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Update | Putonghua rated more 'weird' than Cantonese in language study

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The 25 "weirdest languages of the world" are, in North America: Chalcatongo Mixtec,Choctaw, Mesa Grande Diegueño, Kutenai, and Zoque; in South America:Paumarí and Trumai; in Australia/Oceania: Pitjantjatjara and Lavukaleve; in Africa: Harar Oromo, Iraqw, Kongo, Mumuye, Ju|’hoan, and Khoekhoe; in Asia: Nenets, Eastern Armenian, Abkhaz, Ladakhi, and Putonghua; and in Europe: German, Dutch, Norwegian, Czech and Spanish.

Putonghua ranks among the top 25 "weirdest“ languages in the world, while Cantonese was among the 10 least "weirdest", according to linguistic findings from a US database.

The research, published by San Francisco-based consulting firm Idibon, may come as a surprise to language learners who struggle with the nine tones of Cantonese, compared with four for Putonghua.

"Weirdness" was determined by comparing the linguistic features of 239 languages, including word order, types of sounds and ways of forming negation, according to Tyler Schnoebelen, co-founder and senior data scientist at Idibon, which helps businesses make sense of language data.

By employing a “non-English-centric approach”, the study evaluates “weirdness” of a certain language not by how different it is compared with English, but by how unusual its features are from all the other languages in the project, said Schnoebelen, who holds a doctorate from Stanford.

The language that was most different, or the “weirdest”, was Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken by 6,000 people in Oaxaca, Mexico. Hindi, one of the official languages of India, was rated the least “weird”, or the most ”non-deviant“ language in the newly released Language Weirdness Index. 

English ranks No 33 on the index.

“Part of this is to say that some of the languages you take for granted as being normal, like English, Spanish or German, consistently do things different,” said Schnoebelen.

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