10 Most Spoken Languages You've Never Heard Of (feat. Language Simp) 

Notes/Corrections: A big thank you to all volunteers who did error-checking for this video Special thanks to Wrenguistics for helping research parts of the video! You can find his channel here: youtube.com/@wrenisprobablyb0red

Sick list. I’m a simp for Punjabi 💯💯

I'm ethnically Javanese from the Surinamese diaspora. Most of us speak a creole version of the language, so sometimes Indonesian Javanese can catch me off-guard, but is largely understandable if not mixed with Indonesian. The speech registers have largely died out in Suriname simply due to the history of how the Javanese got here, but Krama Madya and Inggil exists in many traditional Javanese ceremonies, rituals, and prayers. One of my uncles is a Kejawen monk (a sort of syncretic belief system that mixes animism, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism) and he has alluded a few times to an ancient Javanese speech register that was used to specifically to speak to deities and mythical creatures (specifically those of Hinduism). I'm not exactly sure how true this is since I have really only ever heard him talk about it, but he is a very culturally knowledgeable and wise man, but I thought I'd like to share. Because of him and my upbringing, I am glad to say that I was taught Javanese in its original script and I hope it lives on. I don't see people use it much anymore, but I hope any fellow Javans in Indonesia are preserving our script and using it so it doesn't die out.

Hey, native javanese here👋 I want say thank you for LingoLizard for covering up this language, because of how many people that speak this language in Java (around 100mil~) although it's not popular. Note : I love in the "Possessive Suffixes" part, you used "mata" (Eyes) as the object for the example. Cuz "matamu" and "matane" has a similar power like "your ass" for reaction to nonsense. So if someone says some nonsense or words that offending us, we will reacted with "MATAMU" or simply "YOUR ASS" 🤣

Hello this is a comment from Stealthy, aka LingoLizard. I hope anyone reading this comment enjoys the video and has a nice day :)

As a South Asian, this is shocking yet understandable you guys don’t know all these languages. But still wow.

Fun fact: The Java programming language is named after the Java coffee, which is from Java!

One langauge that is definitely more known than the ones here, but is still really strongly underrepresented seems to be Bengali. It has 300 million speakers, and has some really cool history and literature, but is often ignored.

As a native Punjabi speaker, I really like that Punjabi was mentioned in this list. I have seen so many lists talking of lesser known languages, or languages worth learning, and Punjabi was very rarely mentioned. Feels nice!

as someone who comes from indian descent (albeit north indian) it was kind of shocking to me that people don't know tamil, telegu, marathi, and kannada. just goes to show how different everyone's experiences are.

The Wu languages are my favorite out of these. I always loved the way Shanghainese sounded in particular. Hopefully I can study it someday.

I’m surprised I knew all of the languages referenced in the video. I think it’s because I’ve been a language, history, & geography nerd since I was a child. I’m not even saying this as an “American shocks people by knowing even the most basic things about other countries” sort of way. I’m just proud of myself & thought I’d share it because like I said…I surprised myself😂

Bengali is worth mentioning in this list, especially due to the fact that in 1952, many people in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) have sacrificed their lives for the language, as they protested against the imposition of Urdu by the central government of Pakistan. This happened on February 21 of that year, and every year we Bangladeshis celebrate International Mother Language Day, while at the same time we mourn the ones who died for our native tongue.

When talking about Wu dialect group, I think Suzhounese also deserves to be mentioned, as it is considered the most pleasant sounding dialect in China.

Sometime in the past I felt like language enthusiast were only interested in IE, Semitic, and East Asian languages... Now that I've grown a tad bit older, that's not entirely wrong but merely one side of the coin-some people around me are ashamed of being heard speaking their language in public 🤷‍♂️ How would other people want to learn and appreciate our languages if it doesn't start from us?

Wow, this video just made my day! As someone who speaks Telugu, I've never come across a video in the polyglot community analyzing my language before. I really enjoy watching language videos like the ones from Langfocus, where I get to learn about noun cases, verb inflections, and abugida, but I've never been able to compare it to my own language until now. I really hope more videos like this come out in the future. Thank you so much for creating this amazing video! Oh, and here's a fun fact: Telugu only has two genders - one for "he" and another for both "she" and "it". And it's called the "Italian of the East" because most of the words end in vowels. PS: We do say bye in Telugu but it more like " lets meet again" - "మళ్ళీ కలుద్దాం" - "またね", " ok then" - " సరే అయితే "-"じゃね" , " I'll take my leave/ that's all from me" - "ఉంటా" - "それでは" although they're more correct ways say but they all sound more formal. For some reason I feel like Telugu - Japanese have some similarities. This gets more exaggerated in Tamil - Korean

I'm a native Kannada speaker, thanks for including our beautiful language :) (note to language simp : i am also a gigachad polyglot, like you)

Happy that you mentioned Tamil in your list, It is the major Dravidian language along with Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada,But a bit sad that you didn't mention Malayalam in your video🙁. Dravidian languages🔥: தமிழ் (Tamizh)❤ മലയാളം (Malayalam) ❤ తెలుగు (Telugu) ❤ ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada) ❤

吴音 originates from the Middle Chinese period, well before Wu Chinese became a thing. The 吴 is used as a vague designation of "southern" pronunciation.

