Europe s Most Secret Languages

Language, a bunch of random sounds human make to make each other laugh, cry and get mad over politics. Europe has over 200 languages, some good, others not so much. In this video we'll count down some of the rarest languages on the continent. This is part 2 of a video we already made, so if you haven't watched it and want to learn about even more languages, check that one out after this video. So, without further ado, let's begin. To start off, we head to the British Isles, to Scotland. While the south of the country mainly spoke Scots, the north spoke another native Celtic tongue, Gaelic. Gaelic came into existence from Irish. Before Scotland was even a thing, there used to be a kingdom in the 5th century known as Dalriada. Basically it controlled a bunch of islands off the coast and bits and pieces of both Scotland and Northern Ireland. And so, Irish speakers made their way into Scotland, where after centuries of being cold, miserable and wearing skirts for men, their language evolved into Gaelic around the 13th century. Over the years, it became the prominent language in most of the country, but eventually it was overshadowed by Scots and later English. Today, only around 1% of Scotland's population can speak Scottish Gaelic, which makes it a definitely endangered language. Similarly to Irish, Gaelic also follows the verb-subject-object sentence order and has no words for yes or no. But did you know it also doesn't have a verb for to have? To communicate possession, it uses words is at or is with. So if I were to say I have your nose in Gaelic, it would be, which isn't really all too funny as in English, but whatever. And here's a comparison of both Irish and Gaelic via The Little Prince. Heading south down Britain and turning west into its Chubb, we have Cornish. If you thought other Celtic languages were endangered, Cornish is already one foot in the grave and even had to be resuscitated back to life. Similarly to its sister Celtic languages, after the arrival of the Anglos, Cornish increasingly became less spoken as English spread further and further up the Cornwall peninsula. Then in the 18th century, it ceased to exist altogether. But language nerds were having none of that. So in the early 20th century, a revival effort came about with the publication of the book A Handbook of the Cornish Language. I know, a very corny title indeed. The book strived to teach people how to speak Cornish again. It sparked curiosity through retelling the language's history while also providing a guide to its grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. New York Times bestseller material if you ask me. I don't speak Cornish, but I do speak a bit of Cornish. Nevertheless, the book was successful enough that over the next century, Cornish was barely brought back from the dead. Today, roughly 3,000 people claim to have some basic knowledge of the language, while only 500 claim to speak it. Some schools in England have introduced the language in its curriculum in Cornwall and the government has made an effort in its resuscitation by installing bilingual signs and creating media in Cornish. An interesting fact about Cornish is that depending on the grammar in use, it changes the first consonant of a word. Take the word for cat. If you were to just say it on its own, it stays the same. But if you were to say who it belongs to, it changes into this. And here's a comparison of it and Breton. Last but not least for the isles, we also have Monch. You see this tiny little island between England and Ireland? That's where it's spoken. Well, better said, WAS spoken. In 1974, the language went sorta extinct when its last native speaker kicked the bucket. Partial knowledge of the language survived, though, and at the moment many are trying to revive the language as 1800 people have some knowledge of it. Similarly to other Celtic languages found on the isles, Monch also saw its beginning from Irish. But it became unintelligible to Irish speakers around the 15th century. During the Viking invasions, the Scandinavian invaders actually adopted the language on the island. But the same cannot be said for the English, whose language gradually overshadowed the language as it became the language of trade, education and government. All in all, Monch's revival efforts are proving somewhat successful as now there are children being raised with Monch as their mother tongue again. The language is one of the few in history to go from no native speakers to slowly changing that. Grammar-wise, Monch has a lot of similarities to other Celtic languages. An interesting quirk it has is it fuses pronouns and prepositions. For example, you have your typical pronouns, and you have prepositions like… But you wouldn't use them separately in a sentence, but fuse them together into this. And here's how it looks. Next up we cross into continental Europe, into Germany. In the north of the country lie Northern and Sutherland