Christmas Specials | Difficult languages

In search of the world’s hardest language

Illustration by W. Vasconcelos

|New York |10 min read

Illustration by W. Vasconcelos

This article appeared in the Christmas Specials section of the print edition under the headline “Tongue twisters”

Progress and its perils

From the December 19th 2009 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

A typographic illustration built with the words of the year.

The non-English words that defined 2025

Eight terms from other languages sum up the year’s biggest stories

The year as told through illustrations

Our art department looked back to highlight some of their favourites from the past year


The Economist news quiz—Christmas special

Fifty questions to test your knowledge of the year’s events


Our Christmas double issue

A guide to our special edition and its cover

How magicians stay relevant in the age of AI

As TikTok dulls the world’s sense of wonder, conjurors are adapting

The rise and fall and rebirth of lapsang souchong

A smoky tea is fading in the West; in China, a better version survives