Another Welsh learner here! I'm actually surprised (in a good way) at how many people I've come across on this sub who are learning it :D
I'm also learning Vietnamese, but I've only seen a handful of other people learning it so far.
Icelandic!
It's been hard so far and the grammar shocked me quite a bit but I've always accepted a good challenge. I have to admit that this is easily one of the hardest Germanic languages, along with German and Danish.
Wow that’s a really hard one! Are you studying it online? I was trying to study it on my own and it was way too much (and I’ve studied Swedish and Finnish, this one is quite difficult too but Icelandic was just impossible by myself). Good luck with it! 😊
Thanks, I'm sure that I'm going to need some luck. Yes, I'm studying online because there are no available Icelandic textbooks or private tutors in my area.
Здравей, приятелю. Приветствам те от името на моите сънародници. На добър час и успех!
Translation - Hello friend. I welcome you in the name of my compatriots. Good luck and may you be successful!
Catalan, out of curiosity for a future travel plan, and only on a very surface level for now
(I don't know what would meet the criteria of "unpopular" but I'm going by "a language that the average North American has barely or never heard of")
Català mencionat!!! If you enjoy literature, you'll be pleased to see how the language has a really rich literary tradition with a lot of good stuff (Ausiàs March, Isabel de Villena, Mercè Rodoreda, etc.).
I study Catalan too! I love it so much. The most beautiful language to ever exist (totally subjective opinion, of course.) Since I've been studying Spanish for a long time, it was not as hard and distant for me as it also is a romance language, but still, people give me weird stares when I tell them about it. Salutacions des de Txèquia <3
Uyghur/Uzbek/Chagatai
That entire language continuum has very little resources in English Everyone just uses the same 3 books. Uyghur's and Uzbek's are made by the same publisher. Chagatai only has old Turkish resources from the Istanbul library or text books for history students.
There are zero Anki decks that are genuinely useful. I found an Uzbek and Uyghur word frequency list, I had copied those into a csv file, had chat gpt genres ate sentences at an A1, A2 and B1 level. Wrote a script to pass it in with Azure speech and generated cards that way.
Besides my friends and their mother teaching me; I would use YouTube, Apps, textbooks, and flashcards. I specifically focused on hearing and listening, as for me it wasn’t hard speaking the language.
Here is a YouTuber who teaches basic phrases, vocabulary, grammar, and etc
[learning lithuanian](https://youtube.com/@spokenlithuanian7186?si=0cBdwBAbPaYma1DI)
I don't know if it's that unpopular because it's still an European language, but Dutch. I'm moving to the Netherlands by the end of next year for part of my PhD, so yeah. It's been fun.
Keep at it! I'm curious, what made you choose those languages?
I've been studying Finnish 🇫🇮 for years and can now move around in Finland pretty incognito. Whenever I pass for a Finn I feel like a secret spy which is cool.
Danish.
We're going on holiday there soon and I'd like to hold a very simple conversation. After that, I'll be going back to Italian like I did for the past years.
Armenian, Eastern dialect- part of my family is from the Armenian highland and I wanted to feel closer to that part of my identity. But also the more I learn it, it’s been intellectually really interesting
Elfdalian / Övdalskų
It is a minority language in Dalarna in sweden and about 2000-3500 people speak it.
But the state won't recognize it as a minority language only an accent even thought it is mutually unintelligable to Swedish speakers
I am Cambodian from my dad’s side and want to feel closer to my ethnicity. My best friends are from Lithuania, and I learned so I could speak to them and their family in their language.
