Last summer, I was looking to expand my collection of international music. In true completionist fashion, I tried to find a playlist with one song from every country. But in my search, I found something even better: what I believe to be the most diverse and comprehensive playlist of global music in existence.

I discovered this playlist in a comment on this thread in the Spotify subreddit. At the time of publication, the playlist, which you can find below, consists of 463 songs, each in a different language or dialect, with a runtime of 29 hours and 23 minutes. It's called 🇦🇲🇲🇹🇬🇱Multilingualism🇱🇹🇲🇳🇬🇷, and it has been continually updated by Spotify user Ingvar14 since October 2022.

I spent over a week listening to every song in Multilingualism. It was a transformative journey, during which I discovered entirely new genres of music in languages I'd never even heard of with lyrics I didn't understand in the slightest. I highly recommend listening to the entire playlist, which Ingvar14 has graciously coupled with a spreadsheet listing every song and its language, plus associated geographical and linguistic information.

But if you're hesitant to jump into what could very well be a month's worth of listening, let me offer you a shortlist of 10 songs from Multilingualism that you need to hear right now. Not all of them are my personal favorites—I'll drop those in the postscript—but I think they're a good representation of the incredible diversity and surprise this playlist has to offer.

So without further ado: Multilingualism, abridged. You've never heard anything like this in your life.

1. Andachan, Jens Kleist, Heidinnguaq Jensen — "1011" (Greenlandic)

I went through Ingvar14's playlist in alphabetical order, so "1011" was the very first song I listened to. It's also my favorite song on the entire thing.

"1011" is a certified banger, featuring Jens Kleist rapping over synths from Greenlandic EDM trailblazer Andachan with a chorus sung by Heidinnguaq Jensen. I had never heard of the Greenlandic rap scene before—after all, Greenland has fewer than 60,000 people and a very countable number of rappers—but I legitimately bumped this track enough for it to land on my top five most-listened songs of 2024.

I don't know why this song is called "1011" or what any of the lyrics mean—I tried plugging them into Google Translate but couldn't get anything definitive. Greenlandic is closely related to Canada's Inuit languages, but it has lacked translation capacity for a while. Yet there's an entire event dedicated to songs in these languages: the annual Arctic Sounds festival in Andachan's hometown of Sisimiut. Sometimes you don't need a translation. All you need is a vibe. And this song is a vibe and a half.

2. Alsarah & The Nubatones — "Habibi Taal" (Sudanese Arabic)

For the next song on this list, we go somewhere very different from Greenland: Sudan. This is "Habibi Taal," a 2005 release from the Sudanese-American band Alsarah & The Nubatones.

"Habibi Taal" is a spin on a classic love song. According to Alsarah, the band's frontwoman, the song is inspired by aghani al-banat, a genre of Sudanese music traditionally performed by women, and sounds from the 1960s and 1970s. Alsarah & The Nubatones hail not from Sudan, though, but from Brooklyn: Alsarah was born in Khartoum to human rights activists who fled Sudan's 1989 coup and Yemen's 1994 civil war before settling in the United States.

"Habibi Taal" is the opener to Alsarah & The Nubatones' debut album Silt, which also draws from themes of displacement. In the 1960s, the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile forced many people in southern Egypt and northern Sudan to leave their homes, and these communities created "Songs of Return" to express nostalgia for this region of Nubia. Silt is very much influenced by these songs, even as the band's members now live thousands of miles away from Nubia.

You can hear the soul in "Habibi Taal," with a groove punctuated by hand-claps and a finale that whips itself up into a frenzy. It's a definite change of pace (and change of scenery) from "1011," and it's just one of 11 Arabic songs on the Multilingualism playlist! My other favorites from the list: "Kalam" by Mashrou' Leila, in Levantine Arabic; "Alf W Meya" by Nawal Al Zoghbi, in Lebanese Arabic; and "Alo Aleky" by Mohammed Saeed, in Egyptian Arabic.

3. Narek Mets Hayq, Gevorg Martirosyan — "Du Es Du" (Armenian)

Don't mistake the Cuban-style piano-and-percussion intro of "Du Es Du" for something Latin American. This song is straight out of the Caucasus.

"Du Es Du" is an effortless blend of Latin-style beats, Armenian melodies, and bars from rapper Narek Mets Hayq, with a passionate chorus sung by Gevorg Martirosyan. I don't really know what either of them are saying, but what I do know is that this combination of styles somehow manages to work really well.¹

As you might be able to tell already, a lot of what I'm going for with this playlist is songs in languages you probably haven't listened to, paired with musical styles you'd never expect. That brings me to my next pick…

4. Te Ruki — "Te Nohi" (Tuamotuan)

Have you ever listened to Polynesian death metal? I didn't think so. But that changes today.

