Anatolian split in the tree, apparently the first split. There are problems with the date for PIE. A glottochronological study recently gave a date of about 8500 YBP for PIE, considerably earlier than the usual date of around 6500 YBP. Promoters of something called the Anatolian Hypothesis have used this to suggest than an earlier language called Proto-Indo-Hittite was spoken in Anatolia 8500 years ago. The Anatolian languages split off, and the PIE speakers moved to the Pontic Steppe. The movement of Proto-Indo-Hittite speakers out of Anatolia to the Pontic Steppe to form the PIE people may be related to the Black Sea Deluge Theory which has recently been proven correct. The Black Sea expanded dramatically according to this theory as, around 7600 YBP, a waterfall 200 times the size of Niagara Falls (!) poured through the Bosporus Straits, transforming the pre-Black Sea freshwater lake into the present-day brackish (part-salt water, part-fresh water) Black Sea. Soon after this event, PIE culture appears in the Pontic Steppe. This is a very controversial proposal called the Indo-Hittite Theory, but I have long supported it. The late Joseph Greenberg, one of the greatest historical linguists that ever lived, also supported it. This theory holds that Indo-European has two branches, Indo-European proper and the Hittite branch. The Hittite branch is related to the other branch only in a binary fashion. There is good evidence for this. The Anatolian languages, all of which are now extinct, are very strange and seem distant from the rest. The appear archaic and have retained many forms which seem to not be present on the rest of IE. My guess is these are archaic forms. Anatolian lacks grammatical gender – masculine:feminine, an IE innovation spread through the family. Instead, it has an archaic noun class system called animate:inanimate. This is reminiscent of ancient Niger-Congo languages in Africa. In addition, the Anatolian vowel system is reduced (fewer vowels) and the case system is simpler. Many basic IE vocabulary terms are simply missing in Anatolian. All of this debris tends to add up to the hypothesis of an ancient branch of the language family. Tocharian is visible on the diagram as Italo-Celtic-Tocharian. This branch is extremely strange, since Tocharian was spoken way over in Asia near East Turkestan and Kyrgyzstan, and Celtic and Italic are spoken in the heart of Europe. This is the area where the mummies with blond hair and blue eyes have been found. Tocharian may have split as early as 6000 YBP. The Tocharian language is also very ancient and strange and is only distantly related to the rest of IE. If anything, it seems to look somewhat like Anatolian. A very ancient branch of IE also split off around this time. Known as Balkan or Paleo-Balkan, it may also have split off 6000 YBP. There were two major branches, Thracian and Illyro-Venetic. Thracian is extinct, and all that remains of Illyro-Venetic is Albanian, a very ancient IE tongue that is only distantly related to the rest of IE. Proto-Illyrian and Thracian split around 4200 YBP. Here is a map of the Illyrian tribes before the Roman conquest. It is from this milieu that the Albanians emerged. The Albanian language is quite strange within IE and seems to have very ancient roots dating back to Proto-Paleo-Balkan from 6000 YBP. Another very early split you can see in the chart is something called Indo-Irano-Armeno-Hellenic. The Armeno-Hellenic branch probably split off 6000 YBP. The fact that Armenians and Greeks today still possibly retain a PIE appearance is also suggested by this early split. Only the Greek languages and Armenian remain of this family, as most of the family is extinct. Proto-Hellenic may have split off around 5000 YBP, and Proto-Armenian may have split around 4500 YBP. The proto-Hellenics seem to have been related to the Indo-Iranians. This may be why a number of North Indians look like Greeks, Turks or Armenians. Armenian and Hellenic are also strange IE branches that are only distantly related to the rest of IE. The Italo-Celtic branch broke off as early as 5000 YBP. Proto-Celtic split about 2800 YBP; the homeland is in Northern Austria. The Hallstatt Culture is associated with them. The Proto-Italics are dated to around 3500 YBP in Italy. Before that, the Italo-Celtic Homeland is thought to have been in southern and central Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The fact that Italics (Italians and related languages) and Celts share common roots shows how insane and stupid Nordicism is, as Nordicists say that Italians south of the Po are ‘non-Whites.’ It turns out that those greasy dagos and those blond and blue guys in dresses blowing pipes in the Highlands are the same folks after all, as they share common genetic roots in Austria 3500 YBP. Proto-Germanic also dates far back, with pre-Proto-Germanic possibly being spoken 3800 YBP in northern Germany, Denmark and Southern Scandinavia ( map). The homeland of the pre-proto-Germanics is in Southern Sweden and Jutland. They may have settled this area as early as 5000 YBP. These speakers may have been speaking something called Balto-Slavo-Germanic, a group you can see on the tree above. Proto-Germanic proper probably dates from the Jasdorf Culture. The homeland of the proto-Germanics was in northern Germany, around Schleswig-Holstein south into the Lower Elbe region in what is now Saxony-Anhalt and the Hanover area. It also extended along the Baltic coast of Germany to about the Polish border, down into Brandenburg and Mecklenburg. The original center of the homeland was in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony. Balto-Slavic is also a very ancient branch of IE. Lithuanian is an ancient IE language that is very conservative and has retained many ancient IE reflexes that have been lost in the rest of IE. Proto-Balto-Slavic probably split around 4000 YBP. Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic split apart about 3400 YBP. Map of the Balto-Slavic homeland. This homeland encompassed Western Ukraine, Belarus and Eastern Poland. Proto-Slavic, dating from 3400 YBP, seems to have its homeland in Northern and Western Ukraine and in Southern Belarus. The proto-Baltic homeland dating from the same time frame is about the southern border region of Belarus around the Pinsk Marshes. The rest of the splits, of Slavic, Italic, Celtic, Indian, Iranian and Germanic into their branches, are pretty well-documented, and all occur within the past 1500-3000 years. Let us move to some interesting dilemmas about the Indo-Europeans. One is the distribution of R1a associated with the Indo-Europeans.
The map of the R1a lineage showing high concentrations in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
The map of the R1a lineage showing high concentrations in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
The highest levels of this haplogroup are found in Eastern Europe in a narrow band from the Black Sea in the Ukraine through Poland to the Baltic Sea and in Northern India and areas to the northwest around the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, but that does not mean that these two groups are particularly closely related. Northern Indians are most closely related to Iranians and relatively distantly to Eastern Europeans. The truth is that this haplogroup is only a signature of a split from around the Aryan-Greco homeland in the Pontic Steppe region discussed above. This left high levels of R1a in Eastern Europe and in north India. High levels in North India are not particularly notable but exist only due to a founder effect. Actually, the highest levels are not found in North India but in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and north Afghanistan. The high levels found in North India have led some to assume incorrectly that the homeland of the R1a people was in that area, but this is not the case.
A map of R1b DNA distribution. The homeland of the R1b line is the Maykop Culture, shown in the shaded pink region between the Caspian and Black Seas.
A map of R1b DNA distribution. The homeland of the R1b line is the Maykop Culture, shown in the shaded pink region between the Caspian and Black Seas.
R1b levels are highest in Spain and the Western British Isles. The launching point for the R1b seems to have been the Maykop Culture of 5500 YBP. From there, they spread all over Europe. The Maykop Culture was an early PIE split that existed between the Taman Peninsula just east of the Crimea east to the Dagestan border in the area that includes part of Southern Russia east of the Crimea, Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia and Chechnya in the Caucasus. The center of the culture was around Maykop in Adygea (Circassia). The region is now inhabited by peoples of the Caucasus and is heavily Muslim. An explanation:

The Proto-Indo-Europeans belonged both R1a and R1b. Their homeland was in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, in what is known as the Kurgan culture (7000-2200 BCE).

The presence of R1b in modern times between the Black Sea and the Caucasus hints at the Maykop culture (3500-2500 BCE) as their most plausible homeland, while the Eurasian steppes to the north were R1a territory. […]

A comparison with the Indo-Iranian invasion of South Asia shows that 4 The impact of the Indo-Europeans was more severe in Europe because European society 4,000 years ago was less developed in terms of agriculture, technology (no bronze weapons) and population density than that of the Indus Valley civilization. This is particularly true of the native Western European cultures where farming arrived much later than in the Balkans or central Europe. Greece was the most advanced of European societies and was the least affected in terms of haplogroup replacement. Native European Y-DNA haplogroups (I1, I2a, I2b) also survived better in regions that were more difficult to reach or less hospitable, like Scandinavia, Brittany, Sardinia or the Dinaric Alps[…] The eastern branch of the R1a steppe people was the Andronovo culture (2300-1000 BCE), around modern Kazakhstan, which correspond to the Indo-Iranian branch of languages. Their migration to the south have resulted in high R1a frequencies in southern Central Asia, Iran and the Indian subcontinent. The highest frequency of R1a (about 6

References

Pokorny, Julius. 1959, 2007. Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Published on the Internet: Indo-European Language Revival Association.

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Who Were The Ancient Romans?

