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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?
vijayjohn wrote:What about out of all the living languages you've ever studied, have dabbled in, know one or two words of, etc.?
vijayjohn wrote:Have you ever studied any extinct languages? Which one(s)?
French. It's the only language I've studied with the goal of gaining some degree of fluency.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?
Arpitan (~140,000 speakers; currently dabbling), Ligurian (~500,000; learned a bit a while ago), Occitan (~1-4 million), Piedmontese (~2 million).vijayjohn wrote:What about out of all the living languages you've ever studied, have dabbled in, know one or two words of, etc.?
I've studied Latin, for the same reason I study Romance languages. Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic in passing.vijayjohn wrote:Have you ever studied any extinct languages? Which one(s)?
Dormouse559 wrote:Arpitan (~140,000 speakers; currently dabbling), Ligurian (~500,000; learned a bit a while ago), Occitan (~1-4 million), Piedmontese (~2 million).vijayjohn wrote:What about out of all the living languages you've ever studied, have dabbled in, know one or two words of, etc.?
Basically, I have a thing for minority Romance languages, and studying them helps with my conlanging.
księżycowy wrote:As for my smallest language I've seriously tried to study at one time or another, I'd have to say probably either Lushootseed, Cayuga, Mohawk, Pitjantjatjara, or Arrernte. Take your pick, I'm not sure which has less speakers.
As for dabbling, multiple North American languages. Notibly small ones include, Tlingit, Haida, Coeur d'Alene, Colville-Okanagan, Shuswap, Oneida, and Seneca.
I've also messed around with some Ngaanyatjarra, Walpiri, and another Australian language I can't recall at the moment.
I've also been quite interested in the revival of Cornish and Manx. I've also messed around with some Neo-Aramaic from time to time as well.
Last but not least, I'm a huge nerd for ancient/extinct languages. I've formally learned Hebrew and Greek, and have dabbled in Latin, Old Church Slavic, Old Irish, Old and Middle English, Egyptian/Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Sumerian, Akkadian, and Classical Japanese.
I actually intend to learn at least Latin and Aramaic.
You were probably not including older forms of still spoken languages when you said extinct, but I couldn't resist.
voron wrote:I dabbled in: Slovenian, Macedonian, Zazaki, 1-2 million speakers each, that must be the smallest.
Osias wrote:I tried to find things in Occitan, things I like to see/read/consume in the languages I practice, like songs, tweets, blogs, webradios, youtubers... Only then I realized how small it was. Even smaller than Catalan. Actually, Catalan is huge.
When I found a webradio and listen to it some minutes, they were talking about soccer, I think, and I couldn't see the difference between that and Catalan.
By googling around a lot basically. Knowing French (and having passive Italian knowledge) has been essential, since most websites and books about these languages are in French or Italian. And there are actually a few pretty good sites out there. I can give you links if you're interested.vijayjohn wrote:I'm curious; how do you find resources for these languages?
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?
What about out of all the living languages you've ever studied, have dabbled in, know one or two words of, etc.?
Have you ever studied any extinct languages? Which one(s)?
Vlürch wrote:I don't know if even that counts.
Mongolian is something I was really into for a while and remember enough to understand little bits and pieces (in writing (well, at least in the Cyrillic or Latin alphabet (but not in the Mongolian script))), although my interest in it dropped significantly for a while after learning that the /l/ is pretty much always pronounced [ɮ] or [ɬ] and shit.
I used to be alright in Latin
IIRC, there are lots of different dialects of Occitan divided into some kind of groupings based on which other language they have more in common with (French, Catalan and "pure" Occitan, I think?) or something, with some dialects being more or less literally Catalan spelled differently while on the other end some are Frenchified to the point of being more French than French. I could be wrong, though.
Dormouse559 wrote:I can give you links if you're interested.
eskandar wrote: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?
I can't even answer this one - all of the languages I'm actively working on are pretty huge.
Does classical Arabic count?
vijayjohn wrote:Of all of the languages in your profile, if we ignore Chagatai since it's an extinct language, then the one with the smallest number of speakers is Yiddish. If we then ignore the ones that you don't have any stars for, then it's Armenian. Out of the ones listed on your TAC, it appears to be Italian, at least in terms of total number of speakers.
eskandar wrote:Now this has me wondering what language has the greatest discrepancy between (low) number of native speakers and (high) amount of status, learning resources, and literature.
eskandar wrote:Now this has me wondering what language has the greatest discrepancy between (low) number of native speakers and (high) amount of status, learning resources, and literature.
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