My dog learned 81 languages on the Internet

Eighty-one Tongues

My dog told me he had learned eighty-one languages on the internet.

They were Abkhaz, Acehnese, Acholi, Afar, Afrikaans, Albanian, Alur, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Avar, Awadhi, Aymara, Azerbaijani, Balinese, Baluchi, Bambara, Baoulé, Bashkir, Basque, Batak Belarusian, Bemba, Bengali, Betawi, Bhojpuri, Bikol, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Buryat, Cantonese, Catalan, Cebuano, Chamorro, Chechen, Chichewa, Chinese, Chuukese, Chuvash, Corsican, Crimean Tatar, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dhivehi, Dinka, Dogri, Dombe, Dutch, Dyula, Dzongkha, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Ewe, Faroese, Fijian, Filipino, Finnish, Fon, French, Frisian, Friulian, Fulani, Ga, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Guarani, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hakha Chin, Hausa, Hawaiian and Hebrew.

He admitted he still had much to learn. Still, it’s impressive, I said. What motived you? The desire, he said, to speak to all living things, whether creature or plant, chancellor or fern. Snails, rocks, tractors, clouds. Of course, what he really said was, Bark bark bark bark! because though I did high school French and a bit of Spanish in college, I never learned language beyond that of my own people, an insular and trepidatious tribe who cleaved to their tongue as if it were both a small fire and the inside of a tank.