The Language Realm has been organizing a Language Talent Show with the title of ‘The most difficult language in the world’. About 6000 languages have applied as candidates for the title, but only 5 languages reached the finals. The jury of the Realm has to decide which one to give the title to according to the performance of the languages. They established the factors they will consider: writing system, grammar structure and vocabulary from an English-speaker point of view. 

The first language starts with the performance:

’My name is Language Tau. I am an East-Asian language. I am especially difficult because of my three independent writing systems —hiragana, katakana, and kanji — which each have a different alphabet. My other difficulty lies in my very complicated grammar because I am an agglutinative language. I have many levels of politeness that use distinct vocabulary and grammar. I am the most difficult language in the world and I enjoy support by 130 million people in my country.’

Here comes the second language’s performance:

’I am Language Eta. My country lies in North-Europe. I am also an agglutinative and synthetic language and in addition I have 15 grammatical cases, so the smallest change in the end of the word can significantly change its meaning. Both nouns and verbs have a large number of inflectional types. I have only 5 million supporters but I feel strong enough to win the competition.’

The third language comes up with the performance:

’ I am Language Lambda. I am immediately recognizable from my beautiful flowing script. My writing system is especially difficult because I don’t use vowels in my writings, only consonants that’s why it’s hard to understand which word is written for a learner. I am the official language of 26 states, but I have many dialects, so if a learner learns only one of them, he will not able to converse with the speakers of another dialect. I have a complex and unusual morphology. I construct words from a basic root.’

The fourth language presents this way:

‘My name is Language Sigma. I am a small language with only 10 million supporters, but I am very strong and resistant. I am circled by Slavic and Germanic languages but I am still alive and not influenced by them. I have the most difficult grammar rules in the world. I am an agglutinative language. I have about 26 cases. I have definite and indefinite conjugations which are unique among languages. My vocabulary is also particular because I don’t like using international words, I prefer to create a new word for them.’

And at the end, the fifth language comes:

‘I am Language Pi. I am a huge language. I am supported by about a fifth of the total world population. I have the most difficult writing system. The characters are like complex drawings and there are so many of them, that it takes almost infinite time to learn them. Each of them, represents a monosyllabic word or morpheme. My other speciality is that I use four main tones for characters. I have many homophones.’

The jury will make its decision based on the audience’s votes! What language would you vote for? Or do you have other candidates? Which languages are Tau, Eta, Lambda, Sigma and Pi in reality? 

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