Frisian. Not to be confused with West Frisian, that's spoken in the Netherlands and is alive and well, the two Frisian varieties in Germany are critically endangered languages. What makes these two so interesting is that they are the closest languages to English. So in theory, I should be able to speak to a farmer in Old English. Basically, before England was England, you had the Angles and Saxons, who mainly lived here. In the 5th century, a lot of them got sick of living in a cold, wet marsh and sailed across the sea to a different cold, wet marsh. Those who went away founded the travesty of England, and those who stayed, a dying language. Over the next 1500 years, the two languages drifted apart. But even today, they're still more closely related to each other than either is to German or Dutch. Unfortunately for Northern and Sutherland Frisian speakers, history wasn't particularly kind to them. As German became the dominant language of Northern Germany, Frisian was slowly pushed out of everyday life. Northern Frisian survived mainly on a handful of islands and coastal villages, while Sutherland Frisian managed to cling on in just four tiny villages surrounded entirely by German speakers. Today, only around 10,000 people, mainly already one foot in the grave, still speak Northern Frisian, while fewer than 2,000 speak Sutherland Frisian. Here's a comparison of both of them to English and Dutch. You probably know Switzerland as a country with three official languages, German, French and Italian. But did you know there's also a fourth, Romance? Similarly to Romanian, this language also originated when the Romans decided to go out on their world tour of civilizing barbarians. At around 15 BC, they finished conquering Switzerland. In the east of the country lived a group of people known as the Rhaetians, who spoke some weird non-Indo-European language. The Romans were having none of that, so they sent a bunch of colonists and settlers who introduced them to the bane of existence of any gymnasium student, Latin. Over time, these two tongues mixed together and created a Frankenstein Romance language, known today as Romance. From then on, Romance became the dominant language in the region. But things changed in the 15th century when Rhaetian territory joined forces with other neighboring states in an overly complicated process to create Proto-Switzerland, known as the Free State of the Three Leagues, and later on became Switzerland proper itself. Being glued together to a bunch of Germans, who continued coming in droves, German emerged as the dominant language of trade, government and talking ---- about the Pope. Over the centuries, Romance went into decline, so much so that today it's only spoken between 40 to 60 thousand people, mainly in hard-to-reach mountainous villages. Due to its geographic isolation, the language further evolved into five separate dialects, which some linguists argue could be classified as separate languages altogether, due to not being all that mutually intelligible to one another and having separate rules for writing them down. Despite the language being endangered, in 1938, the Swiss voted to make Romance a fourth national language. Alongside that, many programs and institutions were founded to help preserve and promote the language. Here's an example of it, in its standardized version, compared to English. On the border between Czechia and Poland lies a region called Silesia. Where its inhabitants speak a language, Poland vehemently denies it even exists. The story of Silesia is a bit convoluted, so here's the TLDR. In the 10th century, Poland was established, but a couple of centuries later, Silesia was taken over by German states and Bohemia. Then again came more German rule, with Austria and unified Germany taking their turn in ruling the region. Then WWI, a bunch of uprisings ensued, regions divided between Poland and Germany, then comes WWII, borders move again, and almost all of Silesia ends up in Poland, with a smaller chunk in Czechoslovakia. As such, Silesian became influenced by a bunch of different languages, especially German, deviating quite a bit from Polish. Due to its shared origin story with Polish and the two languages forming a dialect continuum, which is a fancy way of saying a region where local languages are similar enough to be mutually understood, but the further you travel the less comprehensible they become, it's debated whether or not Silesians and their language are just Poles speaking a dialect of Polish, or a whole separate ethnic group and language. Some Silesians say yes, while others not so much. There are roughly over 450,000 speakers of Silesian mainly located in Poland, with some pockets in Czechia. There are also numerous recognized dialects of the language within the country, with speakers from each having differing opinions whether or not they speak a separate language from Polish or just a dialect. Throughout the 21st century, a bunch of efforts