What are your favorite natlangs?

[Arayaz]

Biblaridion has a video listing his top ten favorite languages (though he actually lists eleven). That got me thinking: what's my favorite language? What are other people's? I thought about it, and eventually decided I'd ask the board. So what are your top 1, 3, 5, etc. favorite natlangs?

Mine might be:
1. Arapaho
2. Brazilian Portuguese
3. Indonesian
4. Swahili
5. Polish
All of which I have at some time tried to learn. Idk about my top ten; probably Hindi, Mandarin, Hebrew, Hawaiian, and Rotokas, in some order.

[Nel Fie]

I sadly don't have an understanding as deep as I would like of any of them, and my picks are probably very boring, but here they are anyhow:

1.Sign Languages in general: I think they are fascinating, but also severely understudied so I'm extremely curious. I'm pretty confident there's a fantastic amount of typological diversity and other such things to be discovered.
2.Aslian languages: I have a fascination for iconicity and such things as ideophones, and I'm told they are replete with it. But we circle back to the matter of curiosity, because I haven't managed to find much if any satisfying information about that aspect of them, nevermind about Aslian languages in general.
3.Pirahã: Reputation aside, I find the phonology very satisfying and fascinating, the tonal system in particular. And the famous "no recursion" is a nice extreme in showing how diverse natural languages can be.
4.Nuxalk: What can I say, I love me some syllabic consonants.
5.Navajo: The complex and unpredictable verbal system is fascinating, and for some reason I keep coming back to it as an inspiration at the most unlikely times (e.g. how the handling/shape classifiers could be seen as very similar to classifiers in sign languages).
6.Riau Indonesian: And in complete opposition, I find the reputed simplicity of Riau equally fascinating, in part because I assume meaning is strongly driven by context, pragmatics and culture, which are some of my main points of interest in conlanging.

All in all, I think it's a testament in how "green" I am and that I don't know that much about natlangs at all. So, maybe it'll change for the better in the future, but this is what it is for the time being.

[VaptuantaDoi]

I'll bite

1. Obokuitai (or any LP language other than Iau; they're phonologically really neat, their morphology is very simple but very non-SAE and syntactically they're about as non-SAE as you can get)
2. I'saka (suprasegmental nasality and tone and generally very cool)
3. Barupu (all Papuan polysynthetic languages are on crack; they seem to aim to have as much morphology as possible while marking only extremely specific, or ridiculously broad categories. And the applicative system is cool.)
4. Francoprovençal (really neat sound changes, and it's basically the mini-PNG of Romance in terms of variation)
5. Karajá (any language that has the tenacity to have /b d ɗ k θ h w l r/ as its consonants and then shit out the absolutely heinous vowel system /i ɨ̘ u ɪ ɨ ʊ e ɘ o ɛ ə ɔ a/ deserves a place on the list)

Hon mentions go to Mekeo, Yidiny, Arabana, Picard, Nuxalk, Gyeli, Iau, Kokoma, Tiwi.

[WeepingElf]

1. Georgian - the most rocking cool language I know of, doing many things in similar ways as Old Albic.
=2. Welsh - just sweet. Nice phonology, cool initial mutations, all that jazz.
=2. Irish - same reasons as with Welsh, I don't understand why Tolkien disliked it.
4. Hittite - the most interesting of the ancient IE languages.
5. Latin - the language I contracted the "language bug" from when I learned it in school, thus being the greatest influence on my linguistic taste - the ones listed above came later.

[Creyeditor]

This is a really hard question, let me think abour it for some weeks. Right now I think of {Indonesian, Mee, North German Standard German, Igbo, Chatino Zapatec} but it feels like I missed a few.

[lsd]

I like listening to foreign languages and being confronted with foreign cultures...
especially Japanese, Chinese, Slavic, Korean, Iranian, Italian...
unfortunately this year I couldn't get accredited to the Cannes Film Festival to take my annual dose of linguistic and cultural exoticism...

