There are currently 570 known
Latin is by far the most well-known dead language. Though it has been considered a dead language for centuries, it is still taught in school as an important way to understand many languages. Latin was originally spoken by people living along the lower Tiber River.
Dumi is the world's least spoken language and one of the rarest.
What is the rarest language to speak? Kaixana is an unknown language spoken because it only has one speaker left today. Kaixana has never been very popular. But it had 200 speakers in the past.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia. The oldest preserved inscriptions are from this period and written in Old Aramaic.
And it was determined that the weirdest language, spoken by a total population of 6,000 people worldwide, is Chalcatongo Mixtec. Chalcatongo Mixtec is spoken mainly in Oaxaca, Mexico, and is considered the weirdest language because it is the most unique when compared to the other languages spoken throughout the world.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
They are: Eyak—This language was still actively spoken in Alaska until 2008. Yana—This was spoken by the Yahi people of north-central California until 1916. Tunica—Was spoken by the Native American Tunica tribe across Louisiana until the 1930s.
There has only been one successful instance of a complete language revival, the Hebrew language, creating a new generation of native speakers without any pre-existing native speakers as a model. Languages targeted for language revitalization include those whose use and prominence is severely limited.
Right now, 9 languages a year, or one every 40 days, cease to be spoken. By 2080, the rate will rise to 16 languages per year. By the middle of the next century, we will be losing our linguistic heritage at the rate of 26 languages each year—one every two weeks.
Japanese is another most difficult language for all those who have grown up learning English, Spanish or French but at the same time might be easy for those who are well-versed in East Asian languages.
Klingon is the most developed fictional language. It was created in 1979 as the language spoken by the warrior race Klingon in the TV show Star Trek. The linguist Mark Okrand has created the language to be fully functional, to the point where fans use it to write songs and say their wedding vows.
A swear word is like a linguistic punch in the nose. Virtually every language and culture has them—and virtually every language and culture formally disapproves of them.
Unless you're speaking Esperanto, it's best to cover your ears. It's been suggested people can't swear in Japanese or Finnish, but the rumours are wrong in both cases - the only languages in which one cannot swear are 'artificial' ones such as Esperanto.
Hungarian grammar seems like the road to death for an English speaker. Because Hungarian grammar rules are the most difficult to learn, this language has 26 different cases. The suffixes dictate the tense and possession and not the word order. That's is how most of the European languages deal with this problem.
Lojban (pronounced [ˈloʒban] ( listen)) is a logical, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be syntactically unambiguous. It succeeds the Loglan project.
Local Names for Mandarin
Mandarin is the term used through much of the Western world, but the Chinese themselves refer to the language as 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà), 国语 (guó yǔ), or 華语 (huá yǔ). 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà) literally means “common language” and is the term used in mainland China.
The language features grammatical rules that are often broken, an alphabet that can confuse people who are used to a character-based system, and spelling and pronunciation irregularities that perplex even native speakers.
Chinese (Cantonese/Mandarin): Mandarin is the official language for China. Both Cantonese and Mandarin share similar writing systems, and it is insanely different from the English one. Every word has to be memorized separately because you cannot spell out words in these languages.
The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.