UniLang

I have started reading a novel in Luxembourgish on my e-book reader ("Manu" by Gast Groeber, also available on iTunes).

Amazon's Kindle Store has an "Other Languages" section with a lot of interesting, albeit often mislabeled stuff: You can find books in Icelandic (in the "Icelandic" section), Slovene (under "Basque"), Russian (spread among several sections such as "Alsatian" and "Corsican"), Scots, Scots Gaelic and many more.

If you have an e-book reader or e-book software and some money to spare, it's worth browsing through the "Other Languages" sections. They might not have what you're looking for, and they might not have it in the right section, but it's a treasure chest for polyglots.

And of course, other e-book stores or web sites may have many other books in less mainstream languages...

Saaropean wrote:Slovene (under "Basque"), Russian (spread among several sections such as "Alsatian" and "Corsican")

This reminds me of the time I bought a book in Turkish and the vendors thought it was in Swedish or something.

vijayjohn wrote:

Saaropean wrote:Slovene (under "Basque"), Russian (spread among several sections such as "Alsatian" and "Corsican")

This reminds me of the time I bought a book in Turkish and the vendors thought it was in Swedish or something.

I'm not sure if it's necessarily mislabelled, at least not accidentally. I think you can't always offer e-books in any language you want. I know that there was a guy who couldn't offer some of his dictionaries for e-books because Amazon didn't want to offer dictionaries for languages they don't sell e-books in. Since Basque, Alsatian and Corsican are spoken in countries where Amazon exists, so that may be a workaround.

At least the "Other Languages" section exists nowadays. In the past, you could only find e-books for some languages by going to the "Books" section, selecting the language and limiting it to e-books.

I have a short novel in Rumantsch Grischun (Fieu e flomma) which I bought from the author himself when he came to speak at my university.

Someone I met through a now-defunct language-learning website one sent me a book of short essays in her native Low Alemannic variety. It was in exchange for a book I sent her (probably in English). When I was in Austria, I bought an official translation of Astérix into Viennese dialect.

I also made a lucky find once in a local used bookstore of a book of Christmas-themed short stories from Schleswig-Holstein that included selections in Low Saxon as well as Standard German. Another time, I found a book of Ashkenazi folktales printed in Yiddish in Roman script.

I bought some children books in Aranese, when I was on holiday with my family in Vielha, in la Val d'Aran. I remember that the bookseller warned me before I bought them, that those books were in Aranese.

I own an Astérix book in Mirandese.


Bought it back in 2008 I think just for the sake of it. I don't even care about Mirandese tbh, so it was a really random buy, considering I was 17 at the time and had to use my parents money. Maybe it was a deep hidden will inside me to preserve a minority language. My mother also liked this purchase. And yes, she speaks several languages.

By "lesser known languages," do we mean languages spoken by less than some number of people? I have two books in Vietnamese and a number of materials in various Indian languages with official status (especially Malayalam, of course), but

I have one novella each in Swazi, (Southern?) Ndebele, and Tsonga, courtesy of two of my relatives who live in South Africa. I also have a guide book for Yakutsk in English, Russian, and Sakha.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the Romani stories and poems I have thanks to my advisor. I also have a copy of the Fingal Rónáin saga in Middle(?) Irish, though with plenty of commentary in English. I'm not sure whether that counts as a lesser known language.

I've got "The Little Prince" in several languages including North Frisian and Xhosa, a book of poetry in Võro, a booklet in Livonian, and a three-volume set of folktales in Iu Mien.

As for e-books, one sad trend I've seen lately is that some e-books are (very poorly) translated by machine translation, so you have to be very careful about making sure the books are either originally written in the language or well-translated by a competent and fluent human being. Several times I've been happy to see a new title available in a language I wanted, only to look at the preview and realize it's actually just a horrible translation from English.
It seems to be just too easy for e-book authors to take a book they've already written, plug the whole thing into a automatic translator and ten seconds later poof! now they can also sell their e-book in "German," "Japanese," or "Kurdish".... but some are complete gibberish. At least with e-books you can preview them and figure it out prior to purchase; usually it's easy to spot from the very first sentence....

I found this e-book consisting of stories for children in Teiwa (a non-Austronesian language from the Pantar Island in eastern Indonesia) with Indonesian translation when I was looking up for the Teiwa language after reading the Papuan languages thread in the Other Languages sub-forum.

Here's the direct download link in PDF.

Wow! I've been learning Teiwa, so thanks!

vijayjohn wrote:Wow! I've been learning Teiwa, so thanks!

No problem, sir!

The only book I have in rare languages is the new testament, I have It in boe (bororo) and Terena.

Saaropean wrote:Amazon's Kindle Store has an "Other Languages" section with a lot of interesting, albeit often mislabeled stuff: You can find books in Icelandic (in the "Icelandic" section), Slovene (under "Basque"), Russian (spread among several sections such as "Alsatian" and "Corsican"), Scots, Scots Gaelic and many more.

I have tried, many times, to report some of their mis-identified languages using the "report incorrect product information" feature. When I have reported other type of incorrect information, they've always changed it and usually pretty quickly, but when I report that the language is identified incorrectly, they don't make those changes. Maybe they don't have a way to verify it and don't want to take my word for it? But there are so many that are wrong. Some are really quite hilarious, like "Estonian to Russian Dictionary (German Edition)". I'm making that example up because I can't remember exactly which languages were involved, but I've seen that sort of error with bilingual dictionaries that are listed as somehow being in a third language. Like... if the description were accurate, what would a German edition of an Estonian-Russian dictionary even be? It defies logic. (And a quick book preview shows you which languages it is really in.)
They should hire one of us to check that stuff for them.

I bought a book for Maori recently as well as a bilingual (English/Vietnamese) book of Vietnamese folktales and two books in Telugu that appear to be about some kind of Hindu scriptures. (I'm still not sure whether these count as "lesser known" or not).