were made to get this language recognized by the Polish government, but due to it for some reason being a highly contentious topic in the country, it hasn't had a whole lot of success until January 2026, when Poland's parliament recognized it as an Ethnolect, whatever that means. Anyway, here's a comparison. There are a few things still around in the world that are older than George Soros. The Basque language in Spain. Basque is considered the oldest spoken language in Europe, believed to have originated all the way back in the New Stone Age. It's mainly found in the adequately named Basque country, which stretches between Spain and France. Unlike many other languages on this list, it's far from endangered as it has almost a million native speakers and like 400,000 people who speak it conversationally. It's still not known for certain from where or how Basque came into existence. The leading theory is that it emerged from one of Europe's prehistoric languages due to a large congregation of humans in this piece of land for whatever reason. It was able to survive extinction by its speakers being isolated in rugged mountains and the Romans just couldn't be bothered to get more involved with them. Historically, Basque occupied a much larger area, but due to events like the Reconquista which made Spaniards take back control of the Iberian Peninsula and their subsequent settlements, Basque's area of speaking decreased to what it is today. Under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Basque was severely suppressed. The language was banned from public use. If you were caught speaking in public with your mates over a pint, you'd be fined. Basque names were also forbidden, and many tombstones with them were even removed. But after Franco croaked, the laws were reversed. Basque country was given autonomy and they've been free to speak their caveman tongue ever since. Despite there being a significant Basque minority in France, the language still lacks recognition there. French Basque speakers are barred from using the language in court, but Spanish nationals in the country aren't. Which is just another reason to hate the French for. But I digress. Being an ancient non-Indo-European language, Basque has a bunch of interesting grammar quirks. To give you a basic rundown, its word order is subject-object-verb, but similarly to Hungarian, it can be fluid based on sentence topic. It also has a bunch of cases, which are all agglutinative and there is no grammatical gender. Which is why instead of referring to it by its desired name, Euskara, I like to call it Neandertal Hungarian. But for real, it's quite a wild language, so I definitely recommend you go and check out its wikipedia article at least. And as always, here's how it looks. Next up, we head to the tippy top of Europe, where we have Sami, which technically isn't one language, but nine related ones. Back way back when, there were a bunch of people living around the Ural mountains in Russia. But because it was cold as balls there and you couldn't grow jack ---- because the soil was frozen for most of the year, they packed their bags and went all across the continent. A good chunk of them came to Europe, from whom we got Finns, Estonians and Hungarians. But before they even thought about leaving, came the Sami, who to escape their frozen wasteland settled in the far north of Scandinavia. Hence why the Sami people are referred to as the indigenous peoples of the peninsula. The most widely spoken of the Sami languages is North Sami, with around 15,000 to 30,000 people speaking it, the majority of which are located in Norway. The others are scattered all around Scandinavia and are clinging to dear life. Historically, the Sami peoples were nomads, mainly dabbling in the reindeer herding business, fishing and hunting. For some reason, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia found this preposterous. Their governments pressured them into settling down, pushing their own languages onto them and in severe cases, deporting the Sami altogether. Which all contributed to many Sami languages becoming extinct and the decline of existing ones. Things began changing in the second half of the 20th century, especially from the 1970s onwards, as Sami activism pushed governments towards recognition, language rights, Sami education and eventually, institutions like the Sami parliaments. Being the languages of nomads, Sami languages have a bunch of words regarding nature, animals and weather. When it comes to Northern Sami, similarly to other Finno-Ugric languages, it's a glutenative with a bunch of cases. But where it stands out is it has a dual form for both verbs and pronouns. Another fun quirk is the suffix "-go", which works sort of like the Japanese particle "-ka", when asking a question. Just stick it onto a word and boom, your statement turns into a yes or no question. And as always, here's a comparison between it and Finnish. Staying in Scandinavia, we