Czech

Czech is the language of Prague, Kafka, Kundera, Havel and the best beer per capita on earth — ten million speakers packed into a country the size of South Carolina, with a literary tradition that has spent four centuries treating the language itself as a national cause. It was very nearly lost: after 1620 German replaced it in every school and office, and the Czech you hear today is the result of a deliberate nineteenth-century revival that rebuilt the written language almost from scratch.

For English speakers, Czech is genuinely demanding, and it's worth knowing that going in. Seven cases, three genders, verb aspect that pairs nearly every verb with a twin, and consonant clusters that make a word like čtvrtek quite the initiation. The compensation is that the spelling is ruthlessly phonetic — learn the diacritics once and you can pronounce anything you read — and Czechs are visibly delighted by anyone who tries, because almost no foreigner does. Even a handful of phrases changes how you're treated in Prague.