I am a Kannadiga and I am not surprised to find Kannada in this list. We Kannadigas integrate into which ever area we move into and learn that particular language and try to become part of it and don't impose language on others and that is one of the reason why our language is not known outside of our state of Karnataka. This has both positive and negative effects. On the positive side , our ability to learn new languages makes us easier to settle down in new places we move in and on negative side , our large heartedness is misused by people who move into our state and even after living there for decades refuses to learn the local language.

I'm a native Marathi speaker who's learning German. There are a few things that I've noticed are common to both: - Retention of 3 genders (m/f/n) wherein inanimate objects can also be m/f - Adding "in" to make a word feminine (mainly occupation). In Marathi, "kamgar" is worker, "kamgarin" is female worker, and so forth - Use of "s" when conjugating verbs to 2nd person (informal). Ich mache = Me karto; Du machSt = Tu kartoS/karteS

POV: You knew at least the existance of those languages 😎

As expected I knew next to nothing of all this. But I knew about Amharic and I remembered how much I liked their beautiful script. And I have at least heard about Javanese, Hausa, Tamil, Telugu and Punjabi before. Thank you very much!

I like that this was sort of like a marathon LangFocus video. Nice job

You said at 5:56 'a' becomes an 'o' sound such as in Jawa. But at 6:52 you say Krama, I believe it's pronounced closer 'Kromo' 😅 This doesn't detract anything from the video (which is really well made I must add!), but I thought I would point it out nonetheless. I happen to know a bit of Javanese (I have family from Central Java). So, I think it's pronounced 'Kromo', but don't take my word for it, I am Australian after all 😅

As a native Marathi speaker, happy to see Marathi included in the list. Love it how it is closest to Sanskrit than other Indo Aryan languages.

hello! I'm a little fresh when it comes to linguistics and a lot of the terminology you used completely flew over my head but I really appreciate and enjoyed listening to all the research that went into this video. you really know your stuff!

As a Punjabi speaker I’m grateful that you covered it in this video. Thank you!! (And by the way, goodbye and hi are the same in Punjabi with both translating to ਸਤ ਸ੍ਰੀ ਅਕਾਲ pronounced “Sat Srii Akaal.” Hope that helps!!)

at 00:17 russian word пиздец (pisdietz) is a pejorative word and means "fucked up"

My parents are nigerian and now so many random things ive heard like Pikin which ive always known what they meant, make even more sense to me now

Now that I watched your video, I understand that this world has so many languages that most people don't speak about, and they are sometimes wonderful. Thanks for such educational content and efforts you put into finding all this info.

Awesome video! I've heard of most of these languages but didn't know the details about them.

Definitely an underrated linguistics channel. Thank you for this!!

Thanks for the great video and the effort put into them! It would be awesome in future videos to perhaps include clips of the more intriguing rarer sounds, so we could get an idea of how they are pronounced!:D

NAATU, NAATU song which won an Oscar this year is in Telugu language

In Nigerian Pidgin, it's not referred to as Naija, that just means Nigeria

I know all of these languages, and could even tell you a decent amount about most of them, but this is such an interesting overview! Learned a lot about Hausa and Javanese specifically!!

Oh, Lingo, you will never disappoint me with your videos! 🦎

Native Wu speaker (Changshu dialect of Taihu area) and linguistics major here, what you said about Wu having the fewest distinct syllables is actually not true. Wu has as many phonemes as other significant languages if not more. My dialect has 34 onset consonants and 48 possible nuclei, including 8 tones (of course there are a lot of phonological constraints like the others), compared just 23 onset consonants and 39 possible nuclei, including 4 tones in Mandarin. Plus most sinitic languages have only nasal codas, and rarely [p,t,k] that you can find in southern regions. Anyways, this is just an minor issue and I’m really glad that you covered my native tongue!

You forgot Malayalam - the 4th of the 4 Major Dravidian languages, spoken in the 🇮🇳 Indian state of Kerala with not much less speakers than Kannada (35 million natives of Malayalam) - and is also one of the Classical Languages of India, & it's script having the most letters for any Indian Abuguida & looks beautiful like this - മലയാളം! Lovely video though!

