@hoopstats Matías, you are the first person I have contact with who has learned Basque as a foreign language! In the past I had regular contact with a foreign learner of Catalán. I have a letter penfriend from Barcelona who is bilingual in Spanish and Catalán and we correspond 1/2 in Spanish and 1/2 in German.
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I think learning a lesser spoken language is kind of cool because it’s like joining a special club or something.
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If I like a country and its culture, it doesn’t mind how many people speak the language, I go for it and learn it because it makes me feel good. I have spent a countless number of hours learning Finnish and Latvian, and the fact that those languages are not widely spoken is not a problem at all for me. I just love the way it feels when I am in Finland or Latvia and I can interact with locals in their language. I can not think of a better way of showing my respect for their cultures that having learnt to speak their languages fluently from Belgium, where I live.
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- I understand Friulian, a langage spoken in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy, because I grew up surrounded by it as second language after Italian.
- I can also read and speak it with some difficulties, though because I’ve never really studied it
- I hope Latin counts since I was obliged to study it for 5 years during high school LOL
- I speak Friulian just with my family or with older people, but I wish I could speak it better because it’s a nice way to retain old traditions.
I think that each language defines a very specific culture that gets lost once that language disappears
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Would be fascinating to know the institution delivering these courses… I’d love to check them out. (Covid has done some things for us!)
A me mi piace il furlan. É molto simile al catalano.
I second Esteban – when I’m learning a language, the number of speakers doesn’t matter to me at all.
I use Icelandic, Basque and Latin every day, and have also learned Ancient Greek, Sardinian, Old Norse, Faroese, Klingon and North Sámi – and Basque-Icelandic pidgin 
– purely out of curiosity and pleasure.
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Hi,
Who here speaks, reads, or otherwise understands very uncommon languages? What motivated you to learn them?
I shall back some of you who have replied too saying that “as long as I love languages and feel attracted to them I’ll find the way to learn them and meet their speakers too”
By the other side, all languages I’ve been studying, learning and knowing though my life have been uncommon to my family and community because we are used to use only one language for daily life and all others are perceived as “minority or foreign”.
However, as I meet new friends, colleagues I have been inserted in learning new languages which I thought were far from me or too uncommon to find any speaker without traveling far from home.
Too, as I went through my own family’s history and experiences against discrimination in Mexico, I’ve decided to learn Nahuatl and Yaqui not only because I’ve found speakers of them in my family but to fight against their lost and their speakers’ discrimination in my country too.
What methods did you use, and how did they differ from methods you might use for more common languages?
The first thing I do is looking for books about these “uncommon languages”, once I found something, I pick the most actualized and professionally or “expert” approved information I can find. But I never ignore a rich or catching book just because it seems to be “too old”.
Later as I go through a book, I look for the information that best will help me for knowing the language’s basics, too I use a notebook or a word document to organize the language’s basics information in two categories. 1) The grammar & the construction of words and 2) the language’s sounds(phonology)/writing. That makes me much more confident of myself later if I decide to look for the word’s meanings and if I try to jump into phrase construction.
In other words, you should be able to answer yourself the following questions Where to start? What would I need to go further? and Do I want to go further?
But, in my case, if I do not find literature about the language, I am interested in I look for speakers directly, which is harder depending if you confuse phonetics easily (between similar or related languages) or if you don’t research enough about that language’s speakers’ context (which ethnic group speaks it, where do they live, which is their behavior towards other people?, what does the local history says about them and their language? which “etiquette” or attitude should I use to meet this language’s speaker in order to make him feel comfortable with my interest in his language? or Which language should I use to meet him/her/them)
Why my advice is to read about the people who speaks a language before you know about it? *
I’ll give you an example: Some indigenous nations of Mexico have developed notions of cordiality and conflict towards others based on the language they use as much as most of Mexican Mestizo’s “the country’s mayor ethnic group” have created their image of indigenous and their/our languages, then I have been given the opportunity to be taught certain indigenous languages by presenting myself first as speaker or enthusiast of other indigenous languages or as an Anglophone. Then I go straight to etiquette, For example: giving food as gift for showing my good will (this is a common practice in many countries not only in indigenous America).
