The hardest language in the world?

An interesting discussion. It is of course not possible to say just which language is the most complex, and therefore the hardest to learn, since one's perception is inevitably distorted by the distance of one's own mother-tongue from the language of study.

Nevertheless, specialists in the field of Comparative Linguistics would identify a number of areas of the world where spectacular language density occurs. That is, the number of languages in a relatively small area is high, the number of speakers of each language is low and the mutual intelligibility between geographically close languages is much lower than logically might be expected.

The highest language densities occur in:
1. Papua New Guinea - the mountainous island to the north of Australia.
2. The Caucasus - the mountainous area between the Black and Caspian Seas, between Europe and Asia, where the huge number of consonants and consonant clusters cause especial problems for non-native speakers.
And to this can be added
3. Australia - where the huge number of Aboriginal Languages have so far mostly defied classification.

Those wishing to explore further can look at Wikipedia, where sensible overviews and links to more in-depth references are given:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papuan_languages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_languages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austral...ginal_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_families

Rob

Jam it back in, in the dark.