This is an interesting question mostly because it would be academic and noncontroversial except that Nordicists have chosen to shove their hateful snouts into the matter and create a bunch of lies. The proto-Italics, later to become the Romans in part, came from Austria 2900 YBP. No quite knows who Austrians were at that point racially, as Germanics don’t show up in Austria until late in the Roman Empire near the Fall. A sector of the Nordicists have created a lie to disinherit the Italians of their claim to the Roman Empire. According to this lie, the ruling class of the Romans were pure Germanics, and the rabble/refuse were just a bunch of racially degenerated dagos. They enlist all sorts of nonsensical evidence in favor of this supposition, including looking at statues and paintings and whatnot. The Nordicist notion stems from their incredulity that a bunch of no good wops could have created one of the greatest empires known to mankind. It’s interesting that many Nazi racialist authors did not subscribe to the standard Nordicist lie of today. The Nazis were quite clear that the Italians of today were the descendants of the Romans. In fact, Nazi racial hierarchy placed Meds only slightly below Nordics on the racial scale. Both were seen as highly superior races, but the Nordics were seen as a bit better, as supremacists always have to put themselves on top. Nazi theory held that both Meds and Nords had a lot of good and bad racial tendencies, and held that Meds were superior to Nords in many ways. In particular, the Meds were seen as one of the most, if not the most, creative race in modern times, or possibly ever. The Nordicist distortion of today stems from the UK and the US. The US was settled by Northern Europeans and the Southern Europeans, including Italians, who immigrated starting 130 years ago were seen as highly inferior on a racial basis. Science has not born this claim out, but it remains a part of US founding stock culture, and it was a motivating factor being the restrictive 1925 Immigration Act. I don’t know the UK racially very well, but I suspect that they have always looked down on the Continent in general, and probably the Southern Europeans in particular. Not when it comes to partying in Mallorca though I guess. Anyway, the truth is that modern Nordicists have so distorted even Nazi Nordicism that most modern Nordicists would have probably been booted out of the Nazi Party at the time. I am not trying to romanticize the Nazis here, but in terms of racial science, they were correct in some ways. Contrary to popular nonsense, Nazis did not hold Jews to be inferior. Nazi racialism quite correctly recognized the superiority of the Jews. Instead, they just held that the Jews were evil. The Nazis employed racialist academics who followed the army on their gruesome deeds. Over by the Caucasus, these academics undertook deep scientific studies that concluded that certain Jewish groups in that area were not racially Jewish, but instead were culturally Jewish. The Nazis were not as insane as everyone says, and they held by the findings of their scientists and saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews on that basis. The pro-Meds have been battling the Nordicists about this for nearly a century now, and I support the Meds’ side of the argument. From Roman sources we get reports describing Romans in quite the same way as the peoples of Abruzzo to the Po would be described today. Germanics were described as blond, blue and very different looking than Romans. The only difference between the Romans and the Abruzzo to Po Italians of today is that the people in this region are actually more Germanized today than they were under the Romans! To the South, there have been some changes, including a large injection of Arab, Phoenician, Spanish, Corsican, French (Norman), Greek and Albanian genes. This is most marked in Sicily. One lie is that the Abruzzo to Po Italians have lots of Black blood in them. To the South, yes, there is some Black blood, but it is minimal. It is most prominent in Sicily at around Academics have stayed out of the debate only to say that the ancient Romans were the same people as modern day Italians. A similar lie was spread about Greece on the same basis. How could these dumb-ass Southern European inferiors have produced one of the greatest societies in history? It’s obviously not possible, so some mysterious Germanics must have infiltrated that rocky land to surreptitiously ruled over those swarthy inferiors. Once again, statues and whatnot are enlisted in support of this, and Nordicists study art and statues with magnifying glasses claiming to see secret Master Race features in Greek art. The Meds have gone at them again in this argument, and once again, I side with the Meds. The Nordicist argument is curious. If Romans and Greeks were secret Master Race types, then obviously the central Italians and Greeks, as largely racially unchanged folks, are their descendants anyway. The argument becomes circular. The Nords try to say that the Central Italians and Greeks underwent some massive racial degeneration after the Falls, but there is no evidence for this. As with Southern Italians, there seems to be some Black blood in the Greeks, but only about Some Nordicists make a truly insane argument about Ancient Egypt which is almost as insane as the Afrocentric crap about Black Athena. According to this, some Master Race White types created Egypt, then Egypt underwent racial degeneration with an infusion of Black blood and collapsed into the Hellish Cairo of today, trash dumps everywhere, mangy stray dogs in the streets, and rats about as big as the dogs scurrying through the open air markets.

Garbage in Naples. Descendants of the great Romans? Afraid so. How so? A historian might say that down through time, shit happens.
Garbage in Naples. Descendants of the great Romans? Afraid so. How so? A historian might say that down through time, shit happens.
Not only that, but nothing works, and in order to get hooked up to the non-working system, you have to wait in line forever and pay off a bunch of lazy pricks. Academics once again stay out of this one, except to say that they think there was continuity between Ancient and modern Egyptians. I saw one piece in the Journal of Physical Anthropology that compared genes of ancient Egyptians with those of modern Egyptians. Amazingly, racially, they were about the same at 9 The truth is somewhat interesting. While the Afrocentrist notion must be discarded, it’s certainly true that at least historically, a bit of Black blood mixed with mostly White stock has produced some of the greatest societies the world has ever seen. At 90-9 It’s difficult to come up with a theory to explain why this stock did so well, but possibly mixing a bit of one stock to a lot of another produces an excellent genetic set. Anyway, this is how animal and plant breeders have been operating for centuries. It would be surprising if humans were different. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Check Out Galician

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UzwWh91UVc] Galician is a language similar to Portuguese that is spoken in Spain by about 3.5 million speakers. Speakers are located in the far northwest of Spain in the region of Galicia. Galicia is one of four languages other than Castilian that are recognized by Spain. The other three are Basque, Catalan and Aranese (Occitan). Galician is having problems lately, as a lot of speakers in urban areas are not speaking it anymore, and much of the speaker base is located in rural areas. Nevertheless, it is still widely spoken outside of large cities, even by young people. There have been some problems setting up Galician-medium schools, as the Spanish state doesn’t seem to want to pay for it. The state of Galicia has not done a very good job of preserving the language. For instance, most of the Galician TV stations are in Castillian. Despite all of this, Galician is still doing pretty well and should be secure for the remainder of the 21st Century. Galician is related to Portuguese, but Portuguese speakers are very ethnocentric and crazy about their language, and they have adopted the notion that all dialects of Portuguese can understand each other. This is not the case, as there are several languages under the Portuguese rubric, and even saying that Brazilian and European Portuguese are the same language is getting harder and harder of a case to make. A group called “Reintegrationists” insists that Galician is a dialect of Portuguese, but this does not seem to be the case. For one thing, Portuguese and Galician are not really fully intelligible. So it looks like the best case is to split Galician off as a separate language closely related to Portuguese. As long as we are talking about dialects, it really ought to be the other way around – Portuguese as a dialect of Galician. Galician is actually the original language of the area and it preserves the old form of Portuguese-Galician best of all. Portuguese is best seen as a Galician dialect that drifted further and further away from the original Galician language. Galicia has been a part of Spain for a good 600 years or so, and in this period, Galician and Portuguese have drifted further apart. Galician is now properly seen as a language closely related to Portuguese that has been heavily influenced by Castillian. If you will, a language partway between Portuguese and Castillian. So if you speak Spanish, Galician should be more accessible to you than Portuguese. What is interesting is that Galician and Portuguese have drifted so far apart that Spanish speakers say that they understand Galician better than Portuguese speakers do. This is doubtless due to the heavy Spanish influence on Galician. In recent times, the Castillian influence has only increased. A Galician group based in Spain has formed to oppose the influence of the Reintegrationists, who are proposing a common writing system for both Galician and Portuguese. The Galician purists propose a purified Galician written language that emphasizes Galician’s differences with Portuguese. They have their work cut out for them. The video above is from Galician TV. On Galician TV a new form of Galician has emerged that is closer to Castillian than the form typically spoken on the Galician street. Many Castillian speakers say they can understand Galician TV pretty well, but even they have a hard time understanding street Galician. In the video, the female broadcaster in particular is speaking a heavily Castillianized form of Galician. The male broadcaster’s dialect is less so. They are interviewing a man who represents the Reintegrationist group in Galicia. He is speaking a much more “street” form of Galician and was harder for me to understand. I understood the woman best of all, then the male broadcaster and last the man being interviewed. I understand Spanish pretty well. If you understand Spanish, you should be able to understand some of the video above, but you probably won’t fully understand it.

