The Language Genie

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:02]Hi, I'm Calvin Quimby.

[00:00:05]A magical genie has appeared before you granting you three wishes. But here's the catch, he's a language genie and he allows you to pick three languages that you can instantly learn without studying, speak as fluently as a native speaker, and never forget aspects of.

[00:00:19]What would you pick? There's obviously a couple of different ways that you could approach your selections. Do you wish to revive long extinct languages so you can be the guinea pig for phoneticists and build a corpus?

[00:00:30]Do you wish to expand your language skills, be a polyglot, and converse with speakers worldwide? Do you choose chaos?

[00:00:36]I'm going to put these on an alignment chart and then give you my personal selections. Do you wish to preserve and protect moribund languages or languages that recently became extinct? Well, this is lawful good. If you're picking languages such as Yeniseian, Saterland Frisian, or Caddo, then you're benefiting the diversity of humanity and protecting valuable linguistic treasure troves. It's like the story of Guillaume Ladue, who at the age of 12 learned of the last speaker of the Yurok language and sought to teach himself the language to the point that he became the main translator and instructor of the Yurok revival after the death of Marie Smith Jones in 2008. Perhaps you'd instead like to make contributions to historical linguistics by magically learning languages that will absolutely benefit academia and language nerds, but not really positively affect anybody in real life. Still, absolutely a great usage of your wish. I yearn for the rediscovery of the Tyrannica, 20 lost books, the entire Etruscan lexicon. If you have a genie giving you three languages that you can magically learn and you don't pick Etruscan, you better have something cooler or I think we will all be incredibly disappointed. I'll also accept a Teo-Cypriot Phrygian, honestly anything Paleo-Balkanic, Khiton, Peninsular Japonic, and various other languages in that known but poorly understood category. Now, we do run into a slight problem. How do you prove that you are speaking the true, proper, and original language to others, especially if you're translating words and fluently conversing in what is functionally unverifiable? So, we have our first genie caveat of the video. When your proficiency in a selected language cannot be verified by an extant speaker, it is known via the genie by all necessary parties and persons that you are indeed fluently proficient and 100% accurate in the language. This is neutral good as again you're clearly doing this for academic fame and advancement, but not really benefiting humanity in the present beyond academia.

[00:02:16]What if you waste the benefit to humanity of this gift just a little bit?

[00:02:19]You could learn documented ancient languages and just be the most proficient speaker among conferences of scholars. If you're picking Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Vulgar Latin, or the like, you're absolutely still doing a benefit to academia and filling in potholes in the understanding of those languages, but also, come on. You've been visited by a genie who grants you the magical power of three languages and you're picking Ancient Greek? All right, man. You do you. Chaotic good. Let's go back to being a benefit to society. Picking smaller and mid-size languages, not necessarily for being a polyglot, but for communicating with the group travel, cultural work, etc. is definitely lawful neutral. Languages in here are definitely less present worldwide, but would still allow you to do some pretty great things with your knowledge. If you picked Kabyle, Yucatec, Norwegian, languages like that with a solid speaker base, but no huge international presence, you could really do some good localized polyglotting and make good of your genie granted powers. Lawful neutral. You could also just be true neutral and be boring. Sure, you can pick Portuguese, Mandarin, Hindi, French, or German, but like, okay, man.

[00:03:18]Nothing really interesting happens in comparison to all the other alignments.

[00:03:22]The genie has granted you a gift and you chose the most basic I want to be a polyglot option. I honestly hold the most contempt for this choice, but it is also objectively true neutral. I think chaotic neutral will be selecting languages you want to learn, but are lower on your list and you're too lazy to put in effort the normal way. Let's be honest, most of us would do something like this. How many of you want to learn Basque?

[00:03:43]Noted. How many of you actually want to put in the effort to learn Basque and won't just jump at the first opportunity to magically learn it? Do you, dear viewer, have grammar books that sit on your shelf that you've opened a few times and maybe read the first chapter before shelving it and thinking, "I'll learn this later." I'm guilty of this, too. I would love to learn Faroese. Am I ever? Probably not. Welsh, Finnish, Mongolian. I know damn well that if a genie came out and offered me three languages, I would be tempted to go with languages I feel like learning, but don't feel like putting in the work for.

