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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stoggler" data-source="post: 1725526" data-attributes="member: 75203">I doubt if any (serious) linguist has said that, as it's not possible to quantify complicatedness or otherwise in a particular language.All natural human languages are highly complex constructs that take years to master, regardless of the language involved.  While some languages may on the face of it appear to have a regular and fairly straightforward morphological system, they usually have complex sound systems, or many strange idiomatic expressions, or complex hierarchical systems.Perhaps the only exception to that would be young creoles, but a creole is a language in development and the speakers naturally add complexities to it so that within a generation or two it is attaining the complexities of a full natural language.For learners of new languages, how difficult a langauge is to learn is a matter of what the learner's frame of reference is - if an English-speaker is learning a foreign language, they would find French and Spanish considerably easier than Finnish or Turkish due to the morphological, lexical, and to a lesser-degree syntactic similarities.  An Azeri-speaker meanwhile would find Turkish much much easier than French for similar reasons.If you've had a stab at Finnish and think that's difficult, why not have a look at some native North American languages - now they have grammatical systems that make the head hurt if you're unfamiliar with the concepts!  <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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