What are your favorite languages?

[StarryNightAllAlone]

You don't have to speak or understand them, but what languages are your favorites? It could be any languages you find beautiful, interesting, fun, etc.

 

My favorite languages (aside from number one, they're not in any particular order):

 

1. Italian & Spanish

2. Japanese

3. Dutch

4. German

5. Finnish

6. Greek

7. Hebrew

 

[sillyvie]

My top three would probably be French, Japanese, and ASL

[Boondocks Paradox]

In no particular order: Italian, Japanese, and two of my native languages - Filipino and Kapampangan.

 

If fictional languages are allowed: Simlish 😅

[Calliers]

English and Japanese....

[Captain_Tass]

Out of ones I speak, I'd say Greek, because it has some extremely creative yet unfortunately untranslatable swear words, and French cause it sounds pretty. Out of ones I don't speak yet, Spanish and Hebrew.

[J. van Deijck]

Dutch. Maybe I'm used to it, maybe it's some kind of *local patriotism* or whatever, but I can't help but think I speak one of the coolest languages out there.

Polish would be the next one in line. It's a difficult language, but really pretty.

I also like the sound of Spanish and Finnish language. And Romanian is cool as well. And Hungarian.

[bizarrist.in]

The only ones I speak are German and English and I'm quite fond of them  From a linguistic standpoint I have a deep respect for Icelandic but that was too much for me so I switched to Norwegian (and Swedish) which I enjoy very much (I only have some theoretical knowledge of those). Oh, and Scots Gaelic, particularly for its phonetics, but my brain simply can't handle VSO syntax 😅

[Anomaly Q3Xr]

I love languages, and learnt a fair few growing up, as well as dabbled in creating them when I was younger (very basic since I was a kid). However, I now only speak English due to just never using the languages that I learnt growing up. I have thought about trying to learn another language again (probably German which I learnt in school), but not sure if I would be able to get back into it. With my created universe I am always having to make new words for names of starships, people, planets, etc

 

I guess German was the one I most preferred learning when I was growing up.

[Blue eyes white dragon]

American Sign Language 

[blunose2772]

Japanese and Klingon. 

[J. van Deijck]

2 hours ago, Life Of Tass said:

Greek

I'm not familiar with the sound, but I've always been curious about it. And I get totally lost while trying to read your alphabet

[Captain_Tass]

1 hour ago, alsjeblieft said:

And I get totally lost while trying to read your alphabet

Haha, I totally get that! Different alphabets are always really confusing to me as well! The only alphabet other than Greek (mother tongue) and Latin (because English, French, German, Romanian etc.) I can read is the Cyrillic one, just because it's so similar to the Greek one.

 

(Fun fact! The word ΠΡΟΓΡΑΜΜΑ/ПРОГРАММА (schedule/programme) when written out in capital letters is identical in Greek and Russian! No, I didn't write the same word twice, it's in 2 different alphabets! Try running it through a lowercase converter!)

[daveb]

I'm only fluent in English, so it has to be one of my favorites. And in spite of the "hate" it gets sometimes I think it does have some good features. It is certainly conducive to punning.  

 

Other languages that intrigue me include Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic, Finnish, Welsh, Italian, French, any of the Scandinavian languages, Dutch, German (which is the one other than English I have actually studied in the classroom), and various lesser known languages/dialects (depending on where the line is drawn) such as Cornish, Frisian, and others.

 

If I could choose to be suddenly fluent in another language I'd probably start with Scots Gaelic (partly due to my heritage), then maybe Finnish or Dutch (because I think they are cool), then one of the Romance languages (Spanish would probably be the most useful here, but French would be a possibility, too).

[J. van Deijck]

@daveb you seem to have picked up some Dutch already

[daveb]

Only really that I can figure some of it out based on my limited knowledge of English and German.  

But seriously, I couldn't communicate in it.  (it's more like when you can kind of figure out something when you read it, but would not be able to write it or speak it, you know? and even the you can get things wrong and/or not get some things at all)

[StarryNightAllAlone]

9 hours ago, blunose2772 said:

Japanese and Klingon. 

You're a man of culture. Good choices.

[StarryNightAllAlone]

2 hours ago, daveb said:

I'm only fluent in English, so it has to be one of my favorites. And in spite of the "hate" it gets sometimes I think it does have some good features. It is certainly conducive to punning.  

