This is a fascinating article in Foreign Policy of all places, that reports on a researcher who coded in 21 different factors releating to 239 different languages to come up with what he calls the "weirdest" language spoken in the world. Are you one of the 6,000 people in the world who speaks Chalcatongo Mixtec? Congratulations! You speak the world's weirdest language. That's what Tyler Schnoebelen and the researchers at Idibon, a natural language processing company, found when they statistically compared 239 languages to see how like or unlike they were to one another. Using the World Atlas of Language Structures, Idibon coded the languages for 21 characteristics including, for example, how subjects, objects, and verbs are ordered in a sentence, or how a language makes clear that a sentence is a question. When Schnoebelen ran the numbers, Chalcatongo Mixtec, spoken in Oaxaca, Mexico, was the least like the majority of the world's other languages. And it is pretty unusual:...(Read Full Post)