What languages are you particularly interested in, and why?

[dɮ the phoneme]

Of course, I'm sure most people on this board would say they're interested in all languages to some degree or another. Still, it seems many people have particular languages or families they've dedicated an especially large amount of study to (whether learning to speak the language(s), or just studying them linguistically, etc.), or just have particular languages that strike their aesthetic fancy more than others. So, I'm curious what those areas of interest are for others here. I'm also curious what people consider their strengths and weaknesses to be, in terms of knowledge about different families/languages areas globally. For example, I feel pretty comfortable talking about Japonic languages, but totally out of my depth with anything Sinitic. It's not a coincidence that the language I've put by far the most effort into studying, both for speaking and also linguistically, is Japanese.

I'll put my own list of particular interests in a comment a bit later, but for now I'm interested to hear everyone's responses.

[linguistcat]

Most of my linguistic knowledge is from Japonic, tbh. It's the main family that I've studied in depth and actually know some terms in the language itself. I suppose I like it because it is very unlike the Romance languages or even PIE in general, which I was pushed to try and learn in school and so felt some amount of repulsion toward.

I have studied Latin but that was before I seriously studied Japanese. I also tried for a time to learn Romanian and Russian though neither of those particularly stuck. I also had some interest in Irish; I have some ancestry there on both sides of my family and it goes with my rebellion against speaking English and French. Also studied Old English/Old Norse for a bit because I'd enjoyed Beowulf and similar stories and it just felt right at the time. I also got into Finnish, somewhat because I'd heard it was an inspiration of Tolkien's, somewhat because I found the language itself beautiful, and somewhat because I kept running into Finnish things in the weirdest places. And now I'm trying a bit of Mandarin and Classical Chinese because I'd like to use Mid Ch for a project I'm working on.

Mostly I've learned languages either because they are pretty (to me) or useful, or both. I continue with languages that I have access to resources for study and when the culture interests me. I learned about Japonic because I both enjoyed the language and wanted to incorporate it into conlangs I was working on.

[Nortaneous]

I just read whichever papers are easily accessible and in English.

I should probably try to learn an actual language at some point, but there are only so many hours in a day.

[Vijay]

If we include languages that aren't natlangs, then I would say that ironically, I've been slow to get into conlangs, to be honest, and I never really got into programming languages (even though I've learned some to some degree anyway). The natural languages I try to focus on, though, are as follows:

Malayalam, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Russian, Turkish, Arabic (especially MSA and Damascene), Amharic, Dinka, Krio, Swahili, Hindi/Urdu, ASL, Thai, Tagalog, Indonesian/Malay, Oirata, Teiwa, Australian Kriol, Light Warlpiri, Cusco Quechua, Mapudungun, Micmac, and Michif.

Dinka is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in South Sudan, Oirata is a Papuan (supposedly Trans-New Guinea) language spoken just to the northeast of (East) Timor, Teiwa is another such language (but supposed to be from a different branch of Trans-New Guinea) spoken a few islands immediately to the west, Light Warlpiri is essentially a mixed language made up of (the Pama-Nyungan language) Warlpiri and English, Mapudungun is the language of the Mapuche (people) of Chile and Argentina, Micmac is an Algonquian language spoken along the eastern coast and islands of Canada, and at least the variety of Michif I'm learning is another mixed language combining French and Cree spoken by (now very few) Metis people.