When you think of Polynesia, you probably think of ukuleles and calming island breezes. The French Polynesian band Te Ruki makes music that sounds like the exact opposite. Founded in 2017, their name means "The Night" in the Tuamotuan language. They hail from the Tuamotu Archipelago, a chain of atolls northeast of Tahiti that stretches across a swath of ocean the size of Western Europe. Tuamotuan has just a few thousand speakers, but Te Ruki carries the torch for the language's black metal scene.

"Te Nohi"—meaning "The Eye"—is simply an incredible listen. With pounding guitars, drums, and screams, the song builds up to the repeated chant "A tu i ana / A hipa i aku nei," which translates to "Praise him / Look at me."² I can't believe "Te Nohi" exists, but I'm glad it does. What a world we live in.

5. Hetty Koes Endang — "Emut Bae" (Sundanese)

Hetty Koes Endang is one of the most important figures in Indonesian music, owing in part to how prolific she has been as an artist: she has recorded over 150 albums over a musical career spanning more than half a century. Hailing from the western part of the island of Java, she sings in Sundanese, the native language of that region.

Endang is perhaps most famous for her work in keroncong, a uniquely Indonesian genre with origins in Portuguese music. Portuguese slaves were freed in what is now Indonesia beginning in the 16th century, and they adapted their early versions of ukuleles to traditional melodies. The name keroncong is an onomatopoeia, coming from the sound one of these ukulele-like instruments might make when strummed. The blend of traditions that created keroncong survived throughout the centuries to become popular across Indonesia.

"Emut Bae," however, is not a keroncong song; instead, it has a more classic Sunda pop feel. In fact, it's the most popular song on Endang's 1990 album Sunda Reggae Mix - Vol 1. With a pulsating sense of melancholy, it adapts winds and guitar to the Sundanese sound. And at 67, Endang is still making music—after all, she once recorded three albums in four days, all in different genres. Truly a one-of-a-kind artist.

By the way, if you haven't gotten your fix of Indonesian cultural fusion, check out "Kali Merah Athena," also from Multilingualism. It's another mix of pop with traditional Indonesian melodies, but the entire song is about the singer and his lover arriving in Athens. The song's title is literally "Good Morning Athens," not in Indonesian but in Greek! You can find it here.

6. Renata Flores — "Tijeras" (Quechua)

And to yank you back to the modern era just as quickly as we departed for the 90s, let me introduce you to some Quechua trap music.

Quechua is a collection of indigenous languages spoken by around 7 million people across the Andes. The Quechuan languages were the primary tongues of the Inca Empire, and they have official status in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador today. The Peruvian highlands aren't an obvious landing point for trap music, but in a mere 20 years the genre found its way from Atlanta to Ayacucho, where Renata Flores got her start.

That's not to say that she got her start in the trap game—far from it. She first went viral in 2015 for her Quechua cover of Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel," recorded when she was just 14. By singing in Quechua, she aimed to counter the narrative of the language being associated with poverty and shame, and to revitalize its use among young people. Quechua was highly stigmatized during Peru's late 20th-century civil war, in which speakers of the language were disproportionately targeted and terrorized. Inspired by the political and cultural context of being indigenous and speaking Quechua in the modern day, Flores turned to trap to write her own music.

"Tijeras," meaning "Scissors" in Spanish, was one of Flores' first forays into trap with a political message. It's the most popular song from her debut album Isqun, which according to Flores traces the history of the Andean woman. "Tijeras" addresses the subject of violence against women in Peru, and its title references the danza de tijeras, a traditional ritual dance. Musically, "Tijeras" combines trap beats with instrumentation one might find accompanying this dance, prominently featuring a violin riff. Absolutely a must-listen.

7. Riikka — "Ievan polkka" (Savo Finnish)

And now, I present to you Finland's answer to "Cotton-Eyed Joe."³

"Ievan polkka" is a song with a storied history. It originates in a polka tune from the region of North Karelia, in eastern Finland. The version of the song you hear today is a 2019 remix of that tune, but its dance beat remains irresistible. The lyrics were actually written in 1928 by Eino Kettunen, and they tell the story of a woman named Ieva who sneaks out to dance with the singer.

The song disappeared for a few decades. Then came a television appearance, a viral Russian LiveJournal meme, and a blind Turkish street musician.

All of this made "Ievan polkka" arguably the most well-known Finnish song outside Finland. In 1996, the Finnish folk quartet Loituma went on national television to perform an a cappella rendition of "Ievan polkka," which brought the song back into the public consciousness. Ten years later, a Russian user on the social network LiveJournal⁴ created a 27-second loop video of Orihime Inoue, a character from the Japanese anime Bleach, twirling a green onion,⁵ which was scored to Loituma's "Ievan polkka." This video became known as "Loituma Girl," and it got so big online that it even ended up in a BBC radio segment.

