3 Interesting Language With Less Than 1,000 Native Speakers
If you’ve ever wanted to learn a new language, you probably first considered the romantic languages, or any latin-stemmed languages so there isn’t an intense learning curve. It’s a fine and reasonable thing to do, as learning a new language can be beneficial to our career and social lives, while also being a fun challenge.
As I’ve been looking into tracing my native background and researching a language to study, I’ve come across many interesting indigenous languages and many of them with very few native speakers. Few native speakers doesn’t necessarily mean the language is dying, as some communities have always been small in numbers, but some are threatened. It’s for this reason I’ve decided to share the complex (or simple) aspects and interesting nature of indigenous languages.
Alabama
Alabama (also known as Alibamu, Albaamo innaaɬiilka in the language itself) is a Muskogean language spoken by the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas. It was spoken at the Alabama-Quassarte Tribal Town in Oklahoma, but has since died out there. There are approximately 250 speakers of the language left.
As a Muskogean language, Alabama is distantly related to other, more widely known, languages such as Chickasaw and Chocktaw. Alabama has a pitch accent, though it is not lexically significant but rather grammatically conditioned. There are two pitches, high and low, with low only being contrastive with it is immediately preceded by a high pitch sound. This often occurs within the same syllable, resulting in a falling pitch. Pronouns have three persons: first, second and third. First and second persons distinguish singular and plural forms, while the third person does not.
‘Hello’ in Alabama: ‘Ontitokaaha’
Pirahã
Pirahã (also spelled Pirahá, Pirahán) is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The language is called Hi’aiti’ihi within the language itself. It is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers. It is not in immediate danger of extinction, as its use is vigorous and the Pirahã community is mostly monolingual.
The Pirahã people (pronounced [piɾaˈhã]) are an indigenous hunter-gatherer group of the Amazon Rainforest, who live mainly on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil’s Amazonas state. Their culture and language have a number of unusual features. They call any other language “crooked head.” Members of the Pirahã can whistle their language, which is how Pirahã men communicate when hunting in the jungle. The language may have no unique words for colors. There are no distinct names for numbers, only for one or two, and few or many. No words for colors, other than descriptors like, “blood-like”.
‘Hello’ in Pirahã: ‘Kauan’
Kalaw Lagaw Ya
Kalaw Lagaw Wa (Kalaw Lagaw Ya: [kala(u) laɡau ja]), or the Western Torres Strait language) is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken natively by about 1000 people in the central and western Torres Strait Islands in Queensland, Australia.
In the 1870s and 1880s, the language acted as a lingua franca of the area, in both Papua New Guinea and Australia. The language is still widely spoken by people in Papua New Guinea and by Aboriginal people in Australia. Kalaw Lagaw Ya is itself split into various, mutually intelligible, dialects. The one focused on here is Kalaw Kawaw Ya, spoken on Saibai Island and representative of most the northern dialects.
KKY has a system of pitch accept, distinguishing between high and low. In monosyllable words, only high is used. It has 12 different pronouns, distinguishing three numbers (singular, dual and plural), three persons with the third person distinguishing feminine and non-feminine genders (assigned randomly for non-animate objects), as well as inclusivity in the second person dual and plural. There are three cases distinguished on pronouns: nominative, accusative and ergative, though some of the oblique cases can be used as well. Gender is distinguished in some of the case markings in the first-person singular.
‘Hello’ in Kalaw Lagaw Ya: ‘Sew ngapa’
Language is so important in culture. We can learn a great deal about cultures in the way they speak about each other and the things around them. The Pirahã have no knowledge of what happened before their current generation and don’t have social hierarchy. It’s so different, there’s no wonder language is a passion of many. If you haven’t found your passion, check us out to begin your journey!
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