I'm looking for a word to describe languages which are not easy to study or find books about in Western Europe or North America.
On example language, which I'm currently immersed in, is Georgian, with no major related languages and its own alphabet, most people have never heard of it though it is a national language with millions of speakers.
I'm looking for a word that can work OK everywhere, even in the countries where the languages are not in the minority. Georgians for instance are aware most people might not have heard of their language but it's certainly not a minority language in Georgia.
Is "exotic* the right word to use or is there a better one?
Here's some other languages I think of in the same way:
Albanian, Armenian, Burmese, Hungarian, Khmer, Kurdish, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mongolian, Persian, Sinhala, Tibetan.
(I used the tag "single word requests" because I couldn't find a better one. It doesn't have to be a single word.)
Best Answer
You might just say lesser-known. Words like exotic and arcane can be construed as mildly offensive.
Edit: For what it's worth, a quick search reveals that this is actually a category used by the US Library of Congress. I also ran into it on McGill's linguistics website.