I hate this kind of topic. First off, everyone always sticks to European languages, maybe Arabic or Japanese. Does anyone here know much of the indigenous languages of the Americas, Africa, Australia, and places like the Caucasus? Native American languages at first glance appear very very hard. Then, secondly, everyone has a tendency to tout their own language's difficulty all the time. We all know how simple English is; there's no need to rub it in! But it's all the same; no one is less smart because of what language they instinctively know.
Indeed. What I would call complicated grammar is when it has many features, and not simple ones. Then, I say: English is simple because you almost don't change a verb or a noun. The tenses are expressed by auxiliaries, and they tend to have only 1 meaning. Most things about conjunctions are simple. For instance you only use ''than'' to express all kind of comparatives, while in other languages such as Polish you have 2 ''than'' depending on if you compare clauses or not.
I will add a few ones. Navajo (Diné Bizaad). It has a complicated phonetic system, it has 33 consonants (and not the usual ones), it has 4 vowels, and each one can be short or long, nasalized or non-nasalized, and it has 2 tones. Navajo uses a lot of prefixes. But I think the hardest part of Navajo is its verbal system, in Navajo the verbal system does many many things including adjectives function! it's the key in a sentence. Its verbs change so much and take so many things that it takes quite a lot to use them properly.
I would like to add the fictional language Na'vi. Surely its creator achieved his goal, creating a weird and complicated language. The most difficult part in Na'vi is its verbal system, it uses infixes, which is really weird for most languages, and besides that, they express many things like if you are happy or not about doing the action. Nouns are declined for case in a tripartite system. In a tripartite system, there are distinct forms for the object of a clause, as in "he kicks the ball"; the agent of a transitive clause which has such an object, as in "he kicks the ball"; and the subject of an intransitive clause, which does not have an object, as in "he runs". An object is marked with the suffix -ti, and an agent with the ergative suffix -l, while an intransitive subject has no case suffix. The use of such case forms leaves the of Na’vi largely free. And one of weird features is that it has 4 numbers, singular, plural, dual and trial. You use dual if you are counting pairs of something, shoes, socks, eyes, etc but you use trial for counting 3 things.
The verbs are conjugated for aspect and tense but not for person, for example you have:
Taron =to hunt
Tìmaron =just hunted (recent past)
Tayaron = will hunt
Teraron = hunting
Tolaron= hunted
Tìrmaron= was just hunting
And you have many infixes more for many more things. It has a complicated system.
And the final language I add is a south Caucasian language; Georgian. It has a kinda complicated phonetic system. It uses many suffixes and prefixes to give the verb the right meaning, it has 7 cases, nominative, ergative, dative, genitive, instrumental, adverbial and vocative. Georgian does not distinguish between adjectives and nouns but modifiers from modified by relative position in the nominal clause. Georgian uses a lot of postpositions, But once again, the worst part of Georgian is its verbal system, it is extremely complicated.
Georgian verbal system has 4 classes, transitive verbs, intransitive verbs, medial verbs and indirect verbs. There are
many irregular verbs in Georgian. Each verbal class uses a different conjugation. One also could add the ''stative verbs'' not exactly a class, its conjugation is similar to the indirect verbs, but it has its own functions. To make it worse, many verbs in Georgian do not seem to conform to the conjugation of one class. There is also the ''preverb'', they have distinctional meanings, most of the time it is totally arbitrary which verb takes which preverb.
The functions a verb can take in Georgian are: Present indicative, imperfect, present subjunctive, future indicative, conditional, future subjunctive, aorist indicative, opative, perfect, pluperfect, perfect subjunctive. And
each one of them is different in conjugation for 1 of the 4 classes of verbs, there are many rules to those, and many irregular verbs. Georgian has no articles or gender, even the pronouns are neutral gender.
To me, Georgian has been the most complicated in grammar I have seen so far. Perhaps someone who knows Tamil and knows Georgian can make a comparison to know which one is more complex.