But "Ievan polkka" refused to be consigned to the status of a mid-2000s Russian ringtone craze. In 2020, a Turkish street musician named Bilal Göregen uploaded a video of him drumming and singing to the tune of "Ievan polkka" while sitting on a bench. A Twitter user overlaid this video with a white cat bobbing its head to the beat, a meme called "Vibing Cat" that had gone viral earlier in the year. This mashup was too much for the internet to handle—there's a good chance you've seen this video in some form. As of publication, Bilal Göregen's "Cat Vibing to Ievan Polkka" video has nearly 100 million views. The revival of a century-old Finnish folk tune into a legitimately global meme is undoubtedly one of the greatest things the internet has ever produced.

So you have to listen to "Ievan polkka," and I bet you'll find yourself nodding your head to it just like Vibing Cat.

8. Otyken — "Legend" (Khakas)

Indigenous languages like you've never heard them before are a big theme of this shortlist, and there are few groups that have exemplified this with as much success as Otyken, a Siberian multicultural collective that got its start in 2015.

You're probably unfamiliar with the Khakas language, which has just around 30,000 speakers. It's unrelated to Russian, but is instead one of the Siberian Turkic languages, more closely related to the tongues of Central Asia. The name "Otyken" comes from Chulym, a critically endangered language in this family, and it refers to a meeting place for warriors. Otyken has written songs in Chulym, Khakas, and Russian, but "Legend" is sung in Khakas, and according to the band, its lyrics are based on ancient Khakas legends. The singer takes on the perspective of a "dutiful girl" in love with a boy named Aidym.

"Legend" makes innovative use of traditional Siberian instruments, coupled with elements of throat singing. The music video for the song, filmed in the lush mountains of the band's native Krasnoyarsk Krai, features the band members in costumes inspired by traditional attire (but also doing some rather goofy non-traditional dancing). As of publication, the video has over 15 million views, which is 500 times the entire population of Khakas speakers. You may not know any of the words, but "Legend" is very catchy nevertheless!

As an additional suggestion, the combination of throat singing and traditional instruments with modern styles can also be found in "Yuve Yuve Yu," another song on Multilingualism by Mongolian folk metal band The HU. The HU might be the most famous band from this entire region of the world, with their debut album The Gereg landing on the Billboard 200 in 2019. I definitely recommend listening to "Yuve Yuve Yu" as well.

9. John Schmid — "Wo Ist Jesus, Mein Verlangen" (Pennsylvania German)

German! In a Southern accent! What more could you ask for?

Despite its name, Pennsylvania Dutch is actually a variety of the dialects of German spoken in southwestern Germany that made their way to the United States and Canada via 17th- and 18th-century immigrants. The language is widely spoken among the Amish, Old Order Mennonites, and other groups descended from these immigrants. Surprisingly, Pennsylvania Dutch still has over 200,000 speakers, mainly in the Midwest!

John Schmid hails from the largest settlement in the Ohio Amish Country, in Holmes and Wayne counties. But according to Ira Wagler, an Amish writer who visited Schmid's stomping grounds in 2009, Schmid isn't Amish himself—he learned Pennsylvania Dutch as a non-native speaker and became fluent in the language. Schmid has released music in both English and Pennsylvania Dutch, but this song, "Wo Ist Jesus, Mein Verlangen," comes from his 2012 album In Dutch!

From what I can tell, the song appears to be an adaptation of a Protestant hymn written by Angelus Silesius.⁶ Here, Schmid turns this hymn into a calming country-folk tune. Many of his listeners might abstain from using technology, but you can definitely listen to his sonorous tones in Pennsylvania Dutch on Spotify!

10. 雅維·茉芮Yaway·Mawring — "藤蔓wahi" (Atayal)

We started with Multilingualism's first song in alphabetical order, and we end with its last one. It's one of the most interesting songs I've ever listened to. Its Chinese title translates to "vine," but this song is not in Chinese, but in Atayal, a Taiwanese indigenous language. The Atayal people form one of Taiwan's largest indigenous groups, and their language has around 90,000 speakers. Unlike Mandarin and Hokkien, Taiwan's most widely-spoken languages, Atayal is a member of the Austronesian language family, meaning it has more in common with languages spoken in Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands.

"藤蔓wahi" is sung by Yaway Mawring, who comes from a mixed Han Chinese-Atayal family in the western Taiwanese county of Miaoli. Mawring began her music career at the age of 38, after reconnecting with her Atayal heritage and learning the language. "藤蔓wahi" is the title track from her fourth album, released in 2022. It's a dreamy, beautiful song with intricate instrumentation, and I could think of no better way to end this shortlist. A language I'd never heard of, with lyrics I can't plug into Google Translate, sung to music I'd have never expected.

There is so much music in the world right now, and there is still so much to discover. We have instant access to everything from Tuamotuan death metal to Quechua trap to early-90s Indonesian pop classics. We can be mesmerized by it without understanding any of it. And this was just a 10-song snapshot of a 463-song playlist, which itself represents just one song from each language or dialect. There is still so much to discover. So keep listening, because there is good music to be found literally everywhere, in every corner of the world, in every language. ∎