Check Out Leonese

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuxTdd0y4RI] This is a sample of the Leonese language spoken in northwestern Spain. If you know Spanish or Portuguese, you might want to check it out, as it is quite similar to both. The Leonese language is part of the complex known as Asturian-Leonese, said to be a single language. However, it is actually several languages. Leonese and Asturian are surely separate languages. In addition, Fala and Mirandese, other members of this purported languages, are in the opinion of Ethnologue also separate languages. However, Fala and Mirandese may well be intelligible with Galician. All of these languages are more or less on the border or Portuguese and Spanish. More precisely, they are on the border or Spanish and Galician, and Galician is surely a separate language from Portuguese. Galician is sort of in between Spanish and Portuguese. Here is a very rare sample of Leonese. Leonese is a dying language, and is only spoken by probably about 25,000 people max in the Leon near the border with northeastern Portugal. The language is seriously dying out, but there are efforts to revive it. At the moment, probably only Western Leonese, spoken near the Portuguese border, is viable. Central and Eastern Leonese are nearly extinct. It is important to note that Extemaduran, in my opinion a separate language spoken by 500,000 speakers in Extremadura, is nothing but a very old Eastern Leonese dialect stranded in Extremadura. Mirandese in Portugal is best seen as an Extremaduran dialect stranded in Portugal, with heavy Galician admixture. Fala is more or less a similar thing. Fala is utterly incomprehensible to a Spanish speaker. Barranquenho, really a separate language spoken in the small border town of Barranca, Portugal, is a mix between Alentejan Portuguese and Extremaduran Spanish, and thus is similar. Alentajo itself is probably a separate language from Portuguese proper. Barranquenho is essentially incomprehensible to a Portuguese speaker. Listening to Leonese, I found it much harder to understand than Asturian, though it sounded quite similar. Leonese seemed to be closer to Portuguese than Asturian. There is a huge language revival movement going on with Leonese, but with no state support, it’s hard to see how far it goes.

Check Out Aragonese

[youtube=ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4rKy63MqZM] Aragonese is a Romance language very similar to Spanish that is spoken in northern Spain in the Pyrenees Mountains along the border with France. It is not in good shape at all. It probably has about 25-50,000 speakers. The subject of this video, Creciendo en Aragonés, is the small town of Benasque in the Pyrenees, where they speak a divergent Aragonese dialect called Benasquese. Benasquese is said to be a dialect of Catalan, but it is not at all. The dialects in this area however are somewhat transitional between Aragonese and Catalan. At one time, there was a Kingdom of Aragon (which I don’t know much about) along eastern Spain, and Aragonese was widely spoken over perhaps 2 Aragonese is said to be a dialect of Spanish by Spanish nationalists, and the fascist Spanish state refuses to recognize the language at all, so it gets little to no support. It is in really bad shape and is considered to be an endangered language. However, in Benasque, as you can see in this video, the language is doing great. It is spoken by all residents, including young kids. All the teachers in the local schools are fluent speakers. This town is isolated high in the Pyrenees (Check out the incredible, Alps-like scenery) and that is probably what has helped to preserve Aragonese here. The narration of the video in is Spanish, but when they start interviewing the locals, all of them are speaking Aragonese. I understand Spanish pretty well and could get a lot of the Spanish narration, but I was seriously lost whenever they started speaking Aragonese. Aragonese sounds like a cross between Spanish and Portuguese to me, but actually it has a heavy Basque substrate. There are also similarities to Occitan and Catalan. Intelligibility is said to be 8

Check Out Asturian

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIHhlxhvv8w] This is a clip of a Spanish comedian doing a skit in a comedy club. The skit is completely in the Asturian language, which is a separate language and not a dialect of Spanish. However, it is close to Spanish. I speak Spanish pretty well, and I could catch some of this, but not all by any means. Spanish nationalists like to say that this is just a dialect of Spanish, but that is not the case at all Asturian is a full-fledged Romance language. Intelligibility with Spanish is probably about 8 Listening to the video, it sounds like some strange cross-breed between Spanish and Portuguese. In some ways, that is what it is. It is spoken in Asturias in the northwest of Spain, east of Galicia. To the west is a Galician dialect called Eonavian which is said to be transitional between Asturian and Galician. However, in general, Asturian and Galician do not appear to be intelligible. To the east is a dialect called Cantabrian which is transitional between Asturian and Spanish. Whether or not Eonavian and Cantabrian are separate languages is much in dispute. To the south, Asturian is part of a dialect chain involving Leonese and Extremaduran. Extremaduran is in my opinion a separate language and not a Spanish dialect. Leonese is said to be one language with Asturian, but I believe that they are not intelligible with each other. The language is not recognized by the Spanish state for some fascist reason, probably because they fear independentists. There are many Asturians in the US, and quite a few of them still speak the language. They seem to have migrated due to poor economic conditions. They have some websites. I can read Spanish fairly well, but I can barely make sense of written Asturian. Asturias has always been a poor part of Spain, and many young Asturians leave the area to go make money. When they do so, they usually quit speaking Asturian. There is mining, but that is does not generate a lot of income. It’s traditionally regarded as a backwards part of the country. During the Spanish Civil War, it was a hotbed of Leftism, and the fascists committed many atrocities there, which continue to haunt the population. Evidence of this is that even 80 years after the fact, many locals seem afraid to discuss politics. There is indeed an Asturian independence movement, but it is not really going anywhere. Asturians regularly bemoan the decline of their language, but this young women and her audience speak fluently, so that seems to be an exaggeration. The pure Asturian seems to be getting contaminated with an Asturian Spanish, which is just a Spanish dialect. Asturian probably has about 550,000 speakers. It’s promoted by the local government, but they seem to be chronically short of funds. Education is all in Spanish, a source of contention. The number of speakers has declined dramatically in the past century. Judging from the number of young fluent speakers, I do not think that Asturian is going to die out anytime soon.

Check Out Occitan (Aranese)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yx3qeNwWyk] Aranese, a form of Gascon, which is a form of Occitan, is a Romance language spoken in northeastern Spain, southwestern France and a town in Sardinia. A good backgrounder about Catalan is my previous post on the language. In this video, the announcer speaks 10 Occitan sounds pretty strange to me. It sounds something like a cross between French and Spanish, but sometimes it also sounds like Portuguese or Italian. It’s said that Spanish speakers can understand Catalan. That’s not the case. I understand Spanish fairly well, and I could not really follow what this guy was saying. If you speak Spanish, Portuguese or another Romance language, check out the video and see how much you can understand of Occitan.

Check Out Andalucian

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJgr_mwcR1g] Contrary to popular belief, Andalucian is not a dialect of Spanish, but his is very confusing. There is something called Andalusian Spanish. This is what the announcer in this video is speaking. I can understand Spanish pretty well, but this guy is almost incomprehensible, and this is just a mere dialect. I showed it to two friends who have some Spanish comprehension as most White native Californians do. One thought it was Romanian and the other thought it was Italian. If you understand Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese or any Romance language, see how much of this Andalucian you can get. However, there is more to the story. In the vignettes in this video, you will see people speaking something altogether different, not a dialect of Spanish, but a full-blown separate language altogether, Andalucian. True, it is not recognized by Ethnologue yet, but it ought to be. Part of the problem is Spanish fascist nationalism that will not tolerate any more languages in Spain. So far, Catalan, Basque, Occitan and Galician are recognized, but many others, such as Extremaduran, Asturian, Asturian, Fala, Portuguese, Aragonese and Leonese are not. Andalucian is another one, in this case not even recognized as a language by the ISO yet. Andalucian has a heavy Arabic influence and in particular an influence for Mozarabic, which is an extinct form of heavily Arabized Spanish.

Check Out Spoken Romanian

Romanian is said to be one of the hardest languages to understand for speakers of other Romance languages. It shares that honor with French. However, Romanian speakers have fair intelligiblity of Italian. On the other hand, Italians can’t understand much of Romanian. Here is an audio file in Romanian – a woman with a great, sexy voice reciting a beautiful poem. You will ruin the experiment if you look at the text while you listen. I know Spanish fairly well – that is, I can generally communicate orally with Spanish speakers. However, out of the 107 words in this poem, I think I understood 2 of them. That’s If you know Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese or another Romance language, listen to this Romanian audio file and see how much you can get. Even if you can’t understand it, it’s interesting to hear it spoken.

A Look At the Catalan Language

Updated September 25, 2011. Catalan is a Romance language that is most closely related to Occitan. Although Occitan-Catalan started forming in 700-800, Occitan and Catalan are usually thought of as splitting from 1000-1300. However, scholars such as María del Candau de Cevallos and others present evidence that Catalan was already breaking away from Catalan-Occitan as early as the 700’s-800’s. An alternate method is to see Catalan as part of something called Ibero-Romance together with the Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula and to put Occitan in Gallo-Romance together with French and related tongues. It’s better to just avoid this and create a whole new category called Catalan-Occitan.