[GoshDiggityDangit]

1: Tlingit - Tlingit has been the linguistic apple of my eye ever since I lived in Alaska. I own a number of learning materials for the language, and I hope that I will be able to pursue an in-depth Tlingit language education someday.
2: Aleut - The Aleutian Islands are one of my favorite places on Earth, though I've never actually had the chance to visit. The Eskimo-Aleut languages are of special interest to me, but Aleut has been one of my favorite languages after finding a book about Aleut ethnology during a short stay in Utqiagvik.
3: Lakota - Lakota is such a wonderfully bizarre language to me. It's orthography is so... crunchy! It sounds so beautiful to me. A beautiful language spoken in beautiful South Dakota. I think Lakota must have been one of the first languages I ever got really into!
4: Japanese - This placement was very tough for me. It was a close toss up between Ainu and Japanese. Japanese is a very personally important language to me. Cumulatively, Misawa AFB is the single place I have lived the longest in my life, and having been surrounded by Japanese language and culture for some of the most important years of my life (so far) really makes Japanese a must-have on a list of my favorite languages.
5: English - Perhaps a controversial opinion, but I think English really must be one of my favorite languages. I might be biased, seeing as I can't hold a conversation in any other language, but having lived with English my whole life, the regional variations of English may well be a life-long fascination of mine! To point out a specific variant, I would have to say that Appalachian English is the dearest to me.

[Omzinesý]

In the alphabetic order, the more you know abaut languages the less you wanna rank them.

Arabic It's morphology is fascinating, not just the triconsonantal system but also how the logic the semantics of lexemes is related to that of the root. Its sociolinguistic and dialectal situation is also fascinating. Is it even a language or a branch of Semitic. Some students have a drinking song where you say 'now' in a language and everybody drinks. You get very drunk just with Arabics.
Hindustani At first glance it is a typical SOV language without too much morphology, but then it starts forming its gazillion periphrastic tense-aspects. Its light verb constructions are also cool.
Kalaallisut It was the first 'exotic' language I got to contact with. I like its word shapes. It has something familiar with Finnish but not really. And we can debate forever if it really has noun incorporation or just very productive derivation.
Lakota It sounds beautiful with its simple syllable structure. I still don't know its grammar well enough to say anything about its grammar.
Navaho Its verb is a mess. Word formation is also very innovative. If Arabic words are derived at the lexical level, in Navaho you can derive a word from a phrase. I still know too little of it.
Northern Saami It sounds beautiful with its preaspiration. It's also so recognizably close to Finnish but still so different. I could say some other Saami language but that's the one I know a bit. Its analytical morphology is nice, complex but not strange.
Yidiny The only Australian language I have some knowledge of. Its morphosyntax has inspired me much. tripartite alignment, adjectival cases, classificatory nouns ...
Yoruba I'm just starting to study it. It is anytic par excellence but contractions of patricles still appear and make wordlike things very complex. I also like its phonotactics.

[Solarius]

2.Aslian languages: I have a fascination for iconicity and such things as ideophones, and I'm told they are replete with it. But we circle back to the matter of curiosity, because I haven't managed to find much if any satisfying information about that aspect of them, nevermind about Aslian languages in general.

I have a grammar of Semelai if you want any info in particular.

[Arayaz]

5. Karajá (any language that has the tenacity to have /b d ɗ k θ h w l r/ as its consonants and then shit out the absolutely heinous vowel system /i ɨ̘ u ɪ ɨ ʊ e ɘ o ɛ ə ɔ a/ deserves a place on the list)

Karajá's vowel system will not see the gates of heaven...
But perhaps it earns a place in hell alongside English and French...

[Khemehekis]

Karajá's vowel system will not see the gates of heaven...
But perhaps it earns a place in hell alongside English and French...

Is Vietnamese heavenbound or hellbound?

P.S. It's funny because you, Üdj, were in my dream last night, and I asked you if you thought Donald Trump was going to Heaven or Hell. Then I remembered you were an atheist.

[lsd]

do atheists think they're going to heaven or hell...

