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Language is a sign system consisting of sounds, words and sentences. The sign system of each nation is unique due to its grammatical, morphological, phonetic and linguistic features. Simple languages do not exist, since each of them has its own difficulties that are discovered in the course of study.
Below are the most difficult languages of the world, the rating of which consists of 10 sign systems.
10 Icelandic
Icelandic – This is one of the most difficult in terms of pronunciation. Also, the sign system is considered one of the most ancient languages. It contains linguistic units used only by native speakers. One of the biggest challenges in learning Icelandic is its phonetics, which only native speakers can accurately convey.
9. Finnish language
Finnish language deservedly ranked among one of the most complex sign systems in the world. It has 15 cases, as well as several hundred personal verb forms and conjugations. In it, graphic signs fully convey the sound form of the word (both spelled and pronounced), which simplifies the language. The grammar contains several past forms, but no future tenses.
Navajo – the language of the Indians, a feature of which is considered to be verb forms that are formed and changed by faces with the help of prefixes. It is the verbs that carry the main semantic information. Navajos were used by the US military during World War II to transmit encrypted information.
In addition to vowels and consonants, there are 4 tones in the language, which are referred to as ascending – descending; high Low. At the moment, the fate of the Navajo is in jeopardy, as there are no linguistic dictionaries, and the younger generation of Indians is switching exclusively to English.
7. Hungarian
Hungarian one of the ten most difficult languages to learn. It has 35 case forms and is replete with vowel sounds that are quite difficult to pronounce due to longitude. The sign system has a rather complex grammar, in which there are an uncountable number of suffixes, as well as set expressions that are characteristic only for this language. A feature of the dictionary system is the presence of only 2 tense forms of the verb: present and past.
6. Eskimo
Eskimo and is considered one of the most complex in the world due to the numerous temporary forms, of which there are up to 63 only in the present tense. The case form of words has more than 200 inflections (word changes with the help of endings, prefixes, suffixes). Eskimo is a language of images. For example, the meaning of the word “Internet” among the Eskimos will sound like “travel through the layers.” The Eskimo sign system is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as one of the most difficult.
5. Tabasaran
Tabasaran one of the few languages listed in the Guinness Book of Records because of its complexity. Its peculiarity lies in numerous cases, of which there are 46. This is one of the state languages of the inhabitants of Dagestan, in which there are no prepositions. Postpositions are used instead. There are three types of dialects in the language, and each of them combines a certain group of dialects. The sign system has many borrowings from different languages: Persian, Azerbaijani, Arabic, Russian and others.
4. Basque
Basque one of the oldest in Europe. It is owned by some residents of Southern France and Northern Spain. Basque contains 24 case forms and does not belong to any branch of language families. Dictionaries contain about half a million words, including dialects. Prefixes and suffixes are used to form new linguistic units.
The connection of words in a sentence can be traced through changes in endings. The tense of the verb is displayed by changing the endings and the beginning of the word. Due to the low prevalence of the language, it was used during the Second World War by the US military to transmit classified information. Basque is considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn.
3. Russian
Russian one of the three most difficult languages in the world. The main difficulty of the “great and mighty” is free stress. For example, in French, the stress is always placed on the last syllable of a word. In Russian, a strong position can be anywhere: both in the first and last syllable, or in the middle of a word. The meaning of many lexical units is determined by the place of stress, for example: flour – flour; organ – Organ. Also, the meaning of polysemantic words that are spelled and pronounced the same is determined only in the context of the sentence.
Other linguistic units may differ in writing, but are pronounced the same and have a completely different meaning, for example: meadow – onion, etc. Our language is one of the richest in synonyms: one word can have up to a dozen linguistic units close in meaning. Punctuation also carries a great semantic load: the absence of one comma completely changes the meaning of the phrase. Remember the hackneyed phrase from the school bench: “You can’t pardon the execution”?
2. Arabic
Arabic – one of the most complex sign systems in the world. One letter has up to 4 different spellings: it all depends on the location of the character in the word. There are no lowercase letters in the Arabic dictionary system, word breaks for hyphenation are prohibited, and vowel characters are not displayed in writing. One of the individual features of the language is the way words are written – from right to left.
In Arabic, instead of two numbers, which are familiar to the Russian language, there are three numbers: singular, plural and dual. It is impossible to find equally pronounced words here, since each sound has 4 different tones, which will depend on its location.
1. Chinese
Chinese is an incredibly complex language. The first difficulty, if you want to study it, is the total number of hieroglyphs in the language. The modern Chinese dictionary has about 87 thousand characters. The difficulty lies not only in the sign system of the language, but also in the correct spelling. The only incorrectly depicted feature in one hieroglyph completely distorts the meaning of the word.
One Chinese “letter” can mean a whole word or even a sentence. The graphic symbol does not reflect the phonetic essence of the word – a person who does not know all the intricacies of this language will not be able to understand how the written word is pronounced correctly. Phonetics is quite complex: it has numerous homophones and contains 4 tones in the system. Learning Chinese is one of the most difficult tasks that a foreigner can set for himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mp2jtyyCF0