I'm obviously interested in Malayalam because it's my heritage language (and the first language I ever spoke, in fact). I got into French and Latin because I knew people who were studying them in school and was insanely jealous, German and Russian because my dad studied them and couldn't wait for me to do that as well, Spanish because I live in Texas and it's close to French so why tf not, Portuguese because it's close to Spanish and I had resources for it (plus Kerala used to be a Portuguese colony) so why tf not, Mandarin Chinese and Turkish because my dad had colleagues who were native speakers of both and I like talking to people in their own languages, Arabic for various reasons (it's transcontinental, it's one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, I made friends with a Lebanese guy, and I took a course once where some of my classmates spoke it every day with each other despite all being non-native speakers), Amharic because one of our family friends is Ethiopian, Swahili because I have Teach Yourself Swahili and another family friend speaks it, Dinka because I'm curious about Nilo-Saharan, Krio because my advisor spoke it, Hindi/Urdu because...idk I'm Indian and Nasta'liq looks pretty, ASL because fuck limiting myself to oral languages given how far down the rabbit hole I am, Thai because the lady who cut my hair was Thai, Indonesian/Malay because I have resources for it and it looks easy except for the vocab, Tagalog because it feels more typically Austronesian (and thus more challenging) and I know some Filipinos, Oirata because I thought that was the westernmost Papuan language that was still spoken today, Teiwa because that's spoken even further to the west and I found a resource for it, Australian Kriol so I could learn a Pacific English-based creole, Light Warlpiri and Michif because I naively thought mixed languages would help me get more familiar with more non-European languages, Quechua and Mapudungun because otherwise I don't know any indigenous languages of South America, and Micmac because otherwise I don't know any indigenous languages of North America.

That being said, I have a special affinity for Persian, I think mainly because Persian music fascinates me. Even when it's Westernized, it usually doesn't feel too Westernized (or so I used to think). I'm also fascinated by the way the lyrics of Persian songs talk about wine as if it was fundamental to human existence even though wine is banned in Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. (I get why they do it, but it's still pretty fascinating to me).

[WeepingElf]

I am curious like mad about the languages of prehistoric Europe, but of course, there is only so little to find about them That said, I am particularly interested in the Indo-European languages, though not as much the usual "Standard Average European" faire, but those where something funky is going on, such as Insular Celtic, Hittite or Proto-Indo-European itself. In fact, I am currently rebuilding Proto-Hesperic (the protolang of my main conlang family to which my main conlang Old Albic belongs) to more closely resemble (though not being a rip-off of) Hittite; Old Albic will be rebuilt accordingly. This is because as I learned more about prehistoric Europe and what can be inferred from archaeology and genetics about population movements and languages, I have realized that Old Albic ought to be much closer to IE than previously imagined, and about as close to Hittite as Latin is to, say, Sanskrit.

[dɮ the phoneme]

Ok, here's my list.

Languages I've actually tried to learn:

As I mentioned above, the language I've studied the most by far is Japanese. I'm actually embarrassingly rusty at this point (I've barely spoken the language in the past year). I first decided I wanted to learn Japanese when I was about 11 or 12, because I wanted to play video games that were never localized to English. From there my interest in Japanese culture generally grew, and I started studying the language properly in college.

I studied French for 3 years in high school, and was actually pretty capable in the language at one point (you can get a lot farther with three years of French than three years of Japanese). But honestly... I don't like French much at all. I keep telling myself I'm going to start practicing again, just because it's useful (I can sometimes still parse enough of a math paper to get by), but I haven't thus far.

I speak a small amount of Spanish, and understand a fairly large amount of Spanish. I come from a monolingual English-speaking family, but I grew up around many many Spanish speakers pretty much throughout my elementary school years, and I picked up quite a lot. There are actually a number of words I learned in Spanish before I learned them in English... the one that sticks out most in my memory being mocos... perhaps evidence that my pupils wanted to switch to a language the teachers wouldn't understand for such topics. Anyway, I don't find Spanish that linguistically interesting, if I'm being honest, but it's enough of a part of my life interpersonally speaking that I do eventually need to get around to studying it formally one of these days.

In my freshman year of high school I tried to learn Russian for maybe a month or two, using basically random internet resources and nothing else. All I retained is knowledge of Cyrillic and the phrase "Я не понимаю по-русски". It's notable, though, because at some point in the process I googled something to the effect of "how to learn a language" and that's how I discovered linguistics.

In middle school I took Latin for a year or two. I wasn't any good at it, but it was very fun. We used Hans Ørberg's Lingua Latīna and I can still recite the opening lines.

