11 Weird Languages You Never Knew Existed
Looking for precise and professional language translation? Look no further! I specialize in accurately translating English to Haitian Creole, French, and Spanish.
Trust me to deliver exceptional results that capture the essence of your message. Contact me today for flawless language translations.
There are a lot of languages out there that you probably never knew existed, yet some of them are hiding in plain sight! Is it possible you’re missing out on something amazing? I went looking from the icy Arctic to the Pacific Islands, and found 11 incredible languages you should know about. Each one is packed with surprises that’ll make you think about language—and the world—a little differently… And one of them is even taking over Silicon Valley! Ready?
📺 WATCH NEXT:
7 BEST Languages to Learn in 2025 👉🏼
Want to learn more? Check out my FREE PDF of languages you never knew existed. It’s all here, inside the Bonus section of my FREE StoryLearning Kit 👉🏼
✍🏼 ON THE BLOG:
Can you learn two languages at once? 👉🏼
📖 LEARN A LANGUAGE THROUGH THE POWER OF STORY:
Learn a language the natural, effective way with one of my story-based courses. 👉🏼
🗣 SUPERCHARGE STORIES WITH SPEAKING PRACTICE
Combining story-based learning with 1-on-1 speaking practice. Book a free trial with a 5-star tutor here 👉🏼
⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 I found 11 languages you never knew existed
0:42 Wymysorys
3:19 Yup’ik
4:57 Guugu Yimithirr
7:14 Wáray-Wáray
9:03 Nigerian Pidgin
11:17 Telugu
13:01 Wu Chinese
14:26 Guaraní
16:21 Ladino
18:09 Sámi
19:30 Māori
🎬 Video Clips:
Check out my FREE PDF with even more languages you never knew existed (inside my FREE StoryLearning Kit) 👉🏼 https://bit.ly/freeSLkit_hidden-languages
Bro forgot Gen Alpha!!
Soon future English will have truck load of Tiktok abbreviations and Acronyms of words that will be stanrdardized
That gen z made!
I was learning Yupik while working with the tribe in Alaska! No specifically Yup’ik but Siberian Yupik. it is really cool. The language is a agglutinative and very complicated. But it is a really cool language.
Also my mom speaks Wari-Wari! Well she speaks Tagalog, English, Visayan, and Wari-Wari. My dad calls Wari-Wari “Channel 4”. Well when my mom is switch languages he refers to them as “TV Channels” he says the subtitles got lost when she speaks Wari-Wari. I am not exactly sure what he means.
I caught “Sámegiella” in the Sámi”. “Giella” is cognate of Finnish “kieli”, which means “tongue”.
I understood *almost* all the Ladino, since I speak Spanish. Spanish has “cántico” as well as “canción” and “canto”, all from the same root.
“Guugu Yimidhirr” means “language this-having”, but it’s called that because the word “yimi” is peculiar to the language, as opposed to “yala” (or is it “yalan”?) in Guugu Yalanji. Similarly “Meänkieli” means “our language”, but also differentiates it from standard Finnish, in which “our” is “meidän”.
How can you say an Indigenous language to Australia isn’t Australian? It’s more Australian than English, that’s for sure!
Maori is closely related to Hawaiian. Tangata Māori:Kanaka Maoli; aroha:aloha. (The first ‘a’ in “*maqoli” is long in the Tahitic branch but short in the Marquesic branch.)
Thank you Olly for the segment of Ladino. A lot of my ancestors are were Sephardic Jews from North Africa and the Balkans. I am currently learning Ladino and love it. Again, thank you so much!
A quick note: Wymysorys is called in Polish język wilamowski – which, as a Polish person – I had no idea it existed. We aren’t taught these things and I am not pleased.
Lots of examples of these words are basically Polish phonetisation of German and the sound ł roughly translates to English w as in water, web, world.
The language was probably banned because it sounded German and huh, the hate towards German language was very strong till recently (still is but not as widely spread).
OMG, Yup’ik language brought me to Inuit instantly! It has similar glottal sounds.
I’ve heard about Gugu Yimithirr in the context that they use the geographical directions to say front, back etc. Apparently they are quite good in orientation as such which does show how much language shapes our perception of the world.
Ladino is probably the easiest of these, it’s a bit like Yiddish for me, when it comes to similarity between the main language they stem off of.