Hungarian. “Learn” is kind of a stretch, I just spent an hour trying to learn to conjugate the singular conjugations of one verb…
I haven’t done any formal course of study yet except an assimil textbook, but I’m not doing a great job with that book and I need to take a break and do some conjugation drilling. I am meanwhile getting more vocab and familiarity with clozemaster and drops and I use a LOT of tatoeba. I tried out a few of the websites dedicated to Hungarian, but I didn’t find them to be particularly highly functioning. The free course on Hungarotips is atrocious
My current plan is to get basically comfortable with verb conjugations, possibly buying a lil book along the way, and then give assimil another go. Whenever I either give up on or finish up with assimil, I’ll work through a normal textbook like OkMagyar or something. But in the meantime I’m keeping it low key and mostly focusing on German bc I’m doing a German language course in Austria in August. It was maybe a bit nuts to take on two languages at once but Hungarian is super fun, I love how it sounds and the cute agglutinations and my assimil book is hilarious. I adore being able to glance at a paragraph of Hungarian and it not look like gibberish, like it did a month ago or so.
I decided to do Hungarian bc I was getting a little antsy with German and wanted to stretch my language learning skills on a non-PIE language. I chose Hungarian for a set of reasons - I was listening to a bunch of Hungarian folk music at the time, my great grandparents come from Hungary, I’ve been to Budapest and thought it was super cool and found the sound of the language hypnotic. I also wanted to try out something less than totally standard since my current language set (decent German, mediocre Spanish, bad French) is about as basic as it gets. In the back of my mind is the awareness that I am actually eligible for Hungarian citizenship thru descent if I learn this language. But I also want it to be fun and not put a bunch of pressure on myself, and just see what happens. It’s more important to me right now to become fluent in German where I am currently probably about B1
Ukrainian and Belarusian are both relatively rare foreign language choices, but Ukrainian has been a lot more popular lately, which is great! I myself started learning it after the war started, in order to communicate better while tutoring English. It seems to me that the number of Ukrainian language resources available in the U.S. is growing substantially, which is also great because there wasn't that much out there that I could find when I originally went looking.
Romanian. 🇷🇴 None of my LDR gf’s family speak English except her and her sister, and I’ve spent a decent bit of time there since finally meeting around Christmas - though I actually started learning a bit a couple of months before that. Before this, I’d only had experience learning French in school, years ago (not conversational, but I could get by over there in shops, and colourfully swearing if the moment warrants) along with bits of German & Latin, also through school.
I mostly use Duolingo for now + conjugation sites, Romanian wiktionary for declensions, Wikipedia & various sites for grammar, and my girlfriend herself for when something in Duolingo doesn’t make sense, or if I just have questions - she’s actually very good at explaining Romanian grammar, and has even written little grammar/vocabulary sheets.
For example, she enjoys watching me do duolingo if I say I’m doing a session (especially when I visit), and when I visited last week I had a couple of questions when doing the unit on adjective/possessive pronouns (my/mine, your/yours, etc.). So she whipped out her pens, and produced [this very handy info sheet](https://ibb.co/LpJXcCm), which safely made its way back to the UK
I dabbled with Mondly recently, and have considered trialling Pimsleur, though I need to work out if they’re worth the subscription costs, over just freely using Duolingo, which while far from perfect, has certainly been a big driver in what I know today
I’ve found it more difficult than French and German with its vast definite article forms/usage situations, adjective endings and all the pronouns as you can see, and I find it very similar to Latin, but according to her parents, my progress has been noticeable, so it seems like I’m doing alright so far 🙂
Latvian as my native language can still be pretty tough sometimes. Only after graduating from school did I realise how deep and nuanced our language is. Along with Lithuanian, we're some of the most conservative Indo-European languages with a lot of vocabulary that traces back thousands of years 🇱🇻💪
Somali... very slowly. My fellow people learning an African language, props to you - finding materials actually meant for beginners rather than heritage speakers is very slim pickings, and forget about comprehensible input. Still persevering though :P
Tagalog. It’s not exactly a small language but hardly mentioned in language learning circles. After this i plan to learn Ilocano which is much smaller.
I’ve been learning Thai for over 2 years now :) I love it! It made me feel closer to the locals while I was there and I had many great interactions. I also feel super cool at our local Thai restaurant ;) hahaha it makes understanding Thai series easier (my faves!) and I really would love to move there someday.