Latin is considered a “dead language.” Does learning it “count”?
Even if it has much less speakers than when it was considered “living” I would say that a part of the catholic community and a large community in certain universities and catholic academic institutions would find it as one of the most famous and common languages in the world. Wow, I know a friend who uses it in her social media and that makes your question much more hard to answer…
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Hello everyone, I am very glad to join your discussion!
I am currently studying and teaching courses in ancient (mostly dead) Indo-European languages at university and online. My favourite ones are Hittite, Hieroglyphic Luwian, Sanskrit, Old Persian and Old Lithuanian.
Learning ancient languages, as Ute mentioned, enables us to understand our present-day languages much better. We can make statements about how grammars evolved by comparing morphology and syntax and reconstructing a Proto-language. But we can also learn a lot about the culture of our ancestors: If we compare lexical items we can find out what words are of ancient origin and make theories as to where we are from and how we migrated to where we are now.
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When my wife and I were in Crimea from 1999 until 2003 we started to learn the Crimean Tatar language. What I find to be most rewarding in learning to speak a “rare, low-population” language, is the reaction of the mother tongue speakers themselves to this fact. Very often such peoples have a “low self esteem”, and feel threatened when it comes to their culture which also includes the language. For them a foreigner that learns to speak their language, is experienced almost as some kind of a miracle.
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Hey Daniel! Which language are you working on?
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It’s called Tsez (iso: ddo). It is spoken by about 20k people in the Caucasus Mountains. They have lived in this place and spoken this language for an estimated 4k years! I’ll be talking about it briefly in the Topic room 22-OCT-2020 – Montréal 15:30 / London 20:30 / Tokyo 04:30.
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Ooh sounds great! That’s past my bedtime, but I would love to attend so I’ll do my best! Thanks for letting me know.
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I’ll be sharing a bit about that as well as some of the interesting scientific research that exists on language acquisition.
Oh this is such an interesting topic. I would love to learn Ancient Egyptian and Ancient Greek one day, mostly out of personal interest, but as was mentioned before already, I also think that learning ancient languages will help us to understand modern languages better 
If anybody here has any good links, infos on where to get good material or find useful apps or websites for either of the two it would be very much appreciated … And if anybody knows an online tutor for Ancient Egyptian, this would actually be really awesome!
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It’s extremely important to preserve languages and cultures, and to bring testimonial about this. That’s why Wikitongues exist.
Kristen: I have to send to you the preliminary list of those who we want to make an interview for HYPIA as a Rare Language Specialists!
Oh hi Matias! Yes, still looking forward to that list from you.
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Joshtwo,
I visited Ethopia in 2007 and attended a cultural evening where we enjoyed traditional food, music and dance. It was a great experience and lots of fun.
Greetings from South Africa.
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Hi,
One of my friends @John_FK, who is also attending the conference, will be able to explain more about learning the “so-called” dead languages.
For Christians the value of learning Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek is that they will then be able to read the original texts of the Bible and understand the original context better. This will help to understand the Bible better.
Greetings from South Africa.
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One very important point has not yet been mentioned here. Why learn ancient languages?
Because after learning them, you can teach them to the others! I really like learning ancient languages, but what is even more fun is to teach all I know about our linguistic past to the others 
If anyone is interested in learning ancient Indo-European languages, I offer online courses via superprof.de. I also tweet about ancient languages @idiomarium. Please write me if you have any questions and I will try to answer them at my best 
@Rina if you send me an email to olga.olina@gmx.net I will reply you some time next week with a few suggestions on Ancient Greek and Egyptian.
Greetings from Berlin to everyone and enjoy the last day of the Polyglot Conference! 
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