The Catalan-speaking world. Catalan is mostly spoken in Catalunya and Valencia in Spain, a bit in Aragon in Spain, and also in far southwestern France in Rousillon. The three shaded islands on the map are the Balearics. The tiny shaded area on the island at the far right represents Alghuerese Catalan spoken in Alghuero, Sardinia.
The Catalan-speaking world. Catalan is mostly spoken in Catalunya and Valencia in Spain, a bit in Aragon in Spain, and also in far southwestern France in Rousillon. The three shaded islands on the map are the Balearics. The tiny shaded area on the island at the far right represents Alghuerese Catalan spoken in Alghuero, Sardinia.
There is a common notion running about that Catalan speakers can understand Occitan. Although surely it differs with exposure, in general, Catalan speakers have a hard time understanding Occitan. Intelligibility between the two languages is probably on the order of 5 The same type of folks (I call them “everyone can understand everyone” people or lumpers) also insist that Castillian and Catalan are mutually intelligible. If this were the case, there would be no grounds for a political fight in Catalunya from the Castillian speakers who do not wish to have Catalan shoved down their throats. The truth is that Castillian speakers can only understand about 4 There are claims that Catalan and Portuguese are mutually intelligible. This is not the case. Catalan is also not intelligible with Aragonese. In the Medieval Period, Aragonese and Castillian were considered to be unintelligible to Catalan speakers in the Catalan region. Aragonese is not even intelligible within itself. Why would they be able to understand Catalan too? Catalan, when spoken, sounds like a cross between Castillian and French. There is a lot of intense language politics swirling around Catalan. It is the language of an autonomous region of Spain called Catalunya. The fascist Franco tried to kill the language by forbidding its use. Spanish nationalists are just as horrible as French nationalists, if not worse. As an example, there is a tiny part of Portugal that Spain has occupied for hundreds of years. As per a treaty of 1812, Spain was required to hand over this bit of territory. In the 197 years since then, they have flatly refused to do so. An imperialist Spain continues to occupy a few small islands of frankly Moroccan territory off the coast of Morocco in defiance of Moroccan insistence that they are Moroccan territory. After the fascists were toppled, Spain was arm-twisted into making Galician, Basque and Catalan into official languages. During the dictatorship, Galician and Catalan were referred to as dialects of Castillian. Recently, Aranese, an Occitan dialect, was also recognized. There are other languages in Spain such as Asturian, Leonese, Murcian, Andalucian, Extremaduran and Aragonese. These are not yet recognized by the imperialist Spanish state. There are problems in Catalunya. At home, about 1/2 the population speaks Catalan and 1/2 speaks Castillian. However, 9 For this, Castillian speakers have called them “fascist,” but it’s only normal for them to try to save their language, which is not necessarily doing all that well. In Andorra, the official language is Catalan, and this is also the most widely spoken language. It is the only officially independent Catalan speaking country on Earth. French and Castillian are also widely spoken. All dialects of Catalan are said to be mutually intelligible. However, people say that about the Occitan lects, about Dutch and German, about the Scandinavian languages, about Spanish and Portuguese, on and on, so that is not very reliable. Further, there is a strong politicization movement similar to Occitan whereby a language in trouble wants to see its various lects as unified under a single language. The notion is that splitting will further endanger a troubled language. Hence, there is a tendency for Catalan nationalists to scream that they can easily understand every variety under the sun. That’s ultimately a politicized response, and it is not scientific. It’s only natural to wonder whether Catalan is more than one language, so an investigation was undertaken. Method: Literature and reports were examined and Catalan-speaking informants were interviewed to determine the intelligibility of the various dialects of Catalan. >9 Results: The result of this investigation was to split Catalan from 1 to 2 languages. Below, separate languages are in bold, and dialects are in italics. Discussion: Catalan is a very tight-nit language family. The vast majority of Catalan lects can more or less understand each other with few problems. The Blaverist Movement is politically motivated and is not linguistically justified.
A great map of all of the languages and dialects of SW Europe. It's in Spanish, but you should be able to understand it anyway. All of the Catalan dialects are listed here in dark green.
An excellent map of the languages of southwest Europe. Catalan languages and dialects are in dark green.
There are many dialects of Catalan. Some are: Rousillonese (Northern Catalán), Valencian (Valenciano or Valencià), Balearic (Balear, Insular Catalan, Mallorqui, Menorqui and Eivissenc), Central Catalan, Alghuerese, Northwestern Catalan (Pallarese, Ribagorçan, Lleidatà and Aiguavivan). Northern Catalan is actually spoken in France by about 100,000 speakers. It receives no support from the Jacobin French state. Northern Catalan is a very divergent Catalan dialect, although Catalan speakers say that they can understand it just fine. It has a lot of French influence in the lexicon. Northern Catalan sounds very much like French to Southern Catalan speakers. About 4 Rousillonese is the main dialect of Northern Catalan spoken in France. It’s in better shape than many say it is, but the future prospects are probably not too good. Rousillon is close to the Occitan language Languedocien. There is a tremendous to-do over Valencian. Valencian activists, the Blaverists, insist that Valencian is a separate language from Catalan. This is a political issue, not a linguistic one. Linguistically, it is long settled. Valencian is simply a dialect of Catalan, and the two varieties have about 9 Balearic, Alghuerese and Rousillon (Northern or French) Catalan are much further from Central Catalan than Valencian is. Balearic is spoken in the Balearic Islands and is said to be quite different. Majorca Catalan is somewhat hard to understand for Valencians. It is even hard for Barcelonans to understand. Central Catalan speakers say they go to the islands and communicate without problems, however others say that the old Catalan language of Ibiza is hard for Barcelonans to understand. Some Balearic speakers, like Valencians, say they speak a separate Catalan language. Intelligibility between Balearic and Catalan Proper is said to be about the same as between Catalan and Valencian, which would mean that Balearic is a dialect of Catalan. We will tentatively split this off due to reports of intelligibility issues, but this remains very controversial. The best way to sort this out would be through intelligibility studies as have been done with Valencian. Central Catalan is the main variety and is the most widely spoken. This is the variety of Barcelona, and this is what the literary language is loosely based on. Catalan TV usually uses this dialect. Northwestern Catalan is extremely divergent. Ribagorçan is transitional to the Aragonese language and is sometimes called a dialect of Aragonese. The truth is that the eastern part is Catalan transitional to Aragonese, the western part is Aragonese transitional to Catalan and the central part is Benasques. Pallarese is also spoken in the same area and is said to be very different. Aiguavivan is spoken in high valleys of Pyrenees and is very different. Related varieties called Chapurriau are spoken in Castellote, Torrevelilla and Matarraña nearby in Aragon and across the border in Valencia. These are mixtures of Old Castillian, Castillian, Valencian, Aragonese and a bit of Catalan. The Valencian element predominates. Although these lects are intelligible with Catalan proper, the speakers insist that they do not speak Catalan. Benasquese is spoken in the same region as Aiguavivan and is often said to be a Catalan dialect. It is not. It is either a transitional lect between Catalan and Aragonese, a divergent Aragonese dialect, or a separate language in between Aragonese and Catalan. At any rate, however we wish to characterize Benasquese, it is not a Catalan dialect. All of NW Catalan appears to be intelligible with the rest of Catalan. At last we come to Algherese, spoken in Sardinia in the town of Alghero. This language is dying out, but there are still 20-30,000 speakers, mostly older people. Many say that structurally, this is by far the most divergent variety of Catalan, created when Catalans landed on the island over 500 years. Algherese has been split from Catalan for over 500 years now. The lect sounds like Medieval Catalan and furthermore, lots of Sardinian language has gone in. Catalan speakers say it sounds like Italian. Reports indicate that Catalan travelers to Alghero can still understand Algherese quite well, albeit as a somewhat Medieval form of Catalan. However, the venerable Encyclopedia of Endangered Languages “Catalan”, Chapter in Posner, Rebecca, Green, John N. Trends in Romance Linguistics and Philology, Volume 3. La Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton.
Moseley, Christopher. 2007. contribution to support more of this valuable research.

A Reclassification of the Occitan Language

Updated May 29, 2015. Long, runs to 65 pages.