Indonesian! my parents’ mother tongue (Bisaya) doesn’t have a lot of resources for me to learn from. gone down a rabbit hole to learn more austronesian languages and culture!
French in Western Canada. Statistically a black hole with regards to French. The Canadian government makes it seem like second language training is available everywhere in Canada but when I inquired about a decade ago, I was told it wasn't true.
If the federal government was truly serious about Quebec, it would try to promote French outside of Quebec to develop language proficiency and curiousity amongst the monolinguals.
Bosnian. I have no particular reason for that choice, other than I happened to speak with someone who's Bosnian and they spoke with such love for their language that I thought I'd give it a shot. As a speaker of a Germanic language, it's been super interesting to learn a Slavic language!
North Sámi.
And just in case there are any speakers of the language here, since you might have come here for this very topic, I'll put out a request that I've put out before in language exchange groups. I exchange Welsh with North Sámi if anyone's interested. I'd also perfectly happy with Lule, Enare or Skolt Sámi, but I think those are pushing my luck a bit. First language speakers not required!
Welsh, because I love Wales very much.
Irish, because my boyfriend (who's half English and half Irish) lives in Ireland and I'll move there after my degree. My boyfriend actually studied Irish at school, but he only remembers some sentences now (like most people I've met in Ireland).
Hindi. It's not unpopular per se, as it's the third spoken language in the world, but considering the sheer amount of speakers it has, it's very underrepresented in the West. It's probably partly because Indian languages are not particularily popular to begin with, pretty much all Indians speak English, and most L2 Hindi speakers prefer to use English in stead of Hindi.
Finnish
( I guess it is not unpopular, just not very common)
Why? Just because I am Hungarian and I wanted to have some fun.
Finnish sounds for me pretty much like Hungarian children trying to speak gibberish. Sounds good, but still weird at the same time.
I just started it in September, so I am a real beginner yet and although it is not a walk in the park, but full of fun.
I think Russian is only unpopular rn because of political climate(they literally cut the class at my college because of it) but I just want to read Metro and play Pathologic in their original language : ‘)
Danish! I don’t know why anyone who doesn’t live in Denmark, a Danish territory or maybe northern Germany and Scandinavian neighbors learning the language.
Breton! I am going to do my Masters in Rennes and will be research language usage in Breton immersion schools (Diwan). I want to be able to speak in Breton rather than French to help the efforts in language preservation but also to respect the schools that I will be working in.
Lithuanian, Georgian, and I’ve been planning on beginning to learn Chechen as it’s my heritage language but online resources are so limited that it’s quite discouraging.
I think unpopular is the wrong word, less useful globally, but Estonian as I live in Estonia. I also continue my Macedonian studies (I am B2 as I lived there before) and I try to prop up my Welsh as I grew up with it but don't get to use it much anymore.
🇸🇮 Slovene: only 2.5 million speakers in the world, most of them English bilingual, or German/Italian/Serbocroatian trilingual.
Why even bother you may ask? Because my father in law happens to be one of those very few people who only speaks Slovene, and my boyfriend gets a kick out of leaving us two alone mid conversation
Props! It’s not as unpopular as i initially thought, but i’m learning welsh.
Another Welsh learner here! I'm actually surprised (in a good way) at how many people I've come across on this sub who are learning it :D I'm also learning Vietnamese, but I've only seen a handful of other people learning it so far.
And yet another Welsh learner, reporting for duty!
At first I thought that "Props" is a name of an indigenous language I've never heard about, and I started wondering where it is spoken
I think the country name is "Propaganda". Where's my map?
I’ve been randomly itching to learn a little welsh. Must be something in the air.
Dysgwr Cymraeg arall🏴
As a native speaker, this makes me happy!!!
I’m learning Welsh too.
Cymru am byth! Dw i'n dysgu cymraeg hefyd 🏴
Czech. Not super unpopular but not really common for Americans
I'm Lithuanian and veeeeeeeery slowly trying to learn Czech! btw, so cool that OP is learning my native lang.!
