The Most Difficult Language I Have Ever Studied

I like to tell people that I learn languages for a living. This is neither a joke nor an exaggeration, as I work as a linguist and content creator for a London-based company called uTalk, and we make language learning apps for all types of devices. If you’ve ever flown Turkish Airlines and stumbled upon a page to learn Turkish while you were browsing the movie screen on the back of the seat in front of you, then yes, you’ve seen our work.

Our best-selling application, other than the one on the backs of airplane seats, is the eponymous uTalk App, which teaches over 150 languages (‘DuoLingo Lite’, as I call it).

But we do have one strength that even Duolingo would admit to being beyond its capabilities: indigenous and lesser-known languages. From Zambia’s ChiBemba language to Jèrriais (the original Norman French dialect of Jersey in the Channel Islands, best known for being the birthplace of Henry Cavill) to Yucatec Mayan (the language spoken by the water-breathing, wing-footed Prince Namor from Black Panther 2), uTalk’s repertoire of unusual languages is ever-expanding.

This gives me plenty of opportunities to learn the world’s most unusual languages.

And thus, after many years of research, I will explain in detail below what I consider to be the most complicated, mind-boggling, and tongue-twisting language I have ever studied.

Tlingit

Tlingit is an endangered indigenous language spoken by over 300 mostly elderly people on both sides of the border between the Alaska Panhandle and British Columbia in Canada.

It belongs to the vast Na-Dene family, and its distant cousins include Navajo, the Native American language with the largest number of speakers, and Apache, popularised by old-fashioned cowboy movies.

The language has a large number of highly unusual features when compared with European and Asian languages. Most of the consonant sounds of this language do not exist in English, nor, for that matter, in the majority of European languages other than some obscure ones spoken in the Caucasus Mountains.

Tlingit is full of ejective sounds; sounds made by ‘popping’ the tongue or lips while ‘spitting’ from the Adam’s apple area of your throat. In modern Tlingit spelling, these sounds are written as consonants followed by an apostrophe: T’, P’, K’, Kw’, X’, Xw’, and many others. A sample of words with all the sounds of Tlingit can be heard below, enunciated by X̱ʼunei (Lance A. Twitchell), a professor of Alaska Native languages at the University of Southeast Alaska. The video comes from his YouTube channel.

Some have likened the guttural sounds of Tlingit to those of the alien Klingon language, a completely invented language made up by a linguist for Star Trek!

I do believe that the language of those tall, blue aliens from Avatar’s planet, Pandora, also has ejective sounds. I guess strange, otherworldly sounds make a language sound ‘alien’ to non-native listeners. In which case, Tlingit would sound absolutely alien to English speakers. In the above clip, listen to how the professor pronounces the L’ sound (you can hear it at minute 3.57) as in the word for ‘coho’ or ‘silver salmon’, which is ‘l’ook’.

And to make matters even more complicated, Tlingit is a tonal language, like Chinese or Thai. The tone of a word or syllable can drastically change its meaning.

Thankfully, Tlingit only has two tones, high and low.

Mind-boggling grammar

Many nouns are monosyllabic, like in Chinese: for example, ‘yaakw’ meaning ‘canoe’ and ‘xh’é’ meaning ‘mouth’. However, Tlingit verbs are actually complex phrases built from a variety of roots with attached prefixes, suffixes, and particles.

The verbs not only contain the subject of the sentence (the performer of the action), but also the object (the receiver of the action), a prefix to indicate the shape and type of object involved, a prefix to indicate (when applicable) what part of the body is used to perform the action — hand, foot, nose, eye etc. — and a host of other prefixes to indicate the direction of motion (up, down, across, towards the sea, towards the seashore from the sea and so on).

Finally, the verb itself changes its vowels and endings to show whether the action has been completed or not. The verb can also show distinct forms for future, hypothetical, and actions that are performed as a command! Yes, I think I’ll take a deep breath before I continue!

A strange word order and unusual idioms

Take the following sentence:

Yan uwaḵúx.

It translates to ‘he went ashore’ in English.

However, how the words break down is far more complex. The first word, ‘yan’, indicates a motion from the sea towards the shore.

The ‘u-’ at the beginning of the second word is a perfective marker, meaning that the action has been completed.

The ‘-wa-’ is a classifier that indicates that the event is a state (‘having gone ashore’) rather than something forced or caused to occur by another agent.

Finally, the last syllable, ‘-ḵúx’, is a verbal root that means ‘a singular human moves by boat or car’.

Yes, that’s how complex the verb is!

The language arranges sentences in a manner similar to Japanese, Korean, or Turkish, meaning that the verb always comes at the end of the sentence.

Here is a clip from WikiTongues showing two fluent speakers having a conversation.

Generally, the languages spoken along the Pacific Northwest of North America are incredibly complex on all levels: phonology, syntax, morphology, you name it!

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Does Tlingit strike you as one of the most difficult languages, too?