Least Gutteral Language

German just isn t the gentlest sounding language at least not to the ears of english speakers.

Least gutteral language.

There is only one gutteral sound in dutch present only in northern dutch and it isn t even that frequent but people tend to remember the exceptions. Dutch on the whole isn t a gutteral language. It s often difficult to learn less widely spoken languages like danish turkish or thai but english decided a while back that it s kind of done with national borders which is good news for language learners. Most foreigners have this wtf reaction when they hear it because it sounds so out of character considering the overall language.

Finnish has a reputation for being a tricky language to learn and with good reason. I love how you can immediately tell if a word is dutch because it s so distinctive from other languages like the sentence nee ik ben geen hoogleraar in de geschiedenis. Top languages by population ethnologue 2019 22nd edition. The language is in the finno urgic language family so it doesn t have any latin or german influence to help you guess what something means.

Hindi or japanese might be among the most spoken languages without guttural phonemes although hindi has another group of sounds that seem weird to a lot of english speaking ears the retroflex consonants. It uses an ordinary sentence to refer to something without directly stating it. Nouns have 15 different cases while english has only three. The following languages are listed as having at least 10 million first language speakers in the 2019 edition of ethnologue a language reference published by sil international which is based in the united states.

By the way i am a native english speaker who is learning or attempting to learn dutch. It is quite a harsh guttural language but beautiful all the same in its own way. Just have a look and listen at the video above which uses silly costumes and hokey stagecraft to show just how seven everyday words sound in german french english italian and spanish. Figurative language refers to a language that deviates from the conventional order and meaning in order to convey a complicated meaning colorful writing clarity or evocative comparison.

With the wealth of english language media on just youtube and wikipedia alone you hardly need to look anywhere else.