Esoteric linguistic languages that are designed to be incredibly difficult? (retrofed.com)

submitted 1 day ago by scallisto@retrofed.com to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

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I know there are plenty of esoteric programming languages that are designed to be incredibly difficult to work with, like Malbolge, Brainfuck, and PikaLang, though programs written in them can still be compiled and run by a computer.

There are lots of constructed linguistic languages, like Esperanto and Toki Pona, but for most of those they are designed to be easier to learn or have other functional benefits. Are there any linguistic languages where the goal is to be difficult to speak, write, and understand, while still being actual languages?

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[-] HairyHarry@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Khoisan languages might be in this category.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan_languages

Khoisan languages are best known for their use of click consonants as phonemes. These are typically written with characters such as ǃ and ǂ. Clicks are quite versatile as consonants, as they involve two articulations of the tongue which can operate partially independently. Consequently, the languages with the greatest numbers of consonants in the world are Khoisan. The Juǀʼhoan language has 48 click consonants among nearly as many non-click consonants, strident and pharyngealized vowels, and four tones. The ǃXóõ and ǂHõã languages are even more complex.

[-] scallisto@retrofed.com 5 points 1 day ago

Well those are actual languages spoken by hundreds of thousands of people (from what I can tell from the Wikipedia article), they certainly aren't designed to be difficult to learn. Perhaps it's hard to learn for people who speak English, German, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, etc., but the goal wasn't to construct a language that is hard to understand.

[-] HairyHarry@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Damn you are right. Oversaw the "designed to be hard" part of your question.

this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026

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