The 25 "weirdest languages of the world" are, in North America: Chalcatongo Mixtec,Choctaw, Mesa Grande Diegueño, Kutenai, and Zoque; in South America:Paumarí and Trumai; in Australia/Oceania: Pitjantjatjara and Lavukaleve; in Africa: Harar Oromo, Iraqw, Kongo, Mumuye, Ju|’hoan, and Khoekhoe; in Asia: Nenets, Eastern Armenian, Abkhaz, Ladakhi, and Putonghua; and in Europe: German, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech and Spanish.

 

 

Putonghua ranks among the top 25 "weirdest“ languages in the world, while Cantonese was among the 10 least "weirdest", according to linguistic findings from a US database.

 

The research, published by San Francisco-based consulting firm Idibon, may come as a surprise to language learners who struggle with the nine tones of Cantonese, compared with four for Putonghua.

 

"Weirdness" was determined by comparing the linguistic features of 239 languages, including word order, types of sounds and ways of forming negation, according to Tyler Schnoebelen, co-founder and senior data scientist at Idibon, which helps businesses make sense of language data.

 

By employing a “non-English-centric approach”, the study evaluates “weirdness” of a certain language not by how different it is compared with English, but by how unusual its features are from all the other languages in the project, said Schnoebelen, who holds a doctorate from Stanford.

 

The language that was most different, or the “weirdest”, was Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken by 6,000 people in Oaxaca, Mexico. Hindi, one of the official languages of India, was rated the least “weird”, or the most ”non-deviant“ language in the newly released Language Weirdness Index.

 

English ranks No 33 on the index.

 

“Part of this is to say that some of the languages you take for granted as being normal, like English, Spanish or German, consistently do things different,” said Schnoebelen.

 

But surprisingly, Putonghua - commonly perceived as an easier language than Cantonese - is more "weird" than Cantonese, and even French, Icelandic and Japanese. 

 

Unlike Cantonese, Putonghua has “uvular continuants” and some limits on “velar nasals” (as in the ng sound), which are features considered rare worldwide, said Schnoebelen. This could have contributed to its higher ”weirdness“ values.

 

In an e-mail to the South China Morning Post, Schnoebelen further explained:

 

An example of a "uvular continuants" in Mandarin would be something like "和" [often pronounced as hé, meaning "with"]. Mandarin is one of only 12 out of 567 languages that have a uvular sound but it is only a continuant - a continuant has continuing airflow. Cantonese doesn't have any uvular consonants at all.

 

Lester Chan, a Cantonese tutor in Hong Kong, said many features of the ancient Chinese language, now lost in Putonghua, have been preserved in Cantonese.

 

For instance, Cantonese can have a nasal sound like ng at both the beginning and the end of words, but Putonghua can only have the sound at the end. Chan said he wasn’t surprised that such features was considered “weird” by the study.

 

"Cantonese is like the majority of the world's languages - 468 out of 567- in that it is happy having velar nasals anywhere in a word," said Schnoebelen. "A good example is the Cantonese pronunciation of 我 [ngo meaning 'I']."

 

Chris Lam, a Cantonese and Putonghua tutor at the International Language Centre in Central, said weirdness probably does not indicate how hard a language is to learn. Most of his foreign students have found learning Cantonese more challenging, he said. 

 

“For starters, Cantonese has nine tones, and Putonghua has only four,” Lam said. 

 

But Lam said the fact that Cantonese is harder hasn’t thwarted the students, who learn Cantonese to communicate with locals and Putonghua to do business with mainland China.

 

Said Schnoebelen: “I think people want to use the weirdness scale to talk about language difficulty. But I don't really think it can be used that way. Motivation [to learn a language] and immersion are much more important than structural facts.”

 

 

 

Source:
http://www.scmp.com/article/1294928/putonghua-rated-more-weird-cantonese-language-study