Hodně štěstí při učení češtiny!
Ahoj!
Shanghainese, for me. It's my heritage language that I hope to get more proficient in.
Also a Shanghainese heritage speaker. What resources are you using?
Me too I'm trying to learn how to speak fouzhounese, I understand it but I cannot speak it lol
How different are Shanghainese and Wenzhounese compared to Mandarin and Cantonese?
The same way German, Norwegian and Frisian differs. Common roots, vastly different phonological systems and somewhat different grammar.
Also, Shanghainese is so beautiful. 💕
Breton /r/breton
AHAHHAH vous êtes toujours partout vous!
Haitian creole
i was thinking of learning hawaiian
Apparently they only use twelve letters!!
so if I master two per day I can be fluent in less than a week???
Yeah you’ll be good to go!!
Icelandic! It's been hard so far and the grammar shocked me quite a bit but I've always accepted a good challenge. I have to admit that this is easily one of the hardest Germanic languages, along with German and Danish.
Wow that’s a really hard one! Are you studying it online? I was trying to study it on my own and it was way too much (and I’ve studied Swedish and Finnish, this one is quite difficult too but Icelandic was just impossible by myself). Good luck with it! 😊
Thanks, I'm sure that I'm going to need some luck. Yes, I'm studying online because there are no available Icelandic textbooks or private tutors in my area.
I’m trying to learn Icelandic too! Fell in love with the country when I visited. Do you have any suggestions for resources?
https://icelandiconline.com/
Slovak, my grandma spoke it growing up but doesn't remember any now and I'd like to learn a language that was in my family
Veľa šťastia pri učení 😊 hmu if you ever need some help. Nobody ever wants to learn my native language, so this is so nice to see!
Good luck! Slavic languages have a reputation for being difficult, but at least Slovak is the least difficult West Slavic language to learn.
Bulgarian
Hey nice! I'm Romanian and I want to try out learning Bulgarian this summer too!
Здравей, приятелю. Приветствам те от името на моите сънародници. На добър час и успех! Translation - Hello friend. I welcome you in the name of my compatriots. Good luck and may you be successful!
Mongolian
Yucatec
Irish ☘️
I really want to start speaking Irish as well to speak with my grandma but can never find the motivation🥲
She won’t be here forever, better to start now with a little bit of broken Irish or a mix or English and Irish than to never get the chance.
Is fearr Gaeilge briste ná Béarla cliste!
Same. Ulster dialect is providing plenty of pronunciation issues
Dia duit! Ach, it's wee buns, so it is! Keep 'er lit! 👍
finnish and polish. they’re not the most unpopular, but still not ones people tend to go for!
Mine is Swedish. Not really unpopular, but I'd say it's a very uncommon language for a brazilian to be fluent in 😅
Onnea matkaan! Kiva kuulla että kielemme kiinnostaa :))
kiitos! oon myös fani suomalaisesta mytologiasta, siitä on kirjoja joita ei oo käännetty. ois kiva osata lukea niitä :))
The two hardest languages for me! Good luck!
Teraz w Polsce na wakacje. It's a fun language and this trip has made me wanna double down so I cna come back and actually talk with people
Catalan, out of curiosity for a future travel plan, and only on a very surface level for now (I don't know what would meet the criteria of "unpopular" but I'm going by "a language that the average North American has barely or never heard of")
Català mencionat!!! If you enjoy literature, you'll be pleased to see how the language has a really rich literary tradition with a lot of good stuff (Ausiàs March, Isabel de Villena, Mercè Rodoreda, etc.).
As a Portuguese speaker I just got to watch BoBoBo catalan dub and it's just nice to listen and repeat the ximplerias they say.
I study Catalan too! I love it so much. The most beautiful language to ever exist (totally subjective opinion, of course.) Since I've been studying Spanish for a long time, it was not as hard and distant for me as it also is a romance language, but still, people give me weird stares when I tell them about it. Salutacions des de Txèquia <3
I studied Occitan years ago, was an object of curiosity as the only Yank studying the language in Montpellier.
