Another article from the holiday Economist, this time on a search for “the world’s hardest language”: “Difficult Languages: Tongue twisters” (beginning on p. 136). The premise is rather silly, though it does provide a way of talking about language differences; more specifically,
Assessing how languages are tricky for English-speakers gives a guide to how the world’s languages differ overall.
This is a much fluffier piece than the one on politeness, but it’s jam-packed with details about languages.
It focuses on phonetics/phonology, inflectional morphology, grammatical categories (there’s a good bit on noun classes), and morphological structure (agglutination especially). On phonetics:
For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet).
(The article is not talking about the phonetic inventories of languages, but about the phonemic distinctions in languages.)
The article opts for the eastern Amazonian language Tuyuca as the most difficult. The phonemic system isn’t especially remarkable; the morphology is heavily agglutinating; there’s an obligatory distinction between inclusive and exclusive plural pronouns; there are lots of noun classes. But:
Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.
Journalists might tremble at evidentiality, but it’s old stuff for linguists. There’s quite a literature on it (sampled in the Wikipedia article), and it’s not at all a rare phenomenon in the world’s languages: in her 2004 book Evidentiality, Alexandra Aikhenvald estimates that a quarter of the world’s languages have some type of grammatical evidentiality (marked by affixes, clitics, or particles).