Curated playlist
Agglutinative languages
- Hungarian languageFourteen million people speak Hungarian, and that single fact makes it the most widely spoken language of the entire Uralic family. It is the official language of Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Yet its…
- Finnish languageFinnish, known to its speakers as suomi, belongs to a family of languages that has no connection to the great Indo-European tree that gave rise to English, French, German, Spanish, and most of the other tongues of Europe. That alone makes…
- EsperantoEsperanto is a language invented by a single person, published in a slim pamphlet in the summer of 1887, that has since acquired an estimated one to two million speakers, a body of more than 25,000 books, annual global congresses, and even…
- Kazakh languageKazakh is a Turkic language spoken across a vast territory stretching from the Tian Shan mountains to the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Its speakers have written it down in three completely different alphabets within a single century:…
- Korean languageKorean is the native language of about 81 million people, most of them of Korean descent. It carries two names that map to a divided peninsula. In the south it is Hangugeo, written 한국어. In the north it is Chosŏnŏ, written 조선어. The same…
- Uzbek languageUzbek is spoken by more than 34 million people across Central Asia, South Asia, and beyond, making it the second-most widely spoken Turkic language on earth after Turkish. Yet for most of its history, it was not even called Uzbek. The…
- Japanese languageThe Japanese language has around 123 million speakers, and Japan is the only country where it is the national language. Yet it sits almost alone in the world's family tree of tongues. Scholars have tried to tie it to Ainu, to Korean, to…
- Tamil languageTamil, written as தமிழ் and spoken as Tamiḻ, is a language that has survived for more than two thousand years without going silent. It is attested since around 300 BCE, making it one of the longest-surviving classical languages anywhere in…
- Tatar languageTatar is a Kipchak Turkic language spoken by roughly 5 million people, most of them living in Russia. Its heart is the Republic of Tatarstan, a region tucked into the Volga-Ural area, but its speakers stretch from Azerbaijan to Finland,…
- Malay languageMalay is spoken as a first language by about 80 million people, and as a first or second language by close to 300 million. It carries an endonym, Bahasa Melayu, and a Jawi-script name, بهاس ملايو. It is an Austronesian language native to…
- Basque languageBasque, known to its speakers as euskara, is unlike any other language on earth. Spoken today by roughly 806,000 people across a wedge of territory where southwestern France meets northern Spain, it is the only language in all of Europe…
- Uralic languagesThe Uralic languages stretch across some of the most remote terrain on Earth, from the Baltic coastline to the rivers of Western Siberia, binding together speakers of Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and dozens of smaller tongues into a…
- Klingon languageThe Klingon language has a word for "What do you want?" that doubles as the nearest equivalent to "hello." That single fact tells you almost everything about the culture this language was built to serve. Klingon, or tlhIngan Hol, was…
- Altaic languagesIn 1730, a Swedish officer named Philip Johan von Strahlenberg published a proposal grouping Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages together. He had traveled across the eastern Russian Empire while held as a prisoner of war after the…
- SwahiliSwahili, also known as Kiswahili, carries the memory of the East African coast in its very name. The word comes from an Arabic term meaning "of the coasts." About 40% of its vocabulary is borrowed from Arabic, a debt that includes the name…