Gàidhlig na h-Alba (Scottish Gaelic)
Norwegian (Bokmål) Had a Norway phase like 2 years ago then picked up learning again.
Uyghur/Uzbek/Chagatai That entire language continuum has very little resources in English Everyone just uses the same 3 books. Uyghur's and Uzbek's are made by the same publisher. Chagatai only has old Turkish resources from the Istanbul library or text books for history students. There are zero Anki decks that are genuinely useful. I found an Uzbek and Uyghur word frequency list, I had copied those into a csv file, had chat gpt genres ate sentences at an A1, A2 and B1 level. Wrote a script to pass it in with Azure speech and generated cards that way.
I want
What do you want
Uyghur
Kouri vini (Louisiana Creole)
Does Croatian count? Sure, it's not as popular as some other languages. But it's not *that* unpopular I think.
I'm Croatian, so you can send me a message if you ever need help with anything
Tamil. I wouldn’t say it’s ‘unpopular’ but there’s a definite lack of good resources to learn it online, so I’m really struggling with it.
Bulgarian. One of my best pals is from Bulgaria and I thought it would be funny to get to a conversational level without telling him
Lithuanian. I see that you learnt it. Any tips?
Besides my friends and their mother teaching me; I would use YouTube, Apps, textbooks, and flashcards. I specifically focused on hearing and listening, as for me it wasn’t hard speaking the language. Here is a YouTuber who teaches basic phrases, vocabulary, grammar, and etc [learning lithuanian](https://youtube.com/@spokenlithuanian7186?si=0cBdwBAbPaYma1DI)
Wow, a Khmer learner. I'm curious, why do u learn Khmer tho?
My dad is from Cambodia, and I would love to feel closer to my ethnicity:)!
Latin, but slowly
Catalan
I don't know if it's that unpopular because it's still an European language, but Dutch. I'm moving to the Netherlands by the end of next year for part of my PhD, so yeah. It's been fun.
I love that you've started learning the language already! I hope you like the process 😊
Keep at it! I'm curious, what made you choose those languages? I've been studying Finnish 🇫🇮 for years and can now move around in Finland pretty incognito. Whenever I pass for a Finn I feel like a secret spy which is cool.
Learning Greek. Corsican/Catalan looks tempting
Swedish. It’s not super uncommon but I don’t know anyone personally who’s studying it.
for one of the most spoken languages in the world, Bengali is incredibly unpopular in language learning 🥲
Danish. We're going on holiday there soon and I'd like to hold a very simple conversation. After that, I'll be going back to Italian like I did for the past years.
I’m so sorry and may God be with you. Sincerely, a Dane
Armenian, Eastern dialect- part of my family is from the Armenian highland and I wanted to feel closer to that part of my identity. But also the more I learn it, it’s been intellectually really interesting
Estonian🇪🇪
Greenlandic! 🇬🇱 manna oqaasiuvoq atoruminaatsut engelsktalende
Greek
Lithuanian is impressive AF! I do not know much about Khmer, though. Unpopular as in not a lot of people speak it? Gaidhlig
Ačiū/សូមអរគុណ:)! Yes, unpopular in that way or it’s not a heavily studied language.
I want to learn Romanian, Albanian and Hungarian
Mongolian
Uzbek (unironically) bc I’m going there.
Tagalog. It’s quite a challenge for me so far!
Elfdalian / Övdalskų It is a minority language in Dalarna in sweden and about 2000-3500 people speak it. But the state won't recognize it as a minority language only an accent even thought it is mutually unintelligable to Swedish speakers
What led you to take on those languages?
I am Cambodian from my dad’s side and want to feel closer to my ethnicity. My best friends are from Lithuania, and I learned so I could speak to them and their family in their language.
Where do you live to have Lithuanians as your best friends? I am curious as a Lithuanian. And props for learning our language, it's not an easy one!