The go-on in Japanese is actually the first layer of Chinese loanwords in Japanese, which were borrowed from the Wu region. This borrowing happened about 7 to 8th century BC, meaning that it has little to do with the Wu language today.

Did language simp not know what an abugida is? That's not very gigachad! Fantastic video! Definitely your coolest yet! And not just because I helped a little with it. :P

5:36 bring back the original script

As a native Marathi speaker, it is nice seeing the language get some attention

Great video K Klein, thank you

These languages are fascinating and would be fun to learn!

I think I might heard the last one, I do think so. But I'm a huge language nerd. But it was nice hearing information about the languages, since I only have heard about the names, not really how they work.

commenting to boost the video 🙂

Oh my God, im so happy that someone finally made some description of Javanese script internationally!

I've heard of all of these, and I've met some Gujaratis, a Telugu, and probably some Amharic speakers (at Ethiopian restaurants, but I didn't get to know them).

You made such a big point of speaker count in the beginning of the video, really weird that you then chose to not include them for the actual list.

Wu and telegu I didn't know ... the rest: yes! Maybe because I'm a Dane and speaking Danish (approx. 5,5 mio inhabitant) it's necessary to be open to languages. Interesting video, thanks for sharing. Saved, as I have to go deeper into it again.

As an Indonesian we got teached German language in high school beside English 😂 but I've forgot it all since I've never using it

If anyone is curious, Nigerian Pidgin even has there own language pages on BBC World News & Wikipedia

I am a native Tamil speaker happy to see western people covering our language

Greetings from Indonesia, a hotbed of languages (around 700 on a good day) you’ve never heard of but have tens of millions of speakers, some of them which you can find on my channel 😁

Bro thanks for including Punjabi, we are never mentioned in any of these linguistic videos. Jai Punjab

This was such an amazing video but you guys didn't talk about Ancient Albanian Sign Language that used to be the language of Literature during the Macedonian times

Wow thank you for bringing the language called German to my attention. I had never even heard of it before!

The collab we didn't know we needed.

Nice to see a video on Telugu, i think this is the only video that has a linguistic analysis of Telugu. Unfortunately, there aren't too many resources in Telugu.

At 6:05 , I think it should be "kirim" instead of kiren. It's pronounced "kirem" though, where "ki" is pronounced like "key" in English and "rim/rem" is pronounced like "rem in remedy" in English. Also Java coding language as far as I know, named after Java coffee which the coffee bean originally is from Java island.

i know literally all these languages both because i'm a language nerd and also because most of the people in my town speak them despite living in the us 😭

One of my school website's main languages is Amharic even though I live in America because of the sizable Ethiopian and Eritrean diaspora in my district

I'm irritated about how it's excruciatingly difficult to find learning resources for many of these "common" languages. Some examples would be Lahnda and Marathi.

5:30 Javanese written by simps. 5:36 Javanese written by gigachads

the fact that the regional border is so similar to the language extension makes me so happy, it is just perfect.

3:07 thanks for the video. I am a native kannada speaker. For ones who are wondering how do people even learn all these complexities, this is the beautiful thing about any language, it is often well structured that you don't even realise it in day to day conversation (unless you study literature). Thanks for making me realize this about my own language and also how beautiful languages can be.

5:42 yeah, as a javanese itself, i can confirm, i only use javanese scripts and krama javanese in javanese school subject, and sometimes when i wanna write a fancy text 🗿😭

This whole video seemed like fanservice (kind of like a gift to be honest) for language nerds with bunch of things we i love to see. I mean with the grammer tables, Language Simp, cool languages and and the talking speed, what else would i need. Thank you for enteraining 1/2 an hour of my life

The phonology and script are what make these languages unique 👌

One small correction, marathi was also written in modi lipi before the independence.

btw the Indonesian Wikipedia page for Javanese is a Good Article with decent citations, if you want to discuss the lang in the future hehe

As a native Wu Chinese speaker who lives in Zhejiang Province, I would like to express my gratitude for your efforts on making this great video! But I want to point out that Japanese Go-on isn't a direct descendant of the Wu Chinese. Though the examples given in this video (12:09) look quite similar. It's mainly due to the same changes have happened in both Japanese Go-on and Wu Chinese, but not in Mandarin or other Chinese languages. Linguists believe that Go-on and Wu Chinese are both descendants of Middle Chinese (~5CE, Northern and Southern Dynasty), the name Go-on is named after the Southern part of China, Go(Wu 吴) ,which is thought to be the origin (in ~5CE ) of Go-on System.

