The 5 Craziest Human Languages Spoken Around the World

Silbo Gomero, spoken by the inhabitants of the Canary Islands, is the simplest language on this list. It has an "alphabet" of just two vowels and four consonants. Finally, a culture that appreciates simplicity! But if you want to speak it, you'll need a really keen ear and outstanding breath control, because Silbo Gomero is a language articulated entirely by whistling.

The modern language is a variation of the one used by the indigenous Africans who once populated the islands. The Canaries were claimed by the Spanish, who all but wiped the original inhabitants out, because that's just how imperialism rolls. But the Spanish settlers were enamored with their unique way of communicating and adapted it to their own language. And they're really serious about it -- the whistling language is a mandatory part of their school curriculum.

The English language has two things that can be expressed by whistling, which translate to "I am impressed by that," and "Would you kindly shake it, strange woman." But Silbo Gomero is complex and nuanced enough that whistling can be used to communicate news and announce celebrations over the vast distances. The indigenous farmers of the islands can hear a skilled whistler up to two miles away, making it well suited to the mountainous terrain of the region. When you're working at the top of a ravine and you spot some Lothario out with your wife a mile below, you can explain in detail via a jaunty tune how you're going to replace his ass with his face.

It sounds like Chinese spoken through bubblegum and ping pong balls. But all those lip-smacking, popping, and clicking sounds are fraught with meaning. There's no written alphabet, and most of these noises lack even an approximate equivalent in our tongue, so linguists have to resort to all sorts of weird symbols to transcribe what they're hearing. For example, if you:

Then:

And:

You waited for a man, shot him with a bone arrow, then refused to help.

You monster.

Linguists have posited that !Xóõ, or something like it, may in fact be the world's oldest language. As we migrated out of Africa our communications radically diverged, and all but a few lost their ancient clicks. Which is kind of a tragedy, if you ask us: how bitchin' would the alphabet song be with 47 more verses and a didgeridoo solo?

But things quickly get out of hand. Hatkaahuhtiirahpuh means "to dig a small trench or ditch around the periphery, as of a dwelling to prevent seepage or a yard to prevent runoff." Ikstaahkatiictiiruuwaahak means to "blacken someone's hands in a prescribed manner, i.e., as that person has dreamed." And then, just for the hell of it, the Pawnee decided the best thing to call a barbershop was an iririiraktahkictapiriwu. Which we're going to go ahead and guess means "a place for tending to hair where people make awkward small talk to avoid thinking about the fact that they are intimately touching strangers in a public setting."

Tuyuca, by some counts, has 140 genders. No, the whole thing wasn't cobbled together by a think tank of liberal arts majors discussing Tumblr posts -- "gender" in linguistics refers to a sound that modifies a noun. For most languages, the only noun modifiers they have are masculine or feminine. Tuyuca speakers shift that concept into overdrive and then ramp it into the damn sea. They have a gender that means "bark that does not cling closely to the tree," which can be used to describe the literal peeling wood ... or baggy pants.

Also, like Archi, Tuyuca has a large catalog of verb modifiers. It's what's known as an evidential language, which means that every time you report an event, you have to include how you know this as part of the word. For example, the ending -wi means "I know because I saw it" whereas -hiyi means "I assume." Sure, it makes casual conversations difficult, but there is an upside: it's hard to spread bullshit conspiracy theories when every word comes with the "I pulled this out of my ass" morpheme.

Adam Hoss is a writer and immature linguist from Cleveland, Ohio.

For more on linguistics, check out 5 Reasons the English Language Makes No Freaking Sense and The 10 Coolest Foreign Words The English Language Needs.

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