 

Other languages that intrigue me include Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic, Finnish, Welsh, Italian, French, any of the Scandinavian languages, Dutch, German (which is the one other than English I have actually studied in the classroom), and various lesser known languages/dialects (depending on where the line is drawn) such as Cornish, Frisian, and others.

 

If I could choose to be suddenly fluent in another language I'd probably start with Scots Gaelic (partly due to my heritage), then maybe Finnish or Dutch (because I think they are cool), then one of the Romance languages (Spanish would probably be the most useful here, but French would be a possibility, too).

I like English, too. I didn't rank it because I'm naturally a little biased because it's my native language. I think English is a clear, efficient language, although admittedly not the prettiest. 

[nazokashii]

The short answer is a resounding "yes"... I just love languages very very much.

 

Japanese is so cool though - the grammar is both very easy (no plurals, no differences in words depending on 'gender' or anything) but also very complex if you want to: There's so much you can do with different verb endings, to communicate doing something "by mistake", for example, all the levels of politeness/formality, small subtle nuances, that you can be both extremely precises and enormously vague (a complete sentence only needs a verb, which can allow for lots of "figuring out by context")... it's also amazing for wordplay, since there are sooo many words that sound exactly the same but depending on which kanji (Chinese characters) you use, mean drastically different things (great for, say, double meanings in music videos, as well as just general punnery)... oh yeah and pronunciation is super easy, as if you have the word written in one of the two syllable 'alphabets', that's the exact pronunciation.

 

I love English too though, the amount of vocabulary is wonderful, and

2 hours ago, daveb said:

It is certainly conducive to punning.  

this.

 

Icelandic is super cool in how it has made efforts to create their own new words instead of loan words for new technological phenomena like television and airplanes and such. (That said Japanese can be hilarious in the amount of loan words they have, that end up sounding almost nothing like the original or have their meanings shifted from what they were in the source language.)

 

And there's just so much I don't know as well, or have only heard very much second hand, languages with a distinction in grammar between "ordinary past" and "legendary/mythical past", differing amounts of colour names, and just soooo much... How, I've heard, the Korean writing symbols of today were designed to be easy to learn, I think I've heard that it's possible to learn them quite well in a day?

 

Oh and I definitely also want to mention sign languages!

 

For anyone who loves languages as much as I do, I can highly recommend the "Lingthusiasm" podcast. It's great.

 

Myself, I'd say I speak Swedish (mother tongue) and English fluently, Japanese pretty well, and then I also retain some French, especially understanding but could probably speak decently. Can understand Norwegian/Danish/Icelandic just because so close neighbours and there's of course also some other extrapolation I can do to some extent... but for those I've technically studied it's the first four.

[Piotrek]

Interesting topic. For people interested in short "language profile" type videos check out the Langufocus channel on YT. 

 

I don't have an all-time favourite language that I would put at the top for everything, but I do like certain features in many of them, and certain of those have already been mentioned.

My native Polish is, as @alsjeblieft said, difficult but you can do some great things with it, things that you can't do with English. An example would the ease with with you can create diminutives and, conversely, augmentatives. Other than personal names, it's not a common feature in English, I think (And yes, I know there are examples, but it's not common). One drawback of Polish I can think of is that it prefers to take foreign words rather than create its own. As @nazokashii pointed out, Icelandic would be an example of a more creative approach. Also Hungarian, Greenlandic or Finnish.

 

English is versatile and it seems to me, from the outside looking it, that it has a great ease of coining new words and liitle inhibition to do so; usually just mash two words together and some time later it's added to authoritative dictionaries. Now let the rest of world worry how to translate them  One drawback that I can name off the top of my head would be the nightmarish spelling. 

 

Out of the other languages that I've tried to learn in school (or the ones that I was being taught, if you understand what I mean by that difference  ) I'd say Italian because of the melody and the clear pronunciation. (Also, I think the distinction between passato prossimo and passato remoto would be an example of what @nazokashii said about distinguishing between recent past and "legendary/remote past". Or did you mean something like "evidentiality" where you use various particles or constructions to convey whether something is true, hearsay, bs, etc?