I'm Javanese, thank you for adding my language, many foreigners doesn't know this language yet :') Ngoko Aku wong Jåwå, suwun wis nambahké båsåku, akéh wong jåbå sing durung ngerti båså iki :") Kråmå Kulå tiyang Jawi, matur nuwun sampun mindhakaken båsåku, kathah tiyang njawi ingkang déréng ngertos båså niki Kråmå inggil Kawulå tiyang Jawi, matur sembah nuwun sampun mindhakaken båsåku, kathah tiyang njawi ingkang déréng ngertos båså menikå

Very instresting! nice

according to my indonesian friend , bahasa is spoken by more than 250 mio individuals . their population alone are 278 mio not including malaysia and brunei , singapore & southern part of phillipines , and part of east timor

It was actually an interesting discovery that I learned wait some indo europians languages have tones - pundžabi, slovenian, lietuviešu LATVIEŠU - my language has tones! Ou it does! zāle (grass) is differentiated from zāle (hall) by tones, I had to checks by saying one or other word to people and asking them to tell me in english what I said and everyone always heard exactly what I said. Nice.

Sheesh thank you bro for adding my language kannada .

Thank God I studied African Languages once. And I have heard about Amharic, Haussa, Ki-Swahili and Ewe.

This was a great video but a lot of people don't know all the language terms you ran through so quickly. Maybe saying more examples of the actual words or tenses you're referring to would sustain engagement better.

I am of Javanese ethnicity and also a native Javanese speaker really appreciate this content

I speak a dialect of Punjabi, considered by a lot of speakers to be an independent language, the Pothwari language spoken in Pothwar region of Northern Punjab most notably Rawalpindi the differences with punjabi are mostly vocabulary words and some prepositions and verbs, like the prepositions in Pothwari are nā (genitive"of") kī (dative/accusative marker) ań (ergative marker) sũ (ablative"from") icc (inessive"in") nal (comitative"with") other examples are "I will see" in Punjabi "Maiñ vekh leyāñga" in Pothwari "Maiñ takki kińsāñ" "Will you go with me?" Punjabi "tu mere nāl jāveñga?" Pothwari "tu māŕe nal julsēñ?" "Give him water" Punjabi "ennũ pāńi deyo" Pothwari "`issã\`iski pāńi des " etc.

19:11 Not all punjabi dialects are tonal and lost voiced aspirates. Even the standard is pitch accent not tonal. Many varieties such as Hindko, if you can call it a variety, have high similarity to Sanskrit sounds. And early punjabi did not have tone but had Voiced aspirates. many people get this extremely wrong. Edit: Nvrmind i saw the message a bit later ahah

I love amharic. The script just look amazing 😍

15:22: I speak telugu and I cant understand any of that. Edit: probably not telugu, just another language with telugu script. Anyone know which one?

Hausa being covered by a language channel? Let's gooo!

*Pardon*, but I'm Indonesian here 😒🙄 (I'm from Bandung city, which we mainly speak Sundanese & Javanese). I also knew few Batak language. I'm Batak btw. There's more than 1 language (Indonesian) that we usually speak of (our main/official language). There are over 700 languages and over 1,300 ethnic groups. That's include Sundanese, Javanese, Batak, Bali, Bekasi, and lot more. Even I didn't know all of them.

TELUGU MENTIONED 🗣️🗣️🗣️ but seriously this is an amazing short description on telugu and bonus points on pronunciation, this is the quality i love from this channel

While there are some sounds in Tamil that rely on other letters, it’s quite easy to tell the difference, for example for when பா is used like ‘ba’ or ‘pa’ if you study the language; get a feel for it.

Putting the ad between “attractive to every women” and ”and men on the planet” is a genius move 😂

Topics & comments sounds like "subject"s & predicates. I put "subject" in quotes because it's not really a subject. It's differentiated in Arabic. A standard subject with a verb is called "فاعل" which is literally "doer". While the "subject" of a predicate is called "مبتدأ" which roughly means "the one put in the beginning".

Isn't there a BBc pidgin website? It's a bit weird seeing it as written language

12:37 bro it's not "tay-mol" or how ever you pronounced it it's idk how to write it down but "THHA mil or THA mil"

native javanese here, thanks for covering up!

22:30 tamil don't say goodbye, but something like "I'll be back" or "imma put down (the phone)" or "(thank you and) Greetings" In funerals you'd say "I'll go". Because to say "I'll be back" implies you'll be coming to another funeral. Also, when the main character of a movie says "im leaving!" without saying "I'll be back", you SURE AS HELL know it's foreshadowing the character dying.

11:13 fun fact, Suzhou Wu also has fricative forms of /i/ and /y/ 😄

Heyyyy shout out to Amharic speakers! My buddy speaks Oromo at home, but he speaks Amharic with his wife when they need to talk smack about their kids in front of them :D

Cap, I've heard of Amharic, Javanese, Hausa, Punjabi and Pidgin English.

That was super interesting, but it seems like you went away from the concept of how many people speak each of the languages