There were many lingua francas of which French was supposedly the first global lingua franca. That changed and it became English (from what I understand). We will probably see another language become the lingua franca, so my question is: should it be English? Are there better candidates out there? Why / why not?
Came here to say that. I intended to propose an immensely complex language that almost nobody understands and that is unrelated to any other family of languages. My choice was Hungarian or Finnish but Euskadi (aka “Basque”) clearly beats it. I had the privilege to learn some words from Basque coworker years ago when I was living in Spain for a while and I swear it is so utterly alien to anything I’ve heard, that it must be of extraterrestrial origin.
FYI Euskadi is a region of Spain that doesn’t include all Basque-speaking territories. The language is Euskera.
Also, there is a Basque lemmy instance! lemmy.eus
Born in French Basque Country, had to learn Basque, it was horrible. Please don’t.
What’s
difficulthorrible about it?@mikelgs@lemmy.eus @Allartean@lemmy.eus @Txopi@lemmy.eus are there good resources online for learning Basque?
Albanian would also fit your criteria as it’s also completely different from everything else and fucking strange at the same time.
Yes, but when I asked an actual Albanian (another co-worker on a slightly adventurous job abroad) about the Albanian language and relations to other European languages in a friendly small talk he got rather angry and weirdly nationalistic. So I decided it might be healthier not to ask silly questions to anyone Albanian (very recommendable for most Balkan things!) and considered the Alban language as probably too dangerous to bother with. Retrospectively, I think he just didn’t want to admit he had no idea. 😅
Yeah, asking those questions to any balkanese is dangerous. I had the luck to spend some weeks with an albanese family while traveling and while being weird they were also the most friendly and welcoming people I ever met (after every Canadian). I learned some albanian while being there, but the language doesn’t share anything with the other languages around there. And i was explicitly forbidden to learn any curse words, because that could be apparently really dangerous if the wrong people heard it. But if you ever get the chance to visit Albania, i can’t recommend it enough.