Last summer I started studying Sanskrit, which... then took a back seat due to life circumstances. I have ever intention of picking it up again, though. When I was younger I wanted to study all three of the big classical IE languages, Latin, Sanskrit, and Ancient Greek. It's doubtful that I'll get around to Greek at this point, but I think I'll be able to manage the other two.

As for languages I'm interested in:

Unfortunately, there are no particular families or language areas that I'd say I'm really deeply familiar with (in terms of diachronic, etc.). I have enough familiarity with Germanic and Japonic to get by in most discussions, but that's about it. I'd love to know m ore about Papuan languages, Amazonian languages, and Paleosiberian languages, those are probably the regions that interest me most. Indo-Iranian is also very cool.

I'm very interested in the history of Central Asia, so in an ideal world I'd eventually study Persian and Bactrian and... maybe even Tocharian, if you wanna get crazy. On top of that I'd love to learn Mongolian, both for the history and because I think it's perhaps the most phonaesthetically appealing language that Ive yet encountered.

I try to keep my studying focussed on one dead language and one living language at a time. If I do start studying another living language at some point in the near future, it's bound to be Arabic. There is an enormous amount of material I'd like to read written in Classical Arabic, and I suspect whatever modern dialect I took up could end up being useful as well. As for dead languages, next on my list is probably Middle English. I've read a whole lot about middle English, and English historical phonology in general. I'm a huge fan of Chaucer, and I know at least enough to impress people at parties with (something approaching) the original pronunciation. That said, I'm not a fluent reader yet, but it's so close to modern English that I imagine becoming one would be very straightforward.

[Nortaneous]

I'm very interested in the history of Central Asia, so in an ideal world I'd eventually study Persian and Bactrian and... maybe even Tocharian, if you wanna get crazy.

I think Tocharian would be a lot easier than Bactrian... aside from the verbs, which are Old Irish-tier

[WeepingElf]

I have to add that I am also particularly interested in the Caucasian languages - that mountain range, regardless all political and economic troubles, is a linguistic wonderland, which perhaps tells us something about what prehistoric Europe may have been like before IE took over. Also, Basque. I have plans for a "Para-Kartvelian" and a "Para-Basque" language family, both set in Neolithic Europe.

[Ares Land]

The first language I got really, really interested in was English, an interest that persists to this day. English has always been a window into a larger world, and as a kid I really liked the subtle differences with French. Now, it's mainly the language many works I love are written in.
English is a very comfortable language to write in too. I'm a way better writer in French, I think, but French can be awfully constricting. Writing in French is like putting on a formal suit and tie, whereas writing in English, you can just put on a nice pair of chinos and get going.

It's also the only foreign language I really know well. I was actually pretty good at learning languages as a kid, but for reasons too personal and boring to discuss here, I had to discard Latin and German along the way, and never properly learned Greek. Too bad.
Another language I wish I could speak but really can't is Italian.
Perhaps in compensation, I read anything I can get my hands on concerning Latin, Greek or the history of the Romance languages. My favorite IE language is probably Old French, which IMO sounds nicer than Modern French, and has really fascinating grammar.

When I discovered conlanging, I soon came across Swahili. It was the most accessible non-IE language in those pre-Internet days, and I'm glad I found it then. I'm still very much interested in Niger-Congo languages.
I discovered North American languages and polysynthesis soon after; I had trouble wrapping my head around these until a few years ago, when I had access to a lot more resources.

I always was very interested in Arabic as a direct consequence to hearing it a lot in (the equivalent of) college but it is, I'm afraid, too difficult for me. Surprisingly, Hebrew proved a lot easier.
This was a pretty unexpected discovery: I started out with the project of reading the Bible (I just knew bits and pieces of the New Testament), which led quite naturally to an interest in Judaism. There are, as it happens, a lot of online, easy-accessible resources on Orthodox Judaism. One thing led to another, and I watched a lot of shi'urim. I got a real kick out of figuring out I could follow the most common Hebrew prayers, and even some biblical passages. (Not that I really speak Hebrew, though, plus I'm completely illiterate.)

