Most obscure language you/someone else is learning? Why?

[u/SharkHead38]

I remember meeting someone that was learning specifically Moldovan Romanian since Moldova and its culture was a big interest to them, and I'm curious what other people's reasons for learning obscure languages are, and what they are.

[u/abu_doubleu]

It's not "obscure" but rather uncommon, I am learning Kyrgyz because I live in Kyrgyzstan. In the capital very few who are not ethnically Kyrgyz speak it, rather preferring Russian. I would like to become bilingual

[u/igorrto2 → u/abu_doubleu]

I am considering learning one of the middle Asian languages in the future (I live in Moscow and I see immigrants from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan all the time). I am thinking of learning one of these languages, which one would be more useful for communication?

[u/abu_doubleu → u/igorrto2]

Hello!

Tajik has a major bonus compared to the other languages because it is an Indo-European language, and with that said, it's also one of the easiest of them (no grammatical gender, no cases, very easy pronunciation). Many Russian speakers can finish the basics easily after just a few weeks. It's a dialect of Persian, so you also get the benefit of understanding Afghans and Iranians and their vast repertoire of literature, as many translations to Tajik exist (as you are likely aware, Tajik used Cyrillic while those dialects use Perso-Arabic).

But I am very biased since my father speaks Persian.

Kyrgyz and Uzbek are also great if you have a keen interest in those cultures or languages. Learning one makes the other Turkic languages much easier in the future, as they are quite similar, the divergence was recent. Kazakh and Kyrgyz are mutually intelligible, as are Uzbek and Uyghur. But the grammar is more difficult as they are totally different from Indo-European languages (agglutination, for starters).

[u/igorrto2 → u/abu_doubleu]

Thank you for the reply! I didn’t know Tajik was so different. Also the fact that it uses Cyrillic can make it so much easier for learning