Unexpected types of languages

What is the weirdest language you can think of? If you are a native English speaker or a European speaker, you probably think of Chinese, Arabic, Georgian etc. Their alphabets stretch the imagination and their phonetics sound extremely alien.

I will give you a few examples of bizarre forms of communication, which have the right to be called languages.

1. Sign languages

Did you forget about them? Deaf people use sign languages in order to communicate with each other. Deaf children acquire the sign language just as successfully as non-deaf children acquire phonetic languages. There are numerous types of sign language families around the world which are not related to their phonetic counterparts.

2. Whistling languages

A number of communities around the world, including Silbo on the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands and the village of Kuşkoy, Turkey. If you open Google, you will find many other examples. People who make use of the whistling language still speak their local language, but use the whistling language as a form of communication exclusively in the community they are part of.

3. HTML

Short for Hypertext markup language. The standard markup language for web pages all over the internet.

4. Rotokas

How many letters does the average language have? What about hieroglyphs? You definitely would not say anything below 20. But Rotokas, a language spoken by a small population on the island of Bougainville only has 12 (!) letters.

5. Any language other than your native one

And just as anything that is unknown, almost any language we hear sounds strange until we grasp some of its components. That should only encourage us to learn it and decode the secrets that its speakers hold!