 

Last but not least, lots of respect for the learners of tonal languages or the languages including various click sounds. I can't fathom trying to learn not only how to produce them but, more importantly, how to decode them on the fly. 😮 

 

 

[daveb]

1 hour ago, Piotrek said:

For people interested in short "language profile" type videos check out the Langfocus channel on YT. 

Yes, that's a fun channel, with lots of good information about languages.  

[J. van Deijck]

13 minutes ago, daveb said:

1 hour ago, Piotrek said:

For people interested in short "language profile" type videos check out the Langfocus channel on YT. 

Yes, that's a fun channel, with lots of good information about languages.

I'm gonna check it out tomorrow, too, because I'm curious

[Piotrek]

Here's a video with weather forecast in 37 European languages (timestamps for each one are in the video description) 

Spoiler

 

 

@alsjeblieft Greek starts at 5:30 mark

@daveb Scottish Gealic at 18:00 mark

 

Asian languages pt. 1

Spoiler

 

Part 2

Spoiler

 

 

[Calliers]

I have to add Swahili because my parents are from Africa so I mean, I do have to have like the -quintessential- African language as a favorite too guess.

[gwennol]

the prettiest languages, to my taste, are brazilian portuguese, welsh, scottish gaelic, estonian, finnish, maltese, mandarin, and kalallisut/greenlandic. with the disclaimers that i am slightly biased towards one of these, as it's my ancestral language, and of the 7000ish languages there are definitely more that are really pretty but i haven't been exposed to!

i specifically chose prettiest because if i were going by most interesting that list would've been four times the length and changing like the wind

[Calliers]

I should add.... I don't know how to speak Swahili. Apparently when I was a kid I learned a few words, also I wanted to add Setswana to the list (the language they speak in Botswana) and Afrikaans (the language the whites of Dutch descent who settled in Southern Africa speak, it is very similar to Dutch) as I heard these languages a lot when I was a kid.... I still remember a few words from Setswana to this day. Even though I can only make up just about as many sentences in Setswana as I can in Japanese (from watching anime).

[J. van Deijck]

And from myself I'd say the Ecolinguist channel on YouTube is worth checking, too. He's a Polish guy, by the way

[nazokashii]

19 hours ago, Piotrek said:

I'd say Italian because of the melody and the clear pronunciation. (Also, I think the distinction between passato prossimo and passato remoto would be an example of what @nazokashii said about distinguishing between recent past and "legendary/remote past". Or did you mean something like "evidentiality" where you use various particles or constructions to convey whether something is true, hearsay, bs, etc?

I hadn't heard that Italian had something like that, but that is really cool! I don't remember exactly which language it was, because I think it was some very 'small' one, that I heard about on a Lingthusiasm episode... should be in this one: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/190937079286/lingthusiasm-episode-41-this-time-it-gets-tense

Actually, since they had links in the description, I think the language is probably Tifal, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifal_language#Tense_and_aspect

 

So, no, it wasn't for evidentially, but I loved their episode on that as well 😄 https://lingthusiasm.com/post/184928796346/lingthusiasm-episode-32-you-heard-about-it-but-i

 

Also, thanks to everyone for the great channel/video recommendations ☺️

[Piotrek]

@nazokashii To be clear, the rules governing the distinction between passato prossimo and passato remoto in Italian depend on the region where the speaker is from. I was always taught "passato prossimo for more recent past, passato remoto for events more distant in time", but I've heard that it's far from universal. I definitely prefer the former because it's much easier to remember, with just one participle form to memorize (although the distinction between auxiliary verbs can be tricky), while passato remoto has a whole slew of irregular verbs and you have to remember full conjugations. On the othe hand, when I kept a blog in Italian I would often write entries about Polish history using passato prossimo (because lazy  ) and the Italian users reading them would often correct that by suggesting p.r. forms  

[Typhoon]

I love Czech. It feels like a very technical language for me and once you get past all the strange marks above all the letters it's very easy to understand (mostly). Another thing I like about it is that it's very similar to Polish so if someone shows me a Polish sentence I can understand about 25% of it.

 

I also love German as well. I consider it a very powerful language and while I would not consider myself fluent I know it so well I can start speaking it without a second thought.

[GingerRose]

I think the most beautiful spoken language is Hawaiian.