I’ve heard or read about some of these but was never drawn to them, and now that I am focused on Asian languages I might pick up Wu Chinese 😛
According to Wikipedia, only 25 people in Poland speak this language 😮 I also didn’t know anything about its existence.
@@Coen79 Now, that explains a lot.
I *did* know about Telugu! I work in a team split between the UK and India. Hyderabad, to be precise, in the heart of Telangana.
Proud to be from 🇳🇿 ❤🔥Kia kaha Aotearoa
P.S. English is not an official language of Aotearoa New Zealand! It is defacto, and only Maaori and NZSL (sign language) are
Big White Cloud language is one of the most beautiful I’ve heard.
the war cry of that woman made her look possessed by a spirit!
A nice review, might help rekindle some interest in these minority lingos. Also, thank you for naming Nigerian Pidgin for me. I have long had the feeling that people from Nigeria speak “odd English”, now I know it’s a separate language built on English I might understand them better.
Guarani has been on Duolingo for a few years now, Nigerian Pidgin and Telugu are in the top 20 most spoken languages according to Ethnologue and Wu is pretty close at #26. Hardly unknown but still very interesting and worthy of attention. Waray-Waray is a very popular folk song in the Philippines, I learnt it from Asin and Leo Salonga. Ethnologue is also listing Ghanaian and Cameroonian Pidgins which are pretty close to the Nigerian variety, my first was Ghanaian but I talked to Nigerians and Cameroonians without making extra efforts.
@adicelo
Never learned much Nigerian pidgin.
Mostly used “market English” or Ninglish. It used a bit of Pidgin but it was a lot of Nigerian accented English and Nigerian phrases.
In the years since I was there, I surprised some Nigerians here in Canada by speaking this way.
@@rickkwitkoski1976 if it’s a proper language I wonder how people can compare their proficiency using standard levels A, B, C, since it mostly relies on English vocabulary
The last time I looked they pulled Guaraní from Duolingo. Is it still there and I am missing something?
@@williamglassman1281 it’s there, but only in the Spanish version of the app—there’s no English→Guaraní course, just Spanish→Guaraní. if you scroll to the bottom of the course list and tap “More”, you’ll see it with the other Spanish ones.
hi from israel where we speak hebrew, which kinda suppoised to have some relation to ladino (judeo spanol), if, maybe
i heard about yiddish, but realized about ldino only as a teen i think. with a book with tales and jokes in ladino, side by side with hebrew translation. it was named quentos. so called those stories quentos tales, before i learned that the name means tales. some stories are similar to those of arab jokes in another old book i found in hebrew
the Guarani native you showed is actually speaking Portuguese. Granted, it might be a pidgin but it’s not Guarani. hope that helps, the white guy though is really speaking Guarani (ironic, I know)
Was in Nigeria over 40 years ago. Lived there two years.
I learned a bit of Nigerian Pidgin. Mostly though we would use Nigerian Ninglish. It was full of Nigerianisms, English and some Pidgin.
Full on Pidgin was mostly incomprehensible to non Nigerians.
I’ve surprised several Nigerians in Canada when I slipped into Ninglish or Hausa, one of their native languages and lingua francas.
My wife is Filipina from Visayas and her native language is Waray-Waray. She speaks it more frequently with her family and friends from the region
Nigerian Pidgin is a very well known language in south east London. When on a bus, every other passenger is having a loud conversation in that language for everyone else to hear.
There was a hybrid Italian Hebrew language which is extinct.
Thank you for talking about the Yup’ik language! Yes, the words can be very long.
15:29 So… in this part I basically understood everything he said. I’m Brazilian, and no, I don’t speak Guaraní, but this man is speaking maybe a mix of Portuguese with Spanish, I will try to transcript exactly what I heard:
“Y tan lutando y, y vou lutar ‘mai’, por la mia criança.”
Which in Portuguese would be:
“E estou lutando, e vou lutar mais, pelas minhas crianças.”
And Spanish:
“Y estoy luchando, y lucharé más, por mis hijos.”
He’s maybe from a remote region where both Portuguese and Spanish is spoken by the people and probably has a Guaraní background, or some other indigenous language, so this all got mixed up in the end. Quite interesting.