Map of Occitania showing the major dialect divisions including Vivaro-Alpine.
Map of Occitania showing the major dialect divisions including Vivaro-Alpine.
According to Ethnologue, Occitan is currently 1 language. This reanalysis will expand Occitan from 1 language to 22 languages. Occitan, or Langue d’Oc, is spoken in general in a swath across the south of France. It goes a bit into Spain in the Pyrenees and into far northwestern Italy. There is Occitan an outlier in Italy. There are various classification methods for Occitan. One is to differentiate between Langue d’Oil (French) and Langue d’Oc (Occitan). I do not agree that Occitan is particularly close to French. Occitan is about as far from French as Spanish and Italian are. I would put the Oil languages (including French) in a Northern Gallo-Romance and Rhaetian and Italian Gallo-Romance into a Southern Gallo-Romance with Arpitan as transitional between the two.
Another view of Occitan.
Ibero-Romance is a different split altogether. Occitan is better placed into a separate Romance category that I would call Catalan-Occitan. This analysis sees Occitan and Catalan as a singular branch of Romance. Catalan-Occitan is then properly put into Ibero-Romance. It also recognizes that Occitan and Catalan were once a single language stretching across the south of France and into northwestern Spain. This language was very widely spoken, and at one time in the Middle Ages it was very widely used. It is “the language of the troubadours,” the wandering minstrels who plied their trade across Southern Europe in the Middle Ages, though in truth, the troubadours mostly came from Limousin and wrote their songs in a sort of Poitou-Limousin dialect that no longer exists.
Another map of Occitania. This one is a bit harder to read as it is largely in dialect, but if you study it a bit, it makes more sense.
Another map of Occitania. This one is a bit harder to read as it is largely in dialect, but if you study it a bit, it makes more sense.
From 500-1200, there was really only one language – Catalan-Occitan. Occitan only started distinguishing itself after 1200. At the moment, Southern Languedocien has the closest relationship of all to Catalan – in fact, they are intelligible. Gascon is then the next closest to Catalan, but intelligibility data is lacking. The rest of Occitan is more distant from Catalan. Catalan speakers have a hard time understanding Auvergnat, Limousin, standard Languedocien and Provencal. It is not the case, as often stated, that Catalan and Occitan are intelligible, but they are close. Catalan and Occitan probably have about 5
A Third Map of Occitania. This is the best-laid out of all, and it is the easiest to read and make sense of.
A Third Map of Occitania. This is the best-laid out of all, and it is the easiest to read and make sense of.
Occitan has been on decline for a long time, as the Langue d’Oil has been been supplanting it for centuries. The decline began in 1539 when a French king ordered that langue d’oil be the official language of all of France. Despite a brief revival in the 1800’s, it’s been downhill ever since. Occitan speakers did not start speaking French in large numbers until 1885. Before that, there was only minor French influence on spoken Occitan. Since 1885, French influence on spoken Occitan has increased, in some cases dramatically. The codification of the Parisien Langue d’Oil language as Standard French with the victory of the French Revolution and the corresponding fascist Jacobin war on all other languages caused Occitan to recede further into the background. The French government is reactionary/fascist on the subject of language. The Jacobin Constitution baldly states that “French is the language of the state” and allows for no other languages. Hence, Occitan receives no state support in any way. Occitan still has about 8 million people who can understand it and 3 million who can speak it to one degree or another. Estimates of the true number of speakers range from 1-3.7 million. Occitan is surely a modern language and does not lack for vocabulary – it has between 250,000 and 1 million words, though many say that this is an exaggeration. Occitanists like to say that Occitan is all one language, but this is a political statement. They say this in order to unite the dying language and prevent it from splintering. The Occitanist position is increasingly popular. For instance, Wikipedia is calling all of the Occitan languages “dialects.” There are two centralized ways of writing all Occitan dialects, one based curiously enough on a Medieval standard. Around 1850, an Occitanist poet named Frederic Mistral invented a standard based on his own Provencal language, but this solution has not caught on well. The second is neo-Occitan, a new koine language created more recently. Occitan is spoken most often by those over 50, except in Italy and Spain. Occitan is only protected in Spain and Italy, where the respective forms of Aranese and Transalpine Provencal are spoken. If you hear Occitan, it sounds like some curious cross between Spanish and French, sort of the way that Catalan sounds. It’s not true that Occitan is one language as the Occitanists centered in the south of the region insist. The intelligibility among Occitan lects seems to be as I suspected. People with exposure to the other lects can pick them up pretty quickly, but someone who has never heard the other varieties has a hard time understanding them. This is called learned bilingualism. If learned bilingualism is the rationale for saying that Occitan is a single language, it stands on precarious scientific grounds. Nevertheless, intelligibility in Occitan remains a very controversial subject. On the one hand, speakers say they can’t understand speakers of the same lect a few miles away; on the other hand, Occitan speakers say they can understand totally different varieties from far away very well. At this point, it is time for some scientific intelligibility testing to sort all of this contradictory information out. Intelligibility testing has already been done with Occitan. It did find high, but by no means complete, intelligibility between major Occitan lects (Bec 1982). This suggests that intelligibility among Occitan lects is marginal, possibly on the order of 8 Others have put the figure about where I did – at 70-8 It is often said that French and Occitan speakers can communicate well enough. This is not the case. There are many French speakers living in Occitania who say that they cannot understand a word of Occitan. A good overview of Occitan is here. Method: Literature and reports were examined to determine the intelligibility of the various dialects of Occitan. >9 Results: This treatment expands Ethnologue’s 1 Occitan language to 22 Occitan languages.
A great map of all of the languages and dialects of SW Europe. It's in Spanish, but you should be able to understand it anyway. The Occitan languages are the light green stretching across all of southern France.
A great map of all of the languages and dialects of SW Europe. It’s in Basque, but you should be able to understand it anyway. Occitan dialects are listed in light green in the area around Southern France.
Gascon is a Southern Occitan macrolanguage spoken in southwestern France and barely over the border into Spain. It has 256,000 speakers, 250,000 in France, but other figures put the number at 500,000. Gascon has some affinities to Basque – it is said to have a Basque substrate – but it is not close to Basque at all. Gascon is probably closer to Catalan than anything else (even closer than it is to Aragonese), however, there is resent both being referred to as speakers of a dialect of Occitan and what they see as the cultural imperialism of Occitan politics centered in Toulouse. In France, Gascon is spoken in the departments of Landes, Gers, Hautes-Pyrénées, the eastern parts of Pyrénées-Atlantiques and the western parts of Haute-Garonne and Ariège, and it is still used actively by many people. 50 years ago, near La Réole, France, there were still monolingual Gascon speakers among the older people. People were still being brought up speaking Gascon as recently as the early 1980’s. However, in France, it is not being taught much to children. Gascon speakers have a hard time understanding Limousin, and Languedocien speakers say it’s hard to understand Gascon and vice versa. However, it is easier for Gascon speakers to understand Languedocien (though intelligibility is still difficult) than vice versa due to the French-like regularity of Languedocien. For example, “How are you?” is “Quin hes?” and “Cossi fas?” respectively in Gascony and Languedoc. It goes on like that through the Gascon-Languedocien lexicon. It’s clear we have two completely separate languages here. Around Agen, there is a transition between Guyennais, Gascon and Languedocien. One village can understand the next, but once you get 10-15 miles away, things get difficult. Provencal speakers say Gascon is a foreign language. Gascon speakers can’t understand a word of Auvergnat. It makes sense to split Gascon into a West and East Gascon. The border would run from Artix-Pau in the south to Marmande-Agen in the north. East Gascon would then start at around Pau and Agen and West Gascon at Artix and Marmande. These distinctions represent the variant influences of Bordeaux in the west and Toulouse in the east. West Gascon is spoken from Bordeaux in the north to the Basque country in the south. In the east, it runs to Artix in the south and to Marmande in the north. Its differences with East Gascon revolve around the influence of the large city of Bordeaux on the language. Dialects include Bazadais, Marmandais, Bordalés and Médoc. Bazadais is spoken around the town of Bazas, famous for its cows. Marmandais is spoken around the town of Marmande. Bordalés is spoken around Bordeaux. It is probably in very bad shape. It was declining badly even 50 years ago. There is actually a transitional Occitan-langue d’oil (Saintongeais) region around Bordeaux. The region around Bordeaux is notorious for its sharp linguistic breaks. One early chronicler estimated that the distance between West Gascon Limonde and Saintongeais-speaking Pays Gabay north of Limonde to the Saintonge border was 5 There is evidence of a Landes is a West Gascon language spoken in southwestern maritime France in the Aquitaine region. As it is not even intelligible within itself (it differs so much that it is hardly intelligible even from village to village), it must be a separate language. Some say that Landes is nearly a dead language, but others say that it is still spoken in the villages. The coast near Biscarosse gave up Landes long ago, but now even in the inland villages like Rion de Landes and Parentis en Born it is hard to find a speaker. The real Landes died around 1950. The current dialect is very Frenchified. East Gascon is spoken from