Oshikwan-what?

This is my desk where I spend countless hours studying Oshikwanyama.

There are many contenders for the title of most difficult language on Earth to learn. I have heard Chinese, English, even Navajo. I would like to nominate a new candidate--Oshikwanyama. This obscure African language doesn't have tones, clicks, even progressive tenses. Despite lacking the indicators of linguistics difficulty that are familiar to most Westerners, Oshikwanyama has one curveball--noun classes.

I am no linguist, but noun classes and their spawn, prefixes and concords, are the most mind boggling verbal constructions ever conceived. In English, to make a word plural, I merely add an "s" or "es" to the end. In Oshikwanyama, each noun falls into one of nine noun classes. Making the noun plural or singular depends on the noun class. For example, olukaku is shoe, but shoes is omalukaku. This is noun class two. Ear is okutwi, and ears is omakutwi. This is noun class nine. You may have noticed, as I did in my first 30 seconds of studying this language, that these words all start with O's and are around five syllables long.



This is a story from my Oshikwanyama book. It's about a cow stuck in the road.

Memorizing which class every noun belongs to is overwhelming. But Oshikwanyama is not done stomping on our minds yet. Many other parts of the language rovolve around which class the noun in question belongs to. For instance, I want to say "I saw two hyenas." "I saw" is "onda mona." "Two" is "mbali," and "hyena" is "olumbungu." But I can't say "Onda mona mbali olumbungus." No no, I must first scamper to my grammar book, look up plural prefix for noun class six (oma-). Then flip 24 pages back to find the numerical prefix for noun class six "a" to attach to my number. I can finally say "onda mona omambungu ambali." But what if I want to say "I saw two big hyenas"? Then I need to turn back to the end of my book to find the adjective prefix for noun class six (ma-) and tack it to the base word for "big," -nene. So my sentence now reads "onda mona omambungu ambali manene." I must also sprint along this scavenger hunt every time I want to use a possesive pronoun like "my" or a demonstrative pronoun like "those."

If you're exhausted, I don't blame you. I am too. So I will briefly describe the prefix's equally confusing cousin the concord. If "concord" only makes you think of supersonic jets or New Zealand, it's because English doesn't have concords. In English, to describe when an action takes place, I change the verb--I walked, I walk, I will walk, etc. To make the subject agree with the verb, I change the verb--I eat, she eats, etc. To describe the tense and to make the subject and verb agree in Oshikwanyama, I need a concord. To say "I love to eat traditional millet porridge," I say "ame (me) ondi (I in the present) hole (love) okulya (to eat) oshifima (traditional millet porridge)." In this sentence, "ondi" is the concord. This doesn't seem too confusing on the surface. But our friend the noun class also has its teeth in concords. Every noun class has six concords, one each for the past, present and future--for all active verbs--like "run" and "break." And three more concords for stative verbs, verbs like "be" or "feel." That brings us to a total of 54 possible concords all of which start with "O."


This a concord chart for noun class one. Yep, just one noun class.

Despite being daunting, I love Oshikwanyama. It occasionally surprises me with bursts of simplicity. "Now" is "paife." "Right now" is "paife paife." More than I love demanding my students study their pronouns now-now, I love the response of my neighbors and colleauges whenever I attempt to speak. Regardless of how much I butcher their lanuage, they cheer and clap like I recited the whole of Hamlet while standing on my head,

There are fewer speakers of Oshikwanyama worldwide than there are Mandarin speakers in one Chinese province. Why bother learning a language spoken by so few? Because if I can master noun classes, I can talk with my neighbors. I can ask them about their goats and how many cows they plan to slaughter their daughter's wedding. In short, I can be a real Oshikwanyaman. Provided I can evade the two big hyenas for the next two years.


My Oshikwanyama book. This is the one they give to first graders. Also still can't figure out how to rotate pictures, sorry.