[00:04:11]That's lazy. That's chaotic neutral.

[00:04:13]Want to be evil?

[00:04:14]If you told the genie that you'd like to be fluent in Proto-Turkic, that's dope.

[00:04:18]That and any other proto-language is absolutely both lawful and good for academia. We would know so much more about PIE, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Sino-Tibetan, etc. if you chose to magically become a speaker. They're called proto-languages because they're bygone residual. We only have attestations through descent and daughter languages by definition. You could do so much for our understanding of the internal phylogenetics of language families, phonemic inventories, grammar, and most importantly, seeing what we've gotten wrong thus far. But also, picking a proto-language as one of your genie wishes is objectively diabolical. This also reiterates the previous caveat of all necessary parties know that what you say is accurate, and we also need to add another one. What happens if you pick a proposed proto-language and it turns out to be not real?

[00:05:00]Would you get a re-roll from the genie?

[00:05:02]Theoretically, you could just keep spamming re-rolls on controversial proposed proto-languages to rule out the false ones for academic purposes. So, to avert this, if you ask the genie to speak Proto-Nostratic and it is indeed a real language, well then you speak it.

[00:05:15]But if it's a false theory, the genie doesn't give you a re-roll and nothing happens. I think this is a fair caveat on picking proto-languages, which is lawful evil. If you pick anything in the Balkans that you do not have ethnic connections to, that's neutral evil.

[00:05:28]It's a genie, he's magical. If you pick Bulgarian, I mean, go ahead. That is one of the things you can do. Or picking Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. What a wonderful and chaotic usage of free will that exists as one of the choices you could have made. Next time just let somebody else use the genie. Lastly, chaotic evil. How could picking languages to instantly learn be both chaotic and evil? They're languages, the music of words. If you pick a conlang, you are chaotic evil. If a genie visits you with the ability to make you fluently speak any language and you pick Esperanto, you should be banned from genies and put on trial. No good comes to the world of humanity or academia from you picking a conlang and the only way you may benefit from the chaos is by picking a conlang that you were a friend made in order to fill in the gaps. Except, can the genie fill in the gaps for you if the language doesn't fully exist? The genie grants you the full knowledge of the language such that you're speaking it 100% accurately. I don't think by these rules the genie would be able to procedurally generate an unfinished conlang. But there are some other important loopholes with conlangs we need to cover. What if, in order to speak as fluently as a native speaker and know with 100% accuracy, you are required to use a sapiant paraphernalia in speaking the language? Take for example, K-pop.

[00:06:38]Should you pick to magically learn K-pop and not have a pangolin hat in your possessions, the genie would be required to give you the hat so that the language could be properly spoken to full accuracy. The genie would have to regenerate parts of the vocal tract if you had damage in articulator necessary for phoneme production. Let's say you lose the hats necessary for the production of hat names in K-pop. Would they instantly appear when needed? What if you don't have arms and choose sign language? You would need to be given working arms by the genie for the production of the language. Let's say that hypothetically I have a conlang where holding a billion dollars in my hands directly affects supersegmentals and my fluency of the language. I obviously don't have a billion dollars, so would the genie be required to spawn in a billion dollars for my language usage?

[00:07:19]What about procedural generation of languages in the future? I place this alongside incomplete conlangs. The genie will grant you perfect fluency in a language as it existed at some point in time prior to the making of the wish.

[00:07:31]So, what would I pick? I'm going with the neutral good pick of Etruscan, should be obvious. The lawful neutral pick of Sḵwxwú7mesh, and the chaotic neutral pick of Finnish, my favorite language which I know deep down I will probably never sit down and learn.

[00:07:44]So, thank you for watching this video and a special thank you to my Patreon supporters who help keep this channel alive. Special thank yous to John Costello, Katie, Addy, Andrew B, Eden, Cactus Creek, The Wub, Alexis, Elijah, and Faith the Fiocca. See you guys in the next video.

[00:08:01]I'm going with the neutral good pick of Etruscan, should be obvious.