Pau to the Ariege River in the south and from Agen to Toulouse in the north. It represents the influence of the large city of Toulouse. Even between the cities and Pau (East Gascon) and Artix (West Gascon), which are very close together, communication is nearly impossible. This language is probably in very bad shape. It is probably extinct in the Rivière-Basse region around the towns of Marciac, Plaisance and Maubourguet and in the Vic-Bihl region just to the west around Riscle. In Tarbes, Lannemezan and Lourdes, speakers are almost impossible to find. The eastern border with Languedocien is in the Ariege. Neraqués and Lomagne Gascon are two East Gascon dialects. Neraques is spoken in Nerac, just southwest of Agen in the Lot et Garonne. Lomagne Gascon is spoken to the far northeast of the Gascon language, southeast of Agen down towards Toulouse. Pyrenean Gascon is a macrolanguage that is unintelligible with the Gascon of the plains. This language is the most divergent member of Occitan, probably due to very strong Basque influence. Some would put it outside of Occitan proper altogether. The borders of Pyrenean Gascon run from the Ariege in the east to Bearn in the west and to the Spanish border (except in the Aran Valley). Pyrenean Gascon is nearly a dead language in France, only spoken by In Bearn, Pyrenean Gascon is still heavily used. In 1994, fully 2 It makes sense to split Pyrenean Gascon into three separate languages. Gascon speakers in the east of Bearnais have a hard time understanding the speakers in the west of Bearnais. They also have a hard time understanding the Couserans spoken in the Upper Ariege near the Foix and Andorra. Although it makes no linguistic sense, Bearnese is often split off a separate dialect of Pyrenean Gascon. Dialects of Bearnese include Aspés, Ossau Bearnese, and Palois. Bearnese is spoken in Bearn. West Pyrenean Gascon covers the western part of Bearn. It is here that there is the heaviest Basque influence of all. Speakers in the east of Bearn can understand speakers just to the east in Bigorre and Lourdes better than they can the speakers of western Bearn. Oloronais (Aspois) is a dialect of Béarnais spoken in Oloron that borders on Souletin Basque. The actual linguistic border between Béarnais and Basque is in between Aramits and Tardets. Central Pyrenean Gascon covers most of the Pyrenean Gascon region from eastern Bearn all the way to Ariege. Intelligibility is poor with both western Bearn and Couserans in the Ariege. Bigourdan is a dialect of Central Pyrenean Gascon spoken in Bagneres de Bigorre region. Subdialects are Argelès, Aure, Bagnères, and Tarbais. Bagnères is spoken around the city of Bigorre itself, and Tarbais is spoken around the town of Tarbes. Eastern Pyrenean Gascon is spoken in the far east of the Pyrenean Gascon region by the border with Languedocien and Catalan and over the border into the Aran Valley. Central Pyrenean Gascon speakers have a hard time understanding those in the Couserans in the Upper Ariege by Foix, Rousillon and Andorra. Dialects include Aranese, Ariegois, Commingese, Couseranais, Sauratois, and Contadels. Aranese is an Eastern Pyrenean Gascon dialect spoken by most of the 6,000 people living in the Aran Valley in the Spanish Pyrenees, where it has official status. It has Spanish, Aragonese and old Catalan influences, but at the moment it is under very heavy Catalan influence such that many Occitanists regard it as an outrageously degenerated dialect. Aranese is intelligible with Commingese across the border in France. Aranese is not intelligible with Spanish, French, Catalan or the rest of Occitan. Pujolo and Canejan are Aranese dialects. Ariegois is a Pyrenean Gascon dialect spoken in the Upper Ariege. Sauratois is an Ariegois dialect spoken in the Saurat region northeast of Tarascon on the Ariege River. Couseranais is an Ariegois dialect spoken in the Couserans northwest of Andorra. It still has a few speakers. Contadels is an Ariegois dialect spoken in Vicdessos north of Andorra. There is a very heavy Languedocien and Catalan influence on this dialect. This is actually a Gascon-Catalan transitional dialect. Southern Occitan is a branch of Occitan that stretches across Southern France near the ocean. It includes Languedocien, Maritime Provencal, Nissart, and Rhodanian Provencal. This branch has more Iberian influence in the west and more Ligurian Southern Gallo-Romance influence in the east. Languedocien is a Southern Occitan macrolanguage that has 1 million speakers in an area in a line going from north of Andorra – Aude – Fenoullens – Leucate in the south (border with Catalan), from Toulouse to Oust in the west (border with Gascon), in a line running from Toulouse – Albi – Agde in the north (border with Guyennais) and at Bassin de Thau in the east (border with Provencal). Languedocien sounds like a mixture of Spanish and French in the north or Spanish and Catalan in the south. Languedocien speakers have a hard time understanding Limousin, Auvergnat and Gascon. Languedocien speakers have a hard time being understood by the Provencal speakers in Toulouse. Along with Provencal, this language is more conservative and closer to the Medieval Occitan. If you try to learn Occitan now as a second language, you will learn Languedocien. Attempts to standardize writing of Languedocien have not been successful. An Occitan koine is being promoted out of the University of Montpellier that some Occitan speakers have referred to as an Occitan Esperanto. All across Languedoc, most of the older people and many young people still speak Languedocien. In Carcassone, all street signs are bilingual in Occitan, Occitan is an obligatory subject for primary school students, and there are 22,000 speakers in the city. Nevertheless, it is not being learned much by children in general in the region as a whole. It makes sense to split Languedocien into a Ibero-Languedocien and a North Languedocien (or Franco-Languedocien), the first more like Catalan, Spanish, Gascon and Aragonese and the second more like French and the rest of Occitan. North Languedocien is a Languedocien language with borders running from Toulouse – Albi – Bassin de Thau in the north and east and around the Bages-Sigues Lagoon in the south. This language lacks the strong Catalan influence of Ibero-Languedocien. Instead, it has more French influence. There are various dialects within North Languedocien that are quite divergent. Dialects include Besierenc, Narbonés, Carcassés, and Pezenas. These are spoken around the cities that they are named after and are said to be unrecognizable from one region to the next, but until we get specific intelligibility data, we can’t split them. Ibero-Languedocien is spoken in the south from Toulouse and Albi down through the Ariege, the Foix, the Aude, the Fenouillines and over to the coast at Leucate, possibly extending north to Carcassonne and Narbonne. This language is rooted in Iberian phonetics. Ibero-Languedocien speakers feel that they have excellent communication only with Catalan. With the rest of Occitan, they feel that they are speaking another language, and there are communication problems. Ibero-Languedocien is intelligible with Catalan. This dialect is the closest of all Occitan lects to literary Catalan and is spoken in the part of southwestern France right next to Catalonia. Ibero-Languedocien speakers can understand Catalan easier than they can understand Gascon. The border between Ibero-Languedocien and Catalan proper begins in the Languedocien-speaking Fenouillèdes along the Agly River. To the south, Catalan is spoken – to the north, it is Languedocien. But that boundary is fairly sharp. On the coast, the transition zone occurs from Leucate to Le Barcares and Salces. The true transition zone occurs in the area north of Andorra. The Catalan of Formigueres is basically the same language as the Languedocien of Usson just to the north. Tolosenc is a dialect of this language spoken around the city of Toulouse. It has Gascon influences. In the rural areas around Toulouse, almost everyone over 25 understands Tolosenc. In this area, many people over 40 were raised speaking Tolosenc as a first language, but most have forgotten it by now. However, in Toulouse proper, Occitan speakers have gone from 5 Agathois is a divergent Languedocien lect spoken on the coast town of Agde. It is very different from the Besierenc dialect spoken in Beziers and Vias, which were wine-growing regions. Beziers and Vias received many Spanish immigrants to pick grapes in the vineyards and received many more during the Spanish Civil War. As a result, Besierenc now has heavy Spanish admixture. But Agde, on the coast, received no Spanish influx, and now communication is sometimes difficult between Agathois and Besierenc speakers. Provencal is a very famous Southern Occitan macrolanguage that is spoken further east than Languedocien all the way to the Italian border. It has 200,000 speakers. Provencal is cannot understand the Mompelhierenc spoken in Montpellier, and there is marginal intelligibility with Nimes and Sète. People with one parent who spoke South Auvergnat and another who spoke Provencal were not taught Occitan because the lects were too different. This implies that even South Auvergnat has poor intelligibility with Provencal. Limousin speakers who move to the Provencal region say that the two feel very much like separate languages. Provencal speakers say that Gascon is a foreign language, they cannot understand Vivaroalpine and they even have a hard time with Languedocien. Provencal, along with Languedocien, is closer to the Medieval Occitan language and is more conservative. Dialects include Cévenol, Maritime Provencal, Marsillargues, Mompelhierenc, Bas-vivarois, Lunellois, Aptois, Bagnoulen, Barjoulen-Draguignanen, Canenc, Coumtadin, Foursquare-Manousquin, Grassenc, Marsihés, Maures, Castellane Provençal, and Sestian. Cévenol is spoken in the Cevennes Mountains north and northwest of Nîmes and is doing well. Maritime Provencal is spoken around the Cote d’Azur, is doing well and is widely spoken, especially as Marsillargues in Marseilles. Mompelhierenc, spoken in Montpellier, has heavy Languedocien influence. Bas Vivarois is spoken in the lower half of the Ardeche region. Lunellois is spoken in Lunel between Montpellier and Nimes and still has speakers. Aptois is spoken around the town of Apt north of Marseilles. Barjoulen-Draguignanen is spoken around the towns of Barjemon and Draguignan in the hills north of the French Riviera. Canenc is spoken around the Cannes. Grassenc is spoken on the French Riviera. Rhodanian is spoken around Arles, Avignon and Nîmes, is apparently not intelligible with the rest of Provencal and may be more than one language. Rhodanian speakers from around Nîmes say that they cannot understand other speakers from villages only 12 miles away. This is actually a Languedocien language that