have a language that makes Sweden abandon all of its progressive views and deny its mere existence, Elfdalian. Elfdalian is spoken by around 2500 people in the middle of nowhere forests in the west center of the country. Basically like all North Germanic languages, Elfdalian came from Old Norse, but due to its speakers' geographic isolation, the language evolved parallelly with other Scandinavian languages, becoming its own thing over the centuries. As Sweden's government became more centralized and its public institutions became streamlined, its use went into decline as most young people gradually switched to just using Swedish. Due to overly complicated bureaucracy, Sweden has been adamant about Elfdalian just being another dialect of Swedish, despite not being mutually intelligible at all. But considering its use has severely declined and it is now classified as a severely endangered language, a movement has emerged to give it minority language status so stronger revitalization efforts could be implemented. What's interesting about Elfdalian is that it retains a lot of archaic Old Norse grammar. It kept four cases, while Swedish mostly dropped them. It has three genders, while in Swedish there are only two. And the most interesting quirk of all is that it doubles pronouns. In English we'd say this sentence as he will join, but in Elfdalian, which literally translated means he will join he, with he showing up twice. And here's a comparison between it and Swedish. Another severely endangered Germanic language is Moceno. Found in the north of Italy, this language is spoken in three small towns by roughly 1400 people. But how the hell did Germanic speakers end up randomly in Italy? Basically, sometime between the 12th and 14th century, some feudal lords sent a handful of German colonizers to work their land and make them bank. These colonists presumably came from Bavaria, which on its own speaks a bunch of unique German dialects. Some linguists would even label Bavarian as its own language. Anyway, over centuries of isolation from the rest of the German-speaking world, and being surrounded by guys who can't win a war if their life depended on it, their language evolved into what is now Moceno. Similarly to other languages in this video, its use declined sharply after Italy became a dictatorship and Mussolini increasingly applied pressure on its people to stop speaking it, as well as the whole media and institutions centralization spiel. But after the country became a democracy, protection acts were put in place to preserve this language. Here's a comparison. If Bulgaria is so good, why is there no Bulgarian too? Well, there is, we just call it Macedonian. But there's an even cooler Bulgarian variety, Banat Bulgarian. South of Hungary lies the region of Banat, split between Serbia and Romania. More level than a Minecraft super flat world, questionable quality of water, and a booming entertainment industry of a small town in Nebraska. Some Bulgarians in the 17th and 18th centuries thought this would be the perfect place to settle down. Granted, they were fleeing Turkish persecution, but to each their own, I suppose. Today there are roughly 6,500 speakers in Romania and 1,500 in Serbia, mainly found in small Banat villages. Being located in a clusterfuck of languages and cultures, that is, Banat, their language was heavily influenced by Romanian, Hungarian, Serbian, and German, which over centuries made it evolve into a unique dialect of Bulgarian. Despite being of Bulgarian origins, many Banat Bulgarians refer to themselves as Palčene. Unlike standard Bulgarian, they write in the Latin script and even standardized their own language separately in the mid-19th century. And unlike the overwhelming Orthodox population back in Bulgaria, the Banat Bulgarians identify as Catholics, which helped keep them culturally distinct. They even adopted the letter Ć, which is used mainly in Serbo-Croatian, but not so much in standard Bulgarian. And here's a comparison of the two. Buddhists are pretty dope. They like to eat veggies, live, laugh, love, and get reincarnated to do it all over again. It's just a shame they're all in Asia and San Francisco. Except they're not. Introducing Kalmykia, a republic within European Russia and home to one of Europe's most unusual peoples, the Kalmyks. The story goes like this. There used to be the Mongol Empire that went on to conquer half of the world, but then it split up into a bunch of different states that then got gobbled up by other countries. One of them, known as the Oirats, decided for whatever reason to travel west. And I mean really west, where they established the Kalmyk Khanate. With them, they brought two things, their religion, Buddhism, and more importantly, their language. But over the next century and a half, they increasingly came under Russian control, ultimately being fully swallowed up by Russia. Kalmykia today has a population of around 260,000 people, roughly 160,000 