Three Non-European Languages For English Speakers

There's a trend for language learners in the English-speaking world to stick to Western European languages. Who can blame them? English shares a considerable amount of vocabulary with both romance and Germanic languages - this makes them a bit easier to pick up. It's no different than a Hindi speaker learning Bengali, Gujarati, or even Persian.

More adventurous learners have attempted branching out into East Asian languages like Japanese and Chinese, especially for those interested in anime or business.

But here are five more languages that can broaden your horizons:

1. Arabic -  Recently Arabic has grown in popularity due to political situations. It is a Semitic language with 280 million speakers. It's important to learn the formal variant (Modern Standard Arabic) and a dialect in order to get the full experience of the language. The vocabulary may be more difficult, unless you've already taken some Spanish, Urdu or Turkish, as they languages have many loan words from Arabic.
   
   The grammar isn't terrible, although it may take you time to get used to the word order. Every word stems from a three letter root word, making it easy to recognize new vocabulary. Verbs are categorized into 10-15 forms, in which the vowels, prefixes and suffixes are variables. But this also allows for a dynamic and productive language, as you can build and accumulate expressions rather quickly.
   
   If you've taken Germanic or Slavic language, you may recognize the case system. But there's only three cases: Nominative, accusative and genitive, and the forms are rather straightforward and simple.
2. Bengali - Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh, and is spoken in the West Bengal.
   
   Rabindarth Tagore, as well as many notable writers in Bengali. Cinema stars like Kishore Kumar were also from the region. This is a language highly saturated in culture and history.
   
   If you've ever taken an East Asian language, you shouldn't have a problem. The language itself fairly easy to pronounce. You'll find postpositions rather than prepositions, which resemble the use of particles in Japanese.
   
   Word order, like in Arabic, may be tricky. Verbs always appear at the end of the sentence, as they do in other Asian languages (and in German subordinate clauses). There are also four cases for nouns, and you have to take animacy and inanimacy into account when declining. In other words - is the object alive or not.
   
   Verbs also conjugate based on the gender of the subject, but don't worry too much. The verb forms, like Hindi, are fairly straightforward.


3. Swahili - As a lingua franca in the African continent, anywhere from 60 to 150 million people speak Swahili. You may find some words from English, German, Hindi and Arabic, but it's completely unrelated to these language families. Swahili is a Buntu language, which includes some 300 other languages.
   
   Unlike Arabic and Bengali, Swahili is written in Latin script, meaning you won't have to worry about learning a new alphabet. The grammar, however, may appear new.
   
   Nouns are categorized in some 16 classes. In English, for example, we discriminate between abstract and concrete nouns. Only in Swahili the system is more elaborate. Here, these classes are shown as prefixes which you add to the noun. Adjectives and numerals take the same prefixes as well.
   
   Swahili also uses prefixes when conjugating verbs - something it has in common with Arabic. 

All of these languages are bound to be a bit more difficult than Spanish or German. They aren't closely related to English, after all. But they provide a good challenge, cultural insight, and an opportunity to learn about people and histories you have never experienced.

Which non-European languages would make your list?