underwent Provencal phonetic changes in the late 1700’s, resulting in a Provencal tongue. This probably accounts for its diversity. Dialects include Arlaten, Bagnoulen, Camarguen and Nimoues. Arlaten is spoken around Arles. Bagnoulen is spoken around the town of Bagnols sur Centre. Camarguen is spoken around Camargue Bay. Nimoués is spoken in Nimes. Nissart is a Southern Occitan dialect spoken in Nice. It has very limited. Nissart is in very bad shape; it is a dying language mostly spoken by older people, when it is spoken at all. Dialects include Esteron, High Vésubie, and Northern Nissart. Mentonasq is a curious Gavot Alpine Provencal dialect related to Nissart spoken near Monaco in and near the town of Menton. It has a lot of Ligurian influences like Nissart. This is intelligible with Nissart and is apparently a Nissart dialect. This is best seen as transitional between Nissart and Intermelio to the east, a Ligurian dialect with strong Occitan influence. Studies have shown that Mentonasq is between Gavot Alpine Provencal (Nissart) and Royasque (Brigasc)-Pignasque (Ventimiglian) Ligurian (spoken in the Roya Valley in France and Pigna in Italy on the border), with an emphasis on the Occitan. About 2/3 of the words are Provencal. There are still those who insist that this language is basically Ligurian with strong over layer of Provencal. Intelligibility between Mentonasq and Ligurian Royasque is better than between Nissart and Royasque but is still somewhat marginal. Although it is close to Nissart, Mentonasq is also quite different from it. Monegasque is quite different from Mentonasq. It is mostly spoken by older people, fisherman and rural types. There is bilingual signage. But the language is in bad shape as the young do not speak it, and there are many tourists. Roquebrunasq is a dialect of Mentonasque, spoken on the Roquebrun-Cap Martin just to the west of Menton. It is somewhat different from Mentonasque. It is dying out. The similar dialects Gorbarin and Castellarois are spoken in Gorbio and Castellar. Gorbarin is particularly close to Mentonasc. Like Nissart, these are Gavot dialects transitional to Ligurian. Northern Occitan is a branch of Occitan that is spoken in the north of the Occitan region and also over by the Italian border. There are great differences between Northern and Southern Occitan. For instance, 3 One way to look at this is to say that the languages in this region – Limousin, Auvergnat and Vivaro-Alpin, are part of something called Medio Gallo-Roman, which is really in between the langue d’oc proper of the south – Gascon, Languedoc and Provencal – and the langues d’oil to the north and Arpitan to the east. Another way to look at it is to say that Northern Occitan is closer to Arpitan than to the rest of Iberian-dominated Southern Occitan. Limousin is a Northern Occitan macrolanguage spoken in France and has over 100,000 speakers. It is spoken in Limousin Province and over the western border into the far eastern part of Saintonge and the Perigord in North Acquitaine. North Perigord in Acquitaine has Saintongeais influences. South Perigord speaks Guyennais. Limousin is still widely spoken in the Limousin region and in northern Dordogne in Acquitaine. Limousin may have once been many separate languages, at least in the Dordogne department. Older residents in the Périgord Vert near Nontron report that from 1930-1970, it was not unusual for different villages to have Limousin dialects so different that one village could not understand the next, and they had to resort to the use of a koine. Gascon, Provencal, Languedocien and Auvergnat speakers say they cannot understand speakers of Limousin. Charente Limousin is a Limousin dialect that is very hard to classify. It extends from Confolens south to Aubeterre. This is an Occitan-Oil transition zone with an emphasis on the Occitan. So these are Limousin dialects transitioning to Charentais langue d’oil. Between Confolens and Ruffec around Chatain, there is a transitional dialect between langue d’oc and langue d’oil that is nevertheless intelligible with the Charentais spoken in Ruffec. This is probably a Charentais dialect transitional to Limousin. This province is generally langue d’oil speaking and has been so since the original Limousin speakers were eliminated by the Black Plague in the 1300’s and replaced by langue d’oil speakers, but the area around the Charente River in the far east of the province has long spoke Occitan and never underwent replacement. Saint-Eutrope and Montberonés are Charente Limousin dialects. Montberones is spoken in Montbron, and Saint-Eutrope is spoken in the town of the same name. South Limousin is a separate language spoken south of Haute Vienne in Limousin south to the Limousin border. It is closer to Auvergnat and Languedocien. Haute Vienne North Limousin speakers understand no more than 6 Corrèzese is a dialect of South Limousin spoken around the city of Correze. Correzese speakers can understand Auvergnat and vice versa. Corrèzese is best seen as a Limousin dialect transitional to Auvergnat. Sarladais is a South Limousin dialect spoken in Sarlat in Aquitaine just southeast of Limousin. It has strong Guyennais influences. Monédières Limousin, a variety of South Limousin spoken in the Monédières Hills near Correze, is a separate language. For one thing, it does not even appear to be intelligible within itself. Some varieties of Bas Limousin in the Monédières Hills near Correze have a hard time understanding each other. For another, Limousin speakers say they have a harder time understanding Monédières Limousin than they do Auvergnat as a whole. This is more than one language. Guyennais is a highly divergent lect, possibly a separate language, spoken in a swath across central Acquitaine, northern Languedocien and southwest Auvergnat. It is transitional between Gascon, Languedocien, Limousin and Auvergnat. In the South Perigord, the influences are Saintongeais, Gascon and Languedocien. To the east, the influences are Languedocien, Dauphinois Provencal and Auvergnat. In the north, the boundary with Limousin and Auvergnat is a line from Bordeaux – Bergerac – Carlux – S. Cerre – Latronquiere – southern border of Auvergne to the Ardeche border. To the south, Guyennais borders Languedoc along a line running from Castelsarrasin – Montalban – Cordes – Albi to the border of Languedoc at Millau and the Cevannes. Guyennais is still widely spoken. In Saint Cirq in Dordogne Department, all of the elderly speak Guyennais as a first language and continue to use it amongst themselves at all times. Although Guyennais is typically lumped under the rubric of Languedocien, others lump Guyennais in with Limousin, saying that there is no way that Guyennais-Limousin is the same language as Languedocien-Gascon. The best view is that Guyennais was close to Limousin and Auvergnat, but it underwent extensive Languedocienization caused by the expansion of Toulouse to the north from the 800’s to the the 1200’s. At the moment, it is probably closest to Limousin and possibly secondarily with Auvergnat. There is difficult intelligibility on the border of Guyennais and Gascon. Quercynois, Rouergat and Carladezien are not intelligible with Languedocien. Guyennais is very similar to the South Limousin spoken in Brive and South Auvergnat. Specific intelligibility data between Guyennais and Limousin and Auvergnat in general is not available. There is a strong tendency to want to split this off as a separate high level language within Occitan, but there’s no legitimacy to do so yet based on the available intelligibility information. Haut Quercinois, Bas Quercinois, Rouergat, Carladézien, Bergeracois, Agenais, Gevaudan, and Aurillacois are dialects of Guyennais. Quercynois (Carcinòl) is spoken in the Quercy in Midi-Pyrenees. Rouergat is spoken around the city of Rouerge. Carladézien is spoken in Auvergne and is still doing very well. It is transitional to Auvergnat. Bergeracois is spoken around Bergerac. Agenais is spoken in Agen and has Gascon influences. Gévaudan is spoken in the southern part of Lozère, and Aurillacois is spoken in the Aurillac. Both have Auvergnat influences. North Limousin, spoken north of Correze in Haut Vienne to the Marche and over to Nontron in the west, is a separate language. North Limousin speakers only have 6 Millevaches is spoken on the Millevaches Plateau south of Limoges. Lemojaud is spoken in Limoges. Monts de Blond Limousin is a North Limousin lect said to be so different from all other Limousin types that it must be a separate language. It is spoken in the Haut Vienne in the Monts de Blond region around Blond between Nantiat and Confolens near the Charente border. There is heavy influence from Charentais langue d’oil and Creusois. Nontronnais is a North Limousin dialect that is so unusual that it must be a separate language. It is spoken in the North Perigord region around the town of Nontron near the Saintonge border. It has heavy Saintongeais langue d’oil influences. Creusois (Marchois) is a language spoken in La Marche or the Croissant in north Limousin and over into Auvergne. It extends roughly from La Rochefoucauld in Charente to Saint-Priest-Laprugne just over the Auvergne border in Loire in the south and from Bellac in Limousin over to Montlucon and Moulins in Auvergne to the north. The eastern portion in Auvergnat underwent much more extreme changes than the western portion. It borders on and is influenced by the oil languages Berrichon and Bourbonnais in the north and east and Poitou and Charentais in the west but is intelligible with none of them. In the northeast, there is a 50 mile wide Creusois zone between Limousin and Berrichon. Some say it is a langue d’oil with heavy Occitan influence, but a better analysis is of a langue d’oc with heavy oil influence. To the southeast around Vichy, there is some Arpitan influence. This language is still widely spoken in places. 15 years ago, the dialect of Saint-Priest-la-Feuille in northern Limousin was still spoken by everyone over 40. A bit to the west, 15 years ago, Gartempaud, spoken in the village Gartempe, was still spoken by most residents over the age of 50. Dialects include Western Creusois, Eastern Creusois, Central Creusois and Montluçonnais. Montuluconnais is spoken around the town of Montlucon in Auvergnat. It is often thought to be a part of Limousin, but Creusois speakers have a hard time understanding Limousin. Auvergnat speakers cannot understand Creusois. There is poor intelligibility with Berrichon, a langue d’oil. This is basically an Occitan-Oil transitional dialect with an emphasis on Occitan.
Map of the Bourbonnais region in north Auvergne and southeast Berry showing Bourbonnais langue d’ oil, Auvergnat Occitan and Forez Arpitan.