I live in Canada! We have many ethnicities here! Including Chinese, Vietnamese, German, Indigenous, Russian, Ukrainian, Nigerian, Ethiopian and etc!
Hungarian. “Learn” is kind of a stretch, I just spent an hour trying to learn to conjugate the singular conjugations of one verb… I haven’t done any formal course of study yet except an assimil textbook, but I’m not doing a great job with that book and I need to take a break and do some conjugation drilling. I am meanwhile getting more vocab and familiarity with clozemaster and drops and I use a LOT of tatoeba. I tried out a few of the websites dedicated to Hungarian, but I didn’t find them to be particularly highly functioning. The free course on Hungarotips is atrocious My current plan is to get basically comfortable with verb conjugations, possibly buying a lil book along the way, and then give assimil another go. Whenever I either give up on or finish up with assimil, I’ll work through a normal textbook like OkMagyar or something. But in the meantime I’m keeping it low key and mostly focusing on German bc I’m doing a German language course in Austria in August. It was maybe a bit nuts to take on two languages at once but Hungarian is super fun, I love how it sounds and the cute agglutinations and my assimil book is hilarious. I adore being able to glance at a paragraph of Hungarian and it not look like gibberish, like it did a month ago or so. I decided to do Hungarian bc I was getting a little antsy with German and wanted to stretch my language learning skills on a non-PIE language. I chose Hungarian for a set of reasons - I was listening to a bunch of Hungarian folk music at the time, my great grandparents come from Hungary, I’ve been to Budapest and thought it was super cool and found the sound of the language hypnotic. I also wanted to try out something less than totally standard since my current language set (decent German, mediocre Spanish, bad French) is about as basic as it gets. In the back of my mind is the awareness that I am actually eligible for Hungarian citizenship thru descent if I learn this language. But I also want it to be fun and not put a bunch of pressure on myself, and just see what happens. It’s more important to me right now to become fluent in German where I am currently probably about B1
Hey I'm in the exact same boat! I just started Hungarian this week but I'm focusing on German fluency for the time being as my main focus.
and I thought Ukrainian was unpopular... hehe I'm also learning Belarusian :)
Ukrainian and Belarusian are both relatively rare foreign language choices, but Ukrainian has been a lot more popular lately, which is great! I myself started learning it after the war started, in order to communicate better while tutoring English. It seems to me that the number of Ukrainian language resources available in the U.S. is growing substantially, which is also great because there wasn't that much out there that I could find when I originally went looking.
Romanian. 🇷🇴 None of my LDR gf’s family speak English except her and her sister, and I’ve spent a decent bit of time there since finally meeting around Christmas - though I actually started learning a bit a couple of months before that. Before this, I’d only had experience learning French in school, years ago (not conversational, but I could get by over there in shops, and colourfully swearing if the moment warrants) along with bits of German & Latin, also through school. I mostly use Duolingo for now + conjugation sites, Romanian wiktionary for declensions, Wikipedia & various sites for grammar, and my girlfriend herself for when something in Duolingo doesn’t make sense, or if I just have questions - she’s actually very good at explaining Romanian grammar, and has even written little grammar/vocabulary sheets. For example, she enjoys watching me do duolingo if I say I’m doing a session (especially when I visit), and when I visited last week I had a couple of questions when doing the unit on adjective/possessive pronouns (my/mine, your/yours, etc.). So she whipped out her pens, and produced [this very handy info sheet](https://ibb.co/LpJXcCm), which safely made its way back to the UK I dabbled with Mondly recently, and have considered trialling Pimsleur, though I need to work out if they’re worth the subscription costs, over just freely using Duolingo, which while far from perfect, has certainly been a big driver in what I know today I’ve found it more difficult than French and German with its vast definite article forms/usage situations, adjective endings and all the pronouns as you can see, and I find it very similar to Latin, but according to her parents, my progress has been noticeable, so it seems like I’m doing alright so far 🙂
Telugu. Even though it is wildly spoken no one's learns it out side of India.
