What's the most exotic language you speak or have studied?

dia dhiobh,mo chairde nua.
that's hello,my new friends in gaelic,the national language of ireland,the place where i'm from.now you may ask why that's so exotic for an irish boy to be in awe of irish,but,you see, i just finished doing my final school exams and i was very happy with my irish papers!so i'll speak very well of mo theanga (language) in the future.
now,irish is very difficult to learn as it is only spoken fluently in small parts of the country and there are only 4,000,000 ppl here anyway and only about 100,000 can speak it properly.and THEY make us learn it from the age of 5!
so if you wanna impress a few irish people next st. patrick's day,here you go:
Is mise "x"/"x" is ainm dom- i'm called "x"
cad is ainm duit? - what is your name?
conas atá tú?/cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?- how are you?
tá mé go maith,go raibh maith agat! - i'm well,thank you
also,please stop saying "eirinn go brea" to us.for a change try "eire abú!"
and the language is called irish,not gaelic.for some reason everyone else in the world calls it gaelic.
the lord's prayer as gaelge is:
Ár nAthair
Ár n-Athair atá ar neamh,
Go naofar d'ainim,
Go dtaga do ríocht,
Go ndéantar do thoil ar an talamh mar a dhéantar ar neamh.
Ár n-arán laethúil tabhair dúinn inniu,
agus maith dúinn ár bhfiacha
mar a mhaithimidne dár bhféichiúna féin
Ach ná lig sinn i gcathú,
ach saor sinn ó olc,
Amen.

finally,i can also speak french and german (which i plan to study in college),but nothing as near as exotic as all the languages you speak.so does irish count as exotic?,
slán liabh

oh I only learn english and german ... which aren't exotic but I think that my language may be exotic for you --> polish... heh ... have someone learned this language?

Not me. I heard Polish is a very tough language to learn.

And welcome to A2K groszi!

You bring up a fascinating topic there, Rick. But in all fairness, posters should probably be warned that gnagnagna, whether the Dutch variety or any of the others, is a language (or should we say dialect?) that is rarely used, limited as its use is traditionally to certain times and occasions, awareness of which has been passed on in discretion through generations. A further caveat should probably be mentioned in how it can only be come across in an archipelago of relatively obscure settlements, spanning roughly from Mirzanije in the west to Przepice in the northeast.

I myself speak little of gnagnagna, though many of the foes I have encountered on my path through life seemed to have a fairly firm grasp of it, and I could usually discern what the intention behind their utterances was.

Well my grandparents used to use a lot of gnagnagna (they were from Emmetyaan), and they learned me some. What I notice however is that people here in Eindhoven don't appreciate it when I use gnagnagna (mostly when there's a huge line in the supermarket): they immediately start yelling 'learn some real Dutch' and they look at me in shock (you can see them thinking 'that was real gnagnagna'). So I minimize it as much as possible. But I've heard that there's a bigger tolerance concerning the use of gnagnagna in the Randstad; is that true?

It is , never heard before of gnagnagna.

No, it's not; in fact, I myself was long prejudiced in thinking that the use of gnagnagna was significantly more predominant in the outer-lying regions of the Netherlands and neighbouring countries than it was in the more metropolitan environments I grew up in.

This brings us to an interesting thing to note about gnagnagna, namely its association with a certain degree of backwardness and outmodedness - hence the obvious association with, for example, the south of the country. More common still, however, is the association of its use, mostly by those who are not themselves well-versed in its intricacies and subtleties, with nefarious intentions of all kinds.

I myself admit to feeling quite ill at ease when, for example in the situation you sketch, where one is standing in a long line in the supermarket, one notices someone standing aside engaging in gnagnagna. However, I have come to accept that my feelings are probably an expression of an instinctive intolerance of difference and have worked hard to overcome it.

I thought for quite some time that 'gnagnagna' was a Dutch in-joke. Can you give a sentence in both dialects so that we can see the difference?

Drom, you have heard of gnagnagna before? How very interesting! Although I guess I shouldn't be surprised, considering your knowledge of obscure languages both real and invented ...

Did you know that famous speakers of gnagnagna have included fictitious characters like Obelix?

Could it be that Eindhoven has banned gnagnagna when it became a fullgrown city? I wonder. Just two days ago I overheard a conversation between my sister and her boyfriend, who's from a village nearby, and they were discussing how one of their friends had been severely beaten by two guys after overusing gnagnagna in front of them (which is very stupid, but this friend obviously didn't realize that). Now my sister's boyfriend believed that the use of gnagnagna wasn't such a big deal; that we, as Dutchmen, should express a more tolerant attitude towards the use of gnagnagna. My sister however believed gnagnagna is only a sign of your 'backwardness' (as you point out), and actually QUIT the conversation. It could be that the overall attitude at the Brabant countryside is more tolerant than it is in the Brabant cities.

I had never heard of it, either.

In Spanish it would be spelled "ñañaña".

Rick, some good points.

fbaezer, yes, its quite the global phenomenon, in its own rarely explicited way.

I had heard three Dutchmen talk about it before, but I knew that they were joking. And, when you two mentioned it, I wanted to know what the joke was precisely, and I found that it was actually an 'Unmutsäußerung,' (like a 'language of displeasure') used by one of the characters.

I wish that I could speak gnagnagna .

Uhm, could Bulgarian and Armenian be regarded as exotic?

Of course Maggie. I've been to Bulgaria last year. Ehm let me see, what do I still remember? Ehh... 'Merci'. 'Da' (very useful :wink: ). 'Leke nosh' (I hope you understand what I mean). And than some other words... which I don't remember at the moment. OK, four Bulgarian words. Hmmm, maybe it's time to spend more attention on the language when I'm visiting a country :wink:

LOL:))) Very good. Only "merci" is being used both in Bulgarian and Armenian, although it comes from French as we all know. And it's actually "Leka nosht", but hey, you're doing great! My Hebrew is consisting even of less words... Uhm... I know "Shalom", but everyone knows that, so it doesn't count. "Meshugge", but you say that in German too... Ehm... Okay, i got two more! "Mazel", this is luck, and "Motek" is... sweet? Ohhh, look, we just make a deal - i'll teach you more Bulgarian if you pass some Jewish words over here:)))).

What about the language of thought? I wonder if that counts. It is certainly exotic enough that others rarely understand it.

Yeah, and what about the body language? I know a few people that have particular problems with it.)))

I would love to, only... I'm not Jewish. Although I do know some words: mazzel tov, broge, bevakasha (if I'm correct), ken, chaver - of course these are both Yiddish and Hebrew words. Just like shalom is Hebrew and meshugge is Yiddish, bevakasha, ken and chaver are Hebrew, broge is Yiddish, and mazzel tov - for what I know - exist both in Hebrew and in Yiddish.