January 30, 2026
Twist tongues, twist tempers
International Collection of Tongue Twisters (2018)
Tongue-twister list sparks “not real!” debate, color-scheme meltdowns, and multilingual flexes
TLDR: A global tongue-twister roundup lit up the web with wild entries from many languages. Commenters battled over what counts as a “real” tongue twister, corrected a Korean example, mocked the site’s colors, and flexed their favorites—turning a word game into a full-on culture and pronunciation showdown.
The internet dove into the International Collection of Tongue Twisters (2018) and came out breathless—and a little salty. The page whips from Georgian ejectives to Cantonese tone tornadoes, Thai sing-song traps, and classics like Peter Piper, but the real circus was in the comments. One user from Indonesia dropped the killer: “Kuku kaki kakekku kayak kuku kaki kakakku,” calling the repeated k-sounds “brutal,” and argued tongue twisters expose each language’s weak spots—English has the “s/sh” curse, Indonesian goes for consonant clusters.
Then the fight bell rang: one commenter slammed several entries as “not tongue twisters—just homophone jokes,” igniting a purity war over what counts as a real twist. Authenticity drama spiked when a Korean speaker corrected a listed version with a “purer” one, flexing their trilingual creds and declaring it the hardest of the bunch. Meanwhile, a completely different battle broke out: a user roasted the site’s color scheme so hard they joked they thought something was wrong with their brain—UI roast of the year. Others piled on with their own speed traps—“Black bug’s blood and red bug’s blood,” and the “rugged rock” rascal—daring everyone to say them five times fast.
Cameos like the infamous mega-long New Zealand hill name and Poland’s fearsome “Chrząszcz” made readers clutch their tongues. Verdict? A global mouth-gym, a definition brawl, and a design-induced headache—peak internet.
Key Points
- •The article compiles tongue twisters from multiple languages and scripts.
- •It includes the full English classic “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.”
- •Several entries are annotated with sources, including “The Song of Salomon 1:1-2” and Jan Brzechwa’s poem “Chrząszcz.”
- •A Western Lombard section and a note crediting “an old priest” appear among the sources