Okay Finland, why do you consider your own language to be weird?
Trust Finland on this one!
Well fuck you too João
So, only Swedes have an accurate understanding of the various European languages?
Hungarians 🤜🤛 Finns
Why isn’t Welsh on this list?
Based João
I confirm the source: ****Trust me bro****
I would be surprised if anyone in Belgium even know what the fuck basque sounds like
Hölgyeim és Uraim, akkor kapjátok be, köszönöm a figyelmet. 🇭🇺
//
Ladies and Gents, then suck my d***, thank you for your attention. 🇭🇺
Wait, I just realized, do even we Hungarians think that Hungarian language is the weirdest wtf??!
The Dutch and Danes.
It’s all fun and games to meme on the Danes but at least we understand each other. Ever tried reading Polish?
I love how this map makes the effort to point out our borders for no apparent reason
I only recently discovered that “Luxemburgish” is an actual language. Thought these lads just spoke F*rench (and Portugese).
Yeah right fuck you denmark
Swamp Finns, I’ll take it to be honest. But does that also mean we can use drowned soviet soldiers as road signs?
The swedes are weird. Their language is basically the same as Danish minus the gravel
Nem értem az értetlenkedést. Bazmeg + alany = magyar nyelv
/uj
If weirdness means an outlier without any other close relatives, then Basque is the only correct answer today. Even including all those ‘weird’ consonant-heavy languages in the Caucasus – they’d be even more ‘odd’ if they didn’t all have at least a few other close relatives (they fall into three families). It’s the only European language isolate. There are many other language isolates worldwide, though. Maltese and Kalmyk and arguably Ossetian have no other relatives *in Europe*, but plenty outside it.
Typologically though, some of those in the Caucasus are more unusual in global terms than Basque, given their extreme phonology: some have a lot of consonants but very few vowels – Ubykh is now extinct, with its 80+ consonants and 2 vowel, but other Northwest Caucasian languages are close to as extreme, and it’s even possible to analyse Circassian and similar as having only one vowel phoneme with different realisations depending on environment (surrounding consonants).
Uralic languages aren’t weird. Europe has a couple of dozen of them, not just Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian… but most are small minority languages in Russia or spoken by Sámi (usually classified as nine languages these days). Hungarian gets extra press because it’s by far the largest and surrounded by IE languages, and Finnish is the second largest and the ‘odd Nordic national language out’ (even though Estonian is super close). They’re also not that typologically crazy at all – mostly agglutinative, no massively weird phonological features, etc. Just ‘weird’ if all you know is Indo-European languages.
19 comments
Okay Finland, why do you consider your own language to be weird?
Trust Finland on this one!
Well fuck you too João
So, only Swedes have an accurate understanding of the various European languages?
Hungarians 🤜🤛 Finns
Why isn’t Welsh on this list?
Based João
I confirm the source: ****Trust me bro****
I would be surprised if anyone in Belgium even know what the fuck basque sounds like
Hölgyeim és Uraim, akkor kapjátok be, köszönöm a figyelmet. 🇭🇺
//
Ladies and Gents, then suck my d***, thank you for your attention. 🇭🇺
Wait, I just realized, do even we Hungarians think that Hungarian language is the weirdest wtf??!
The Dutch and Danes.
It’s all fun and games to meme on the Danes but at least we understand each other. Ever tried reading Polish?
I love how this map makes the effort to point out our borders for no apparent reason
I only recently discovered that “Luxemburgish” is an actual language. Thought these lads just spoke F*rench (and Portugese).
Yeah right fuck you denmark
Swamp Finns, I’ll take it to be honest. But does that also mean we can use drowned soviet soldiers as road signs?
The swedes are weird. Their language is basically the same as Danish minus the gravel
Nem értem az értetlenkedést.
Bazmeg + alany = magyar nyelv
/uj
If weirdness means an outlier without any other close relatives, then Basque is the only correct answer today. Even including all those ‘weird’ consonant-heavy languages in the Caucasus – they’d be even more ‘odd’ if they didn’t all have at least a few other close relatives (they fall into three families). It’s the only European language isolate. There are many other language isolates worldwide, though. Maltese and Kalmyk and arguably Ossetian have no other relatives *in Europe*, but plenty outside it.
Typologically though, some of those in the Caucasus are more unusual in global terms than Basque, given their extreme phonology: some have a lot of consonants but very few vowels – Ubykh is now extinct, with its 80+ consonants and 2 vowel, but other Northwest Caucasian languages are close to as extreme, and it’s even possible to analyse Circassian and similar as having only one vowel phoneme with different realisations depending on environment (surrounding consonants).
Uralic languages aren’t weird. Europe has a couple of dozen of them, not just Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian… but most are small minority languages in Russia or spoken by Sámi (usually classified as nine languages these days). Hungarian gets extra press because it’s by far the largest and surrounded by IE languages, and Finnish is the second largest and the ‘odd Nordic national language out’ (even though Estonian is super close). They’re also not that typologically crazy at all – mostly agglutinative, no massively weird phonological features, etc. Just ‘weird’ if all you know is Indo-European languages.