Is there a word better than "exotic" to describe languages that are little known and little studied but have many speakers?

Question

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?

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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.)

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Exotic, obscure, esoteric and, even the best suggestion imo so far, lesser-known¹ all have one problem - they are intrinsically speaking from a western civilization perspective.

Objectively the language is isolated (have no proven connections to other languages), it is also an offspring of one of the world's primary language families.

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¹ lesser-know is the best since it does have an immediate connotation of: language we know little about. Exotic would be strange, unusual, rare. Obscure is not known and rare. Esoteric is rare and secretive. (Here I have emphasized unwanted connotations.)

Answer 3

They are sometimes called minority languages.

Answer 4

Maybe 'Obscure' would work in your context. Or perhaps 'esoteric'. An old and obscure language might be deemed 'archaic'.

Answer 5

The definition of a world language is well defined, so I postulated "non-world language" and found lots of hits. It's not a great phrase, but it's understood.

Answer 6

Ethnologue has a list of language statuses from "International", "The language is widely used between nations in trade, knowledge exchange, and international policy." down to "Extinct", which is "The language is no longer used and no one retains a sense of ethnic identity associated with the language."

The closest match would be one down from "International", which is "National":

The language is used in education, work, mass media, and government at the national level.

with a further description below it:

EGIDS 2 (Provincial) and EGIDS 1 (National) focus on the level of recognition and use given to the language by government. Beyond purely official use, however, the focus includes the widespread use of the language in media and the workplace at either the provincial (sub-national) or national levels. EGIDS 0 (International) is a category reserved for those few languages that are used as the means of communication in many countries for the purposes of diplomacy and international commerce. Because the Ethnologue organizes the language entries by country, EGIDS 1 (National) is the strongest vitality level that we report.

Given that "National" may not convey the nuance that it's not going to appear on Duolingo any time soon, perhaps "Non-international" would be a good adjective.