of which are ethnic Kalmyks, a fraction of which speak the Kalmyk language. Despite being so far away from the Mongolian motherland, Kalmyk in large part is mutually intelligible to Oirat varieties of Mongolian in both Mongolia and China. But naturally, over centuries of Russian rule, many Russian and Turkic words from neighboring peoples were adopted. Despite having a sizable population of speakers, Kalmyk as a language is considered endangered. Most speakers are older people, and the youth is largely choosing to speak Russian as it's the dominant language in the country. Furthermore, its decline can be traced back to the Russian Empire's forced assimilation An interesting anecdote is that many Kalmyks fled to Yugoslavia after the conclusion of the Russian Civil War, fearing persecution from the communists, a couple hundred relocated to Belgrade, where they opened up the first ever Buddhist temple in Europe. The neighborhood in which they lived was aptly named Konyarnik, meaning horse breeding area, cause they were Mongols and all. But unfortunately, the temple was severely damaged during WWII and subsequently demolished. And as always, here's a comparison between it and standard Mongolian. Speaking of the Mongols, their empire didn't only contribute to the creation of Kalmyk, but also a whole other separate Slavic language, Izvursky, whose origin is a wild ride. In the 13th century, when the Mongol armies arrived in Eastern Europe, they completely sacked Kievan Rus'. Its prince got out with a head on his shoulders and fled all the way south into Bulgaria, where he founded a couple of villages and monasteries. His lands came to be known as Kievski Izvur, but over time they were renamed to Golyam Izvur, meaning big spring in Bulgarian. Then in the 18th century, its inhabitants fled due to rampant banditry. A bunch of re-settled in Serbia, where they founded a new village known as Veliki Izvur, meaning the same in Serbian as in Bulgarian. Then a group of villagers split off and went deep into a nearby forest to found a completely new village, which they aptly named Dublje, aka deeper. Because of their wild ass journey and geographic isolation, the inhabitants of these villages in Serbia developed a new language known as Izvursky, which is an amalgamation of Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, and arguably a little bit of Ukrainian. It's not really known how many speakers there are, as these villages are quite small and their population keeps declining, but they're still there. Because sources on it are so few in numbers, I couldn't find a little prince excerpt in Izvursky, and the best I found was this article with a little snippet of the language. Last but not least, y'all know about Hungary. It used to be big until it wasn't. Because of which, most of the lands bordering the country have a sizable population of Hungarians with a bunch of quirky dialects. But there exist Hungarians who've lived far beyond Hungary's historic borders. In the middle of nowhere in Moldavia, there exists a group that for centuries developed an extremely unique dialect of Hungarian, Csángos. It's not really fully known how the Csángo ended up here. According to one theory, originally these people came from the Székely, who were another subgroup of Hungarians who lived deep in Romania in the Carpathian Mountains. Historically, they didn't really get along the best with the Hungarian kingdom, because of which its rulers moved them all over the place, even establishing a Székely village in Vojvodina. At one point, a group of Székely set to hell with Hungary and instead of moving west, crossed the Carpathian Mountains and settled in Moldavia, establishing a couple of villages. But other sources noted a Hungarian presence in Moldavia way before as well. So most likely the two groups mixed together, forming what we today know as the Csángo. Being separated from the mainland and surrounded by Romanian speakers, their dialect diverged away from standard Hungarian, retaining a bunch of archaic vocabulary, introducing a bunch of Romanian loanwords and Romanian sentence structuring. According to the census done in 2011, there are roughly only 1500 Csángo left in Romania and even fewer speakers of the dialect. Most who speak Csángo are mainly old folk, while younger generations have in large part switched to Romanian, being surrounded by Romanian speakers and all. Because it's such a niche dialect-slash-language, written examples of Csángo are really hard to come by. So here's some basic phrases I was able to find for comparison. And yeah, those would be some of the rarest languages in Europe. Of course, there are many more we haven't even touched. So if there are any we missed, let me know in the comment section down below. And if you'd like potentially a part three in this series, or even for us to cover a different continent, let me know down in the comments. My name is Janos, and you've watched Living Ironically in Europe.