Auvergnat is a North Occitan macrolanguage that has 1.35-1.5 million speakers. Auvergnat is spoken in reports indicate that nearly everyone over age 35 can speak Occitan, and perhaps 5 A neo-language called Aleppo (Literary and Pedagogical Auvergnat) has been created. It is used to teach students who come from a variety of educational backgrounds and by writers who wish to enrich their prose by using loans from other dialects. Every village has its own dialect, and there is often problematic intelligibility even from one village to the next. People who learn standardized Occitan fairly well are completely lost listening to Auvergnat. Auvergnat in general cannot understand Limousin, with the exception of the dialect spoken in Corrèze. The reason is that the phonetics, inflections and vocabulary of Limousin are completely different than in Auvergnat. Auvergnat speakers are completely lost with the Languedocien speech of Toulouse and Carcassone. Auvergnat speakers cannot understand Creusois. Auvergnat is utterly unintelligible to Gascon speakers. Auvergnat speakers cannot understand the Provencal spoken in Montpellier, and there is marginal intelligibility with Nimes and Sète. The Languedocien influence on these Provencal dialects is what makes them hard to understand for Auvergnat speakers. People with one parent who spoke South Auvergnat and another who spoke Provencal were not taught Occitan because the lects were too different, implying that South Auvergnat has poor intelligibility with Provencal. Auvergnat is closer to French than the rest of Occitan, and it has the strongest Arpitan influences of any Occitan language. There area two major splits – South Auvergnat or Upper Auvergnat in the south of the region and North Auvergnat or Lower Auvergnat in the north of the region, which are separate languages. The names upper and lower do not correspond with north and south here, which is curious. South Auvergnat is spoken from Mauriac in the west through Brioude in the center to Crappone sur Arzon south to the border of Auvergne. It has difficult intelligibility with the North Auvergnat spoken in Allier and Puy de Dôme. South Auvergnat is still in good shape, with 6 Dialects include Brivadois, Mauriacois, Yssingelais, and Sanfloran. Brivadois is spoken around Brioude and Sanfloran around Saint Flour. Brivadois cannot understand the North Auvergnat spoken in Allier and Puy de Dome. It is in between North and South Auvergnat but is best characterized as South Auvergnat. Mauriacois is spoken in the southwest in Mauriac, but it is very different from Aurillacois. It has some old influences from San Floran and Gevaudan. Yssingelais is spoken in Yssingeaux in far southeast Auvergne. It has strong Arpitan and Alpine Provencal influences. Some have classed this as an Alpine Provencal dialect, but this seems uncertain. Intelligibility data is lacking. San Floran is spoken in St. Flour. This is a very influential dialect, having influenced many nearby dialects. North Auvergnat is a macrolanguage spoken in Allier and Puy de Dome. It is close to the langues d’oil, especially Bourbonnais but is probably not intelligible with them. North Auvergnat is not doing well. Speakers of Brivadois, a South Auvergnat dialect transitional to North Auvergnat, have a hard time understanding the North Auvergnat of Allier and Puy de Dome, so it is separate from South Auvergnat. North Auvergnat, especially in the east, is possibly the most divergent lect in Occitan after of Gascon due to very heavy Bourbonnais and Arpitan influence. Some even think it is outside of Occitan proper altogether. North Auvergnat can be divided into two separate languages – Northwest Auvergnat and Northeast Auvergnat. The differences are so dramatic that they must be separate languages. Northeast Auvergnat is spoken in the eastern part of the North Auvergnat from Jumeaux and Arlanc north to the west bank of the Allier River near Vichy and Cusset. From Vichy-Cusset to the Loire border, Forez Arpitan was formerly spoken. North of Vichy-Cusset to the Champagne-Ardennes border, langue d’oil Bourbonnais used to be spoken. Northeast Auvergnat has very heavy Arpitan influences that make it so different from Northwest Auvergnat that it must be a separate language. In fact, Livradois speakers cannot understand Besse-en-Chandesse speakers. Livradois is a Northeast Auvergnat dialect spoken on the broad Lemange Plain in the east-central part of Auvergne bordering on Loire. In the southern part of Livradois around St. Antheme, there are strong Forez Arpitan influences. Northwest Auvergnat is spoken from about Champes sur Tarentaine to Lempdes north to Pionsat and Gannat. The heavy Arpitan influence on Northeast Auvergnat makes it so different that it must be separate from Northwest Auvergnat. And it is true that Besse-en-Chandesse Northwest Auvergnat speakers cannot understand Livradois Northeast Auvergnat speakers. Alpine Provencal (Vivaro-Alpine) is a macrolanguage, part of the Provencal macrolanguage, and is often considered to be a separate branch of Northern Occitan. An ocannot understand Vivaroalpine, so it is a separate entity. Dauphine Provencal (Vivaro-Dauphine) is a separate language within Alpine Provencal. It is spoken in the departments of Ardèche (except the north and the western border areas), Drôme (except the north) and the southernmost parts of Isère. Dialects include Ardechois (Mid Vivarois), spoken in the center of the Ardeche and Dauphinois or Drômois, spoken in the Drôme River area. Gerbier de Jonc is an Ardechois dialect spoken in the Ardeche region of that name. It differs greatly from the north to the south, with words changing from village to village. Other dialects are Albenassien, Albonnais, Annonéen, Southeast Ardèchois, Boutierot, Northeast Drômois, Southeast Drômois, Montilien, Privadois, Valentinois, and Vernoux-Doux. Privadois is spoken in Privas in the Ardeche. Montilien is spoken in Montelimier in the Drome. Albonnais, spoken in the village of Albon in the commune of St. Pierreville in the central Ardeche, was still resembles South Auvergnat. It is apparently not intelligible with Rhodanian or Maritime Provencal. Gavot Provencal is a divergent Northern Occitan language within Alpine Provencal in France. There are intelligibility problems between this and the Dauphine Provencal spoken in the Drome and the Ardeche such that the others say that Gavot is a mutually intelligible. Dialects include Molliérois, Embrunais, and Seynois. Molliérois is a dialect of Gavot spoken north of St. Martin Vesubie and Beaui near the Italian border. It differs significantly from the dialects of St. Martin Vesubie and Isola very close by. Embrunais is spoken in Embrun. Embrunais has problematic intelligibility with the Transalpin Provencal spoken in Briançon. Seynois is spoken in the town of Seyne and in the surrounding towns of Auzet Barle, Montclar, Selonnet, and Le Vernet. Transalpin Provencal is a Northern Occitan language, the Italian group of the eastern section of Alpine Provencal, spoken in the Piedmontese Valleys in the Alps along the northwestern Italian border with France and just over the border with France in the Briançon region. There are about 100,000 speakers in Italy, about 5 It is spoken in 14 Piedmontese valleys in the Alps (in the provinces of Cuneo and Torino) and in one community (Olivetta San Michele) and a few hamlets in the Liguria region (in the province of Imperia). A lot of parents in this region still pass Transalpin Provencal on to their children, but the language is declining, being replaced with Piedmontese or Italian. It is spoken in the highest valleys only, having been replaced in the lowest valleys first and then the middle valleys. The highest valleys often lack schools, courts, post offices, etc. The people live in homes that often lack heating and bathrooms and sometimes lack electricity. Of the young people under age 20, 40-5 In Italy, it is spoken in the upper valleys of Piedmont (Val Maira, Val Varacho, Val d’Esturo, Entraigas, Limoun, Vinai, Pignerol, and Sestriero) by speakers of all ages, but younger people are reportedly shifting to Italian. Nevertheless, there are reports that the number of speakers of this language has actually risen in recent years, and it is now recognized as an official language by the state of Italy. In the Estura Valley, Piedmontese (with heavy Transalpin Provencal influence) is spoken in the lower valley from Demonde up the valley to Aisone, and Transalpin Provencal is spoken from Aisone to the top of the valley. In this area, 10 Transalpin Provencal is not intelligible outside of the region. Escarton is a dialect of Transalpin Provencal that is spoken in France and Italy near the town of Briançon on the border of France and Italy where the Gavot Provencal, Piedmontese and Savoyard Arpitan languages all come together. All three languages influence this dialect, especially Savoyard, but at base it remains an Occitan dialect. It is spoken in the Cottian Alps. There are many different dialects included under the Escarton rubric. Briançon dialects include Viaran and Montegenevre. Escarton also includes Queyras, spoken around Abries and Aigilles in France to the southeast. In Italy, it includes Oulx in Oulx, Bardonecchia in Val Susa and Val Chisone in the town of Sestriere in Val Chisone. Escarton has difficult intelligibility with the rest of Occitan. It has better intelligibility with the Transalpin Provencal across the border in Italy than with the Embrunais Gavot of the lower valley in France. Gardiol is a diaspora Alpine Provencal language spoken in Guardia Piedmontese, an Occitan-speaking town in southern Italy. The town, located in the Cantabria region in Cosenza Province, was established in the 1300’s by people from the Waldensian or Vaudois Protestant movements who were fleeing Catholic religious persecution. They were thought to be heretics and were massacred in the 1300’s. The language is a Vivaroalpenc dialect formerly spoken in Briançon and in the Varaita and Pellice valleys of France. It is still taught from K-12 in school and has 340 speakers. Gardiol is under strong southern Italian influence. Gardiol is said to be incomprehensible to French Occitan speakers due to the fact that it has been diverging for over 700 years in isolation in Italy.
The outlandish costumes of the women of Guardia Piedmontese, Italy, based on clothing from the 1300's in southeastern France.
The outlandish costumes of the women of Guardia Piedmontese, Italy, based on clothing from the 1300’s in southeastern France.
There are more Gardiol speakers in Germany’s Württemberg, in the US (especially in North Carolina in the town of Valdese), in the Argentinian town of Pigüé, and in Canada’s province of Quebec. Intelligibility of these diaspora lects with the language in Italy is not known. References

Bec, Pierre. 1982. “Occitan”, in Posner, Rebecca and Green, John N. Trends in Romance Linguistics and Philology, Volume 3. La Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton.

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