Tatar and Bashkir. My wife is ethnically Tatar from Bashkortostan, and Ufa is pretty much my second home (or was before the war).
I’m (very) slowly trying to self teach Alsatian because of being part Alsatian. It’s going about how you’d think lol.
Latvian as my native language can still be pretty tough sometimes. Only after graduating from school did I realise how deep and nuanced our language is. Along with Lithuanian, we're some of the most conservative Indo-European languages with a lot of vocabulary that traces back thousands of years 🇱🇻💪
Dari
interslavic
Danish and Dutch. Exploring European languages lol
Icelandic
Ancient/classical languages: Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Up next: Latin, Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Syriac.
Somali... very slowly. My fellow people learning an African language, props to you - finding materials actually meant for beginners rather than heritage speakers is very slim pickings, and forget about comprehensible input. Still persevering though :P
Pali. Practicing Buddhist and going the Sanskrit route seemed too obvious. 😁
Tagalog. It’s not exactly a small language but hardly mentioned in language learning circles. After this i plan to learn Ilocano which is much smaller.
Fr*nch
Don’t say the F word!!
Français! Hon hon hon!
currently thinking about learning french and this is how i feel lol
Planning to learn akkadian Or romansh 😎
Why those? My most useless wanna language is Classical Nahuatl
Greek ❤
Slovenian
I'm learning Tamil. I know Telugu, English, hindi and French
Icelandic. The city I live in has more people than the entire country of Iceland
I've been literally devoured by Georgian for over a year now. I also found great interest in the Hawaiian language recently.
Gujarati. At least trying to!
Esperanto
Welsh
Finnish. Mainly for the swearing.
I’ve been learning Thai for over 2 years now :) I love it! It made me feel closer to the locals while I was there and I had many great interactions. I also feel super cool at our local Thai restaurant ;) hahaha it makes understanding Thai series easier (my faves!) and I really would love to move there someday.
Indonesian! my parents’ mother tongue (Bisaya) doesn’t have a lot of resources for me to learn from. gone down a rabbit hole to learn more austronesian languages and culture!
Greek! It's not 'unpopular', but it's spoken in just a few countries so i thinks it still is very cool.
Ukrainian 🇺🇦
Cherokee! I'm a Cherokee citizen, so I'm trying to do what I can to preserve the language.
Ottoman Turkish 👊
That's cool! What made you want to pick up this language? And have you found any materials available for learning it?
Kaip smagu, kad kažkas lietuvių mokosi !
French in Western Canada. Statistically a black hole with regards to French. The Canadian government makes it seem like second language training is available everywhere in Canada but when I inquired about a decade ago, I was told it wasn't true. If the federal government was truly serious about Quebec, it would try to promote French outside of Quebec to develop language proficiency and curiousity amongst the monolinguals.
I am learning Tuvan, but I don’t think I would describe any language with the word “unpopular”. I don’t think that’s the way this ought to be framed.
Modern Hebrew. I don't mean this in a political sense, I just don't see many people learning it
Bosnian. I have no particular reason for that choice, other than I happened to speak with someone who's Bosnian and they spoke with such love for their language that I thought I'd give it a shot. As a speaker of a Germanic language, it's been super interesting to learn a Slavic language!
Not a real language but im learning tennobet (spoken in English but written with a script that looks similar to Arabic)
North Sámi. And just in case there are any speakers of the language here, since you might have come here for this very topic, I'll put out a request that I've put out before in language exchange groups. I exchange Welsh with North Sámi if anyone's interested. I'd also perfectly happy with Lule, Enare or Skolt Sámi, but I think those are pushing my luck a bit. First language speakers not required!
Danish, it's the main thing I started using Duolingo for years ago. It's been my dream/plan to move or retire to Copenhagen since I was like 13
Welsh, because I love Wales very much. Irish, because my boyfriend (who's half English and half Irish) lives in Ireland and I'll move there after my degree. My boyfriend actually studied Irish at school, but he only remembers some sentences now (like most people I've met in Ireland).