Later on, having now access to a lot of reference grammar, I read all I could about Iroquoian. Though within North American, polysynthetic languages, my favorite is Nahuatl. There's a real poetry in the language, arresting images, and a very elegant approach to vocabulary construction. (I get a real kick out of sometimes guessing at the meaning of an unfamiliar word from its constituents.) The grammar itself is very elegant, a strange mix of the very familiar and the very strange; plus omnipredicativity, a neat example of how language may depart from familiar models.

I also really like Mandarin (and also Old Chinese which challenges the noun/verb model in yet another way) and Vietnamese, though I can't see I really know much about these.

It's a bit disappointing that I still don't really know any language besides French and English. But as Nortaneous said, there are only so many hours in a day. Here in Paris, though, you can get classes from an incredible selection of languages (you can even learn Quechua from native tutors!) so I have a moral obligation to find out how to fit one of these around work someday.

[ProfSaber]

I'm a monolingual English speaker, unfortunately, but I spent most of my childhood and the first half of my high school years learning French. I haven't practiced it since 2005, though one of my coworkers now is from France and I think she's hoping to get me speaking it again at some point. So if I ever have the time to actually learn, I'd go with French. If I could go further, Spanish would be very useful as well (I'm in Los Angeles), Italian would also be nice (I'm Italian on my father's side), and maybe Japanese or something else non-Indo-European as well.

That said, in high school there were brief points where I tried to teach myself Welsh and Old English, because I had access to the materials.

In terms of linguistic study, I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who's interested in Paleosiberian and Pre-Indo-European languages! True, there's so little on the latter, but it's fun to speculate, and I've had plans to do a conlang project in that direction. I feel like I know a lot about how Japanese works, even if I can't read or speak it. And I've studied a bit of Swahili for one of my conlangs--I'd like my main language to have noun classes, and maybe be a bit polysynthetic too, so I need to study that.

However, I've set that one aside for the moment; I've never actually finished one, so I'm trying to gain experience by doing minor and ancient languages first. (Right now, I seem to be stuck on relative clauses for the ancient one!)

[bradrn]

I find that I don’t actually look at individual languages so much — more usually I’ll look through a whole lot of reference grammars in search of information about one particular topic. I’ll often end up with an overview of a particular clade, but will only learn bits and pieces of any one particular language. That being said though, there’s certainly some languages which I find more interesting than usual. Starting where I live and moving roughly west:

• In terms of linguistics, New Guinea is probably the single area which I know most about. As I’ve mentioned before, probably my favourite language here is Kalam, with its crazy serial verb constructions. Pawley’s amazingly complete dictionary of Kalam with ethnographic notes (and a mini-grammar, too) should be a must-read for any conlanger interested in conworlding. Komnzo is a pretty interesting language as well (link to grammar).
• I don’t know too much about Austronesian languages. The exception is North-East Ambae, an Austronesian language which is pretty average, but has an amazing grammar.
• In Asia, the standout language is of course Hebrew. I’m Jewish and went to a Jewish day school, so Hebrew is the one language for which I’ve had extensive lessons. That doesn’t translate to speaking or understanding the language, although I can read and write it. (At this point, I can just about have a simple conversation, as long as you stick to sentences less complicated than, ‘The weather’s nice, isn’t it?’.) But I do intend to learn it properly at some point. On the opposite side of Asia, Standard Chinese is the only other language for which I’ve attended formal lessons (albeit not very many). I’d like to learn more about Tibetan some day (either Classical or Lhasa); it looks interesting, but I can’t find any good grammars. I really like the æsthetic of Chukchi, but don’t know much about it other than the fact that it uses the antipassive to relativise on ergatives.
• In Africa, I’ve spent quite a bit of time staring at Lefebvre & Brousseau’s excellent Fongbe grammar; Luwo is also quite interesting. My parents speak Afrikaans to some extent, so I know a little bit about that.
• In the Americas, I’d particularly like to learn more about Algonquian languages, particularly Ojibwe, but I’ve yet to find an accessible resource about it. Hup is also pretty interesting; one of these days I should properly read through Epps’s grammar. I’ve always liked Bororo as well (in fact, I like Macro-Jê generally); I’d probably like it more if my Bororo grammar weren’t so darn inaccessible. And, after what Ares Land has been saying about it, I should probably look into Nahuatl one of these days.

