Languages you may not have heard of that had starring roles in TV shows

07 April 2019 - 00:00 By Matthew Vice

After reading that Giyani: Land of Blood was the first TV drama series in the Xitsonga tongue, I wondered which other minor languages have had TV shows or movies.
BELARUSIAN
According to Wikipedia, this language is third from the bottom in terms of percentage of speakers worldwide. I couldn't find any TV shows.
If you haven't heard of The Theorists debacle, in which an unauthorised Belarusian clone of The Big Bang Theory caused a stink, look it up.
Some of the episodes have even been uploaded to YouTube. 
I found five movies in Belarusian, including a drama called The New World (2015) and an animated feature called Priklyucheniya Nesterki (2013), which looks like it was created by people who were high as balls.
MANX
Hands up, how many of you even knew there was a language called Manx?
It's part of the Celtic language family and was spoken only on the Isle of Man, and although it's considered extinct, there's enough written and recorded material of the language that it's essentially preserved and the subject of revival efforts.
A few films have been made on the Isle of Man, but the only one I could confirm to be in Manx was Solace in Wicca (2013), a film set in 1617 about a woman accused of witchcraft and subjected to all kinds of horrible things.
MAYAN
When you combine all of the Mayan languages together the number of speakers is roughly 6 million, nowhere near as small as some other numbers, but when you take each language as distinct, these numbers drop significantly.
Also, there have been few TV shows or movies to feature Mayan languages, but the mere handful include Ixcanul (2015), a drama in the Kaqchikel language; and Chac: Dios de la Lluvia, which features the Tzotzil and Yukatek languages...

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