EVERYONE has the intuition that some languages are more difficult
than others. For the native English-speaker, professional agencies that
teach foreign languages have made it quite clear. America’s state
department reckons that Spanish, Swedish or French can be learned in
575-600 class hours (“Category 1”). Russian, Hebrew and Icelandic are
more difficult (1100 class hours, “Category 2”). And Arabic, Japanese,
Mandarin and a few others are in the hardest group, Category 3,
requiring 2200 class hours. But what makes a language difficult?
How
long it takes to learn a language does not answer which ones are hard
independent of the learner’s first language (nor the related question
“How hard is English?”) Ranking languages on a universal scale of
difficulty is itself difficult and controversial. Some languages
proliferate endings on verbs and nouns, like Latin and Russian. Such
inflection can be hard for learners who are not used to it. Several
years ago, two scholars found that smaller languages
(those with less contact with other languages) tended to have more
inflection than big ones. By contrast, creole languages—which arise
between groups that do not share a common language—are thought by
scholars to be systematically simpler than other languages, even after
they become “normal” languages with native speakers. They typically lack
heavy inflection.
But inflection is only one element of
“hardness”. Some languages have simple sound systems (such as the
Polynesian languages). Others have a wide variety of sounds, including
rare ones that outsiders find hard to learn (like the languages of the
Caucasus). Some languages (like English) lack or mostly lack grammatical
gender. Some have dozens of genders (also known as “noun classes”) that
must be learned for each noun. Languages can have rigidly fixed or
flexible word order. They can put verbs before objects or even objects
before subjects. Yet it is not clear how to rank the relative difficulty
of exotic consonants, dozens of genders or heavy inflection. Another recent approach
sought to go around the problem by finding languages that had the most
unusual features, skirting the question of whether those features were
“hard”. Comparing 21 feature parameters across hundreds of languages,
they ranked 239 languages. Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken in Mexico, was the
weirdest. English came in place number 33. Basque, Hungarian, Hindi and
Cantonese ranked as among the most “normal”. The researchers did not
find any larger similarities between “weird” and “normal” languages.
(For example, they do not claim that smaller or bigger languages tend to
be “weirder”.) But again, the caveat is that this only compares which
languages are unusual in a global context, not which are hard.
So
the two most robust findings seem to be that smaller languages are more
heavily inflected, and that languages farther from your own in the
linguistic family tree will be harder for you to learn. If you want a
challenge, a good bet is to pick a tiny language from halfway around the
world.