Of course, if I were to include languages where I’ve looked in detail at just one interesting part of the grammar (as opposed to finding it just generally interesting, as with the ones I’ve listed above), I could massively expand this list: Dyirbal, Kayardild, Jingulu, Ma Manda, Murik, Dumo, Maybrat, Marshallese, Niuean, Tagalog, Acehnese, Burmese, Lahu, rGyalrongic generally, Kurdish, NW Caucasian generally, Ancient Egyptian, Moloko, Khoekhoegowab, Basque, Yuʼpik, Yokuts, Seri, San Miguel Chimalapa Zoque, Chalcatongo Mixtec, Teribe, Caquinte, Cocama, Jaqaru and Movima all come to mind. On the other hand, areas I don’t know much about at all include Europe and North America.

EDIT: Fix typos

[Kuchigakatai]

Spanish, it's my native language. (Old to Early Medieval) Latin and Old Spanish, they're old forms of my native language, and reading about the towering amount of research already done on this evolution is pretty interesting. French, I started studying it because it's Canada's other official language, and resources are plentiful here. Old French, branched out into it since I was learning about Old Spanish anyway, and there's also plenty of stuff on its evolution. Standard Arabic, I was looking into making a tricon, and accidentally ended up liking the language, aesthetically, way more than I thought I was going to — I haven't learned more of it in a decade, but all the stuff I learned back then has served me well (I notice vocabulary in particular keeps slipping...). Mandarin, the reason was really just "pretty scripty" at first, but it's also a very useful one to know in Vancouver.

[LingEarth]

Well, I've never had the patience to sit down and learn a whole language, but languages I'm interested in on some level include Quechua (I read zompist's page on it a long time ago and liked the aesthetics of it), Japanese (I watch anime and like how it sounds), Irish and other Celtic languages (again, I like the aesthetics), Italian (I have Italian heritage), Latin and Greek (mainly due to their heavy influence on English and other modern languages), and Hebrew (because I'm interested in Judaism though I'm not Jewish myself).

Probably the most useful language for me to learn would be Portuguese, as there are a lot of Portuguese-speaking people where I live, but it doesn't hold much linguistic interest for me. I have picked up bits and pieces of it over the years, but nowhere near conversational level.

[Linguoboy]

Ho, boy. If I have to narrow it down just to the languages I'm particularly interested in:

• German and Irish, my heritage languages. These were among the very first languages I attempted to teach myself and I eventually picked up enough German to test out of a quarter at university. I went on to spend a year abroad in Baden-Württemberg. (I still have a particular fondness for Alemannic varieties.) It's the only language other than English I could truly be described as "conversational" in. Irish, I bounced off of and didn't really start pursing again with any gusto until about 2007. One of my dreams is to attend an immersion course in the Gaeltacht (Munster, if possible, since West Muskerry is the variety I've set out to master) so I can get comfortable speaking it.
• Welsh. I starting teaching myself Welsh about the same time I started learning German, and with much more enthusiasm. If I'd had available then the resources you can find today, I'd probably be a proper speaker. I read it okay but I still struggle to make out song lyrics and my speaking practice is essentially nil.
• Catalan is my favourite Romance language. I also taught this to myself using a little Teach Yourself paperback I found in the university bookstore in 1989 and got to use it for the first time a year-and-a-half later in Barcelona. Spanish was the language I took for my high school requirement only because the alternatives were French and Latin, but I've never really warmed to it even though it's hella useful in Chicago and probably the language I've gotten the most use out of next to German. I also don't care for French generally but I've loved learning Cajun French.
• Korean was the first non-Indo-European language I really pursued. It was the "funny language" for my linguistics degree at university, but I only took a year of it, which was probably a mistake. I've never been to Korea (unless you count Incheon Airport) but there's a sizable Korean community in Chicago so I've gotten some use out of it all the same.
• Osage is a language I started learning in about 2005 when I discovered that Carolyn Quintero had written an excellent grammar of it. I'd been idly toying with the idea of learning one of the languages indigenous to Missouri, where I grew up, and Algonquian languages just don't have a lot of appeal for me. I just love the morphosyntax of Osage and I wish there was more I could do to help assist in its revival.