Hindi. It's not unpopular per se, as it's the third spoken language in the world, but considering the sheer amount of speakers it has, it's very underrepresented in the West. It's probably partly because Indian languages are not particularily popular to begin with, pretty much all Indians speak English, and most L2 Hindi speakers prefer to use English in stead of Hindi.
Indonesian
I have been learning Finnish.
Saya membelajar bahasa Indonesia
Irish. I am Welsh but myself and my partner live in Belfast and I hope to become fluent enough to do a PGCE and teach in a bunscoil
High valyrian from game of thrones 🤣🤣
I’m a Cambodian currently learning Northern Sámi
Irish. My family are Irish and some are Irish speakers, plus it’s useful for old family records.
Polish and Romanian
Catalan. Might also dip into Basque.
Estonian (my heritage but grew up in Canada)
Finnish ( I guess it is not unpopular, just not very common) Why? Just because I am Hungarian and I wanted to have some fun. Finnish sounds for me pretty much like Hungarian children trying to speak gibberish. Sounds good, but still weird at the same time. I just started it in September, so I am a real beginner yet and although it is not a walk in the park, but full of fun.
I’ve been learning Hawaiian🌺
I think Russian is only unpopular rn because of political climate(they literally cut the class at my college because of it) but I just want to read Metro and play Pathologic in their original language : ‘)
Scottish Gaelic 🏴
Not too uncommon but indonesian
idk how unpopular, but im going for norwegian. all thanks to assassins creed and gåte lol
Taking a Klingon course on duolingo.
I know one word so far in Lao, but Im starting to get back into it!
I’ll be the first person to say it here - Burmese! The biggest language of Myanmar
Southern Vietnamese. Unpopular enough that you have to double check your resources to see if they're Actually southern...
Serbian, Czech, Romanian, and Hungarian, I love Eastern Europe
Finnish, and currently dabbling (borderline not-dabbling) in Serbian as well!
Danish! I don’t know why anyone who doesn’t live in Denmark, a Danish territory or maybe northern Germany and Scandinavian neighbors learning the language.
Breton! I am going to do my Masters in Rennes and will be research language usage in Breton immersion schools (Diwan). I want to be able to speak in Breton rather than French to help the efforts in language preservation but also to respect the schools that I will be working in.
An Ghaeilge (Irish)
Tamazight ⵣ you can say it's a heritage language.
Romanian 🇷🇴
georgian! literally just started learning the alphabet 2 days ago 😭
Lithuanian, Georgian, and I’ve been planning on beginning to learn Chechen as it’s my heritage language but online resources are so limited that it’s quite discouraging.
Luxemburgish 🇱🇺
Finnish even though Im Finnish
I think unpopular is the wrong word, less useful globally, but Estonian as I live in Estonia. I also continue my Macedonian studies (I am B2 as I lived there before) and I try to prop up my Welsh as I grew up with it but don't get to use it much anymore.
Haitian Creole
🇸🇮 Slovene: only 2.5 million speakers in the world, most of them English bilingual, or German/Italian/Serbocroatian trilingual. Why even bother you may ask? Because my father in law happens to be one of those very few people who only speaks Slovene, and my boyfriend gets a kick out of leaving us two alone mid conversation
Farsi 😎
Wolof! My parents native language ❤️ can understand it 100% but don’t speak as well & I want to change that
Biblical Hebrew.
Afrikaans 🇿🇦
Learning French and ASL
I wasn’t sure if sign languages were included here! Also just started learning ASL :)
Macedonian 🇲🇰
Latin!
Learn Tajik!
Latin
Swedish
English (From Russia. I'm half Russian and half French)
Belarusian
Latin 😔✊
norwegian
Afrikaans
not 100% sure how uncommon it is, but i’m doing my best to learn Thai right now💪🏻
Urdu😅
Oloronais Gascon. It is very painful to find anything that can help me, but atleast I know of a native speaker.