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

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.)


Solution 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.

Solution 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.


1lesser-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.)

Solution 3:

They are sometimes called minority languages.