There's a whole galaxy of other languages I've tried to learn at one point or another. I often develop a particular fondness for certain varieties that's difficult to explain. For instance, out of the East Slavic languages, I prefer Ukrainian to Russian or Belarusian and Croatian (particularly the Dalmatian I used to hear often when living in Hyde Park) is my favourite South Slavic variety, but my favourite Slavic language overall (and the one I've put the most effort into learning) is Polish, with Czech in second place. When I tried to learn Swedish, I focused specifically on Finland Swedish and when I learned Mandarin, it was Taiwanese Mandarin

[Skookum]

Languages of the Northwest Coast, but Salish languages in particular. Heavily verb-centric morphosyntax, large phonological inventories, complex morphophonology, and really interesting word-formation with lexical suffixes. Plus, the family is fairly well described compared to most other Indigenous North American language families, especially in terms of historical development. One interesting thing is that grammatical morphemes tend to be extremely consistent across the language family, while lexical items vary wildly, even in "basic" areas of the lexicon like numerals.

[Vijay]

Dawww, no love for Dravidian!

[Ahzoh]

I'm almost exclusively interested Semitic languages and Ancient Egyptian and Coptic, but also the extinct Mesopotamian languages like Elamite, Hittite, Sumerian, Hurrian, etc. Of course I also like languages with weird/cursed phonologies. I think nonconcatenative morphology is very interesting

[Creyeditor]

I like languages of Papuanesia. I am particularly interested in Papuan languages, because they are so diverse. If something is rare, it probably occurs in Papua. I also like Austronesian languages, maybe because I speak Indonesian, but also because they have cool features like small consonant inventories, mysterious alignment/voice systems, flexible categories and lots of morphophonological processes.
I have also looked at African tone languages a lot, ranging from Hausa through Chimwini to Nilotic languages, Grassfields Bantu and even more Bantu. I read a bit about North Indian languages and I think it's fascinating how some of them are similar to languages of West Africa. Assamese has ATR dominant-recessive harmony and some Sino-Tibetan languages have word-based tone systems.
Central American tone languages are also great, but I have a hard time understanding the data.
Oh and I read up on Kazakh vowel harmony. I probably forgot some poor natlang, but maybe I will just make another post later.

[vegfarandi]

Ancient Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean languages have always been my weak spot. Collectively they have a quality that's very attractive for me. I'm talking Ancient, Middle and Late Egyptian, Sumerian, Elamite, Akkadian, Ancient Hebrew, Latin, Etruscan, Punic etc. There's something about all the consonants with those simple vowel systems (sans Latin) that really hits the spot for me.

Uscaniv is primarily inspired by Etruscan, and Duriac, the language I'm most actively working on these days, is inspired by Sumerian, Coptic, Kartvelian languages, Bantu languages and Navajo languages.

[axolotl]

Faroese was my big fascination for a long time.

Things that attracted or continue to attract me to the language:

The "Englishy" rhotic (this is what first caught my attention, thank you to Jackson Crawford for casually mentioning it in a video in 2016)

The many phonological peculiarities, such as:
- The fact that the aforementioned rhotic can be realized in 4+ ways
- The vowel system, which is basically Icelandic's vowel development but done twice
- The palatalization everywhere

The fact that it's somewhat of a middle ground between the North Germanic languages, which are very similar to each other and to English, and Icelandic, which at first seems to be very much off on its own

The strange spelling, which is neither phonetic nor historical (it was literally made that way on purpose)

The beauty and isolation of the islands



More recently though I've been getting into Estonian, mainly for phonetic reasons. I really like the way it sounds (even though I personally find it difficult to pronounce).

There's also the iconic Sakao, but I've talked about that before.
Same with "polysynthetic French."