[Arayaz]

Khemehekis: FTR, I'd say he deserves hell, but a lot of Christians agree with him so ... it would depend how moral God was.
lsd: Hell (at least in my case)

[eldin raigmore]

do atheists think they're going to heaven or hell...

I don’t believe in God, nor Heaven, nor Hell.
But if I’m wrong about that, I’d rather go to Hell. I couldn’t stand to be in God’s presence eternally.

[LinguoFranco]

Mine keep changing based on what I am feeling at the moment. I've always been fickle when it comes to listing favorites.

So, in no particular order, I will list the ones I keep coming back to:

- Japanese
- Albanian
- Wu Chinese
- Ancient Greek
- Swahili
- Arabic
- Mayan

I like Japanese, Ancient Greek, and Wu because they are all tonal/pitch-accent languages and I like how pitch accent languages sound. I think non-tonal languages (or at least ones that have fixed stress) sound boring and flat.

Arabic has weight sensitive stress, so I think it still manages to sound interesting despite not being tonal. I also like the sound of Semitic languages in general.

For Swahili, I like it mostly for it's grammar and morphology. In particular, it's noun class system.

Albanian is perhaps by favorite Indo-European language, and perhaps the only modern one I actually like. I think it's all the palatal sounds it has and how (despite permitting complex phonotactics) may words end in open syllables.

I know Mayan is a family instead of a single language, but I really like their grammar and morphology, especially the VOS word order.

[Arayaz]

do atheists think they're going to heaven or hell...

I don’t believe in God, nor Heaven, nor Hell.
But if I’m wrong about that, I’d rather go to Hell. I couldn’t stand to be in God’s presence eternally.

This is probably a better way of putting it than my one-word answer. This is basically what all the atheists I know (including myself) think.

[Arayaz]

Updated list (also, aside from these little isolated posts, I'll be back permanently on Tuesday).


Arapaho
Indonesian
Portuguese
Irish

[Shemtov]

I agree that all Insular Celtic languages and Lakhota are great languages, and I also have a soft spot for Mongolic, but I've been reading about Fufulde/Fulaani, and why do not more linguistics nerds know about this language? It has a noun class system that is crazier then Bantu (it IS another Niger-Congo language), yet in a beautiful way-like a noun class just for the word for "calf". Also, consonant mutations, but in a very unique way that has a very different flavor then how the Insular Celtic languages use it, and the verbal morphosyntax breaks my brain in a good way. It's a language that looks like a Kitchen-sink Conlang, but again, in a good way. Like, I feel I should hate it, but I just can't.

[Arayaz]

I agree that all Insular Celtic languages and Lakhota are great languages, and I also have a soft spot for Mongolic, but I've been reading about Fufulde/Fulaani, and why do not more linguistics nerds know about this language? It has a noun class system that is crazier then Bantu (it IS another Niger-Congo language), yet in a beautiful way-like a noun class just for the word for "calf". Also, consonant mutations, but in a very unique way that has a very different flavor then how the Insular Celtic languages use it, and the verbal morphosyntax breaks my brain in a good way. It's a language that looks like a Kitchen-sink Conlang, but again, in a good way. Like, I feel I should hate it, but I just can't.

Someone after my own heart :)

Consonant mutation + noun classes = beauty

I need to read about this now.

A palatalized glottal stop??? What?? This is delightful. Why do I not have a book about this language?

[Omzinesý]

I agree that all Insular Celtic languages and Lakhota are great languages, and I also have a soft spot for Mongolic, but I've been reading about Fufulde/Fulaani, and why do not more linguistics nerds know about this language? It has a noun class system that is crazier then Bantu (it IS another Niger-Congo language), yet in a beautiful way-like a noun class just for the word for "calf". Also, consonant mutations, but in a very unique way that has a very different flavor then how the Insular Celtic languages use it, and the verbal morphosyntax breaks my brain in a good way. It's a language that looks like a Kitchen-sink Conlang, but again, in a good way. Like, I feel I should hate it, but I just can't.

Any good resource to link?