The smallest language you've ever studied

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-05-30, 12:08

OldBoring wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Don't Qingtianese and Wenzhounese have fewer speakers than Italian? :P

But I didn't study those languages.

But you studied Italian?

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby aaakknu » 2017-05-30, 13:11

The smallest language I've studied is Crimean Tatar.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby Johanna » 2017-05-31, 19:09

vijayjohn wrote:
OldBoring wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Don't Qingtianese and Wenzhounese have fewer speakers than Italian? :P

But I didn't study those languages.

But you studied Italian?

Had he lived in Sweden, chances are that he would have studied Swedish as a second language rather than a native one, especially since he wasn't a baby when he left China. I suspect the situation in Italy may be similar with regards to Italian.

Also, technically I've studied Swedish, it was a subject in school after all, and a lot of it back in lågstadiet and mellanstadiet (age 7-13) was learning new vocabulary and the grammar of the standard language, at least after the first year when everyone had learnt how to read and write all the letters of the alphabet.
Swedish (sv) native; English (en) good; Norwegian (no) read fluently, understand well, speak badly; Danish (dk) read fluently, understand badly, can't speak; Faroese (fo) read some, understand a bit, speak a few sentences; German (de) French (fr) Spanish (es) forgetting; heritage language.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-06-01, 3:19

Johanna wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:
OldBoring wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Don't Qingtianese and Wenzhounese have fewer speakers than Italian? :P

But I didn't study those languages.

But you studied Italian?

Had he lived in Sweden, chances are that he would have studied Swedish as a second language rather than a native one, especially since he wasn't a baby when he left China. I suspect the situation in Italy may be similar with regards to Italian.

Huh, I thought he claimed Italian to be one of his native languages even on his profile, but I just went back and checked and not quite.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby Bubulus » 2017-06-11, 1:47

vijayjohn wrote:Out of the living languages you're learning right now or have been learning lately, which one(s?) has the smallest number of native (or total) speakers?
German.
What about out of all the living languages you've ever studied, have dabbled in, know one or two words of, etc.?
Salvadoran Pipil Nahuat(l).

Here's a rare recording of a song in that language, made and sung by a native speaker!

http://tushik.org/achtu-at-por-paula-lopez/

It's a song dedicated to her deceased mother, where the singer tells her mother that nature (the trees, the wind flowing through her hair, the dew, the moon's light) accompanies them, and so they don't need anything.

    ♪ Tay timunekit? ♫
    tay ti-mu-neki-t
    what 1PL-REFL-need-PL
    'What do we need?'

    ♪ Tes' tatka timunekit. ♫
    tesu tatka ti-mu-ne-kit
    not something 1PL-REFL-need-PL
    'We don't need anything.'
I sometimes sing the song to myself... I must say I don't really get how she pronounces /ts/ and /tʃ/ though, the song is too short to tell. /tʃ/ seems to be [ʃ] in achtu 'first' (which she also pronounces with a [k] at the end), and /ts/ seems to be [tʃ] in mutzunkal 'your hair'. But then /tʃ/ is indeed [tʃ] in both instances of ajwich 'dew', and /ts/ is [ts] in muatzelwi 'it falls' (? my guess of its meaning from the context--muatzelwia is not found in the largest dictionary!) and metzti 'moon'.
Have you ever studied any extinct languages? Which one(s)?

Latin and Classical Chinese. Sometimes I remember to study Ancient Greek too. Haven't had an interest in studying Classical Arabic in a while now.
eskandar wrote:Does classical Arabic count? I've studied it fairly deeply, though it's probably the largest and most-used classical language on the planet, so it's not exactly rare.

This reminds me of some guy from the ZBB, living in Egypt, who used to say that he liked "reading Classical Arabic all the time, for example, on the back of candy bar wrappers".

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-06-11, 12:18

Serafín wrote:Salvadoran Pipil Nahuat(l).

Here's a rare recording of a song in that language, made and sung by a native speaker!

And here's another song in it. :)

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby Luís » 2017-06-11, 19:35

Probably Mirandese (around 10,000 speakers).
Quot linguas calles, tot homines vales

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby Karavinka » 2017-11-12, 18:39

Manchu and Ainu. Probably Ainu. I mentally classify Manchu to the dead literary language category. Ainu, just indigenous and moribund.

Among the extinct languages, it will have to be Gothic, with the smallest corpus among all.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-22, 6:56

Irusia wrote:The smallest language I've studied is Crimean Tatar.

But not anymore, right? :D

księżycowy

Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby księżycowy » 2017-12-22, 15:05

I think I have a new contender for smallest language I've studied a bit of: Coeur D'Alene. It has (as of 2014) two native speakers left.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby aaakknu » 2017-12-22, 17:14

vijayjohn wrote:
Irusia wrote:The smallest language I've studied is Crimean Tatar.

But not anymore, right? :D

No. I studied it two years ago, when there was a course of Crimean Tatar in my city, but then the course ended and I stopped learning the language after that.
Здайся на Господа у твоїх справах, і задуми твої здійсняться. (Приповідки 16, 3)
TAC 2019

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-22, 18:11

Irusia wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:
Irusia wrote:The smallest language I've studied is Crimean Tatar.

But not anymore, right? :D

No. I studied it two years ago, when there was a course of Crimean Tatar in my city, but then the course ended and I stopped learning the language after that.

I meant that now you've been studying even smaller languages, right? :) Or at least Kalaallisut.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby Linguaphile » 2017-12-23, 4:52

Livonian (no fluent native speakers)
Votic (68)
Ingrian (120)
Veps (1,640)
Muskogee (5,070)
Chalcatongo Mixtec (6,000)
Võro (87,000)
Hmong Njua (310,000)
Iu Mien (818,700)
Aymara (998,000)

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-24, 5:50

Wow, those are some pretty interesting languages! Thanks for sharing, Linguaphile!

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby Clearlanguage » 2020-01-11, 4:40

Papiamentu (341,300 speakers) because it's down right cute.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-08-23, 4:31

Saim wrote:The smallest language I've studied is Upper Sorbian. [...] The fourth largest is Basque.

Did you mean fourth smallest?

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby OldBoring » 2021-08-23, 10:00

Esperanto.
If conlangs don't count, then Italian.
If languages at native-level don't count, then Vietnamese.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby OldBoring » 2021-08-23, 10:03

vijayjohn wrote:
OldBoring wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Don't Qingtianese and Wenzhounese have fewer speakers than Italian? :P

But I didn't study those languages.

But you studied Italian?

Shit, I forgot to reply to this question, and then I forgot I've already posted on this thread and so I've posted just now....
Btw yes, I studied Italian since it's not a language I speak since I was born, but only learnt at the age of 6 going to primary school.
If I learnt a language through school, to me that's a language that I've studied.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby Saim » 2021-08-24, 3:21

vijayjohn wrote:
Saim wrote:The smallest language I've studied is Upper Sorbian. [...] The fourth largest is Basque.

Did you mean fourth smallest?


I posted that four years ago, but I assume so. :lol: I guess I merged the sentences "the largest of the four" and "the fourth smallest" together. Basque was definitely not the fourth most widely spoken language I'd studied.

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Re: The smallest language you've ever studied

Postby vijayjohn » 2021-09-13, 21:45

OldBoring wrote:Btw yes, I studied Italian since it's not a language I speak since I was born, but only learnt at the age of 6 going to primary school.
If I learnt a language through school, to me that's a language that I've studied.

Same, except that I studied English at a slightly younger age. I also ended up having to study Malayalam, so there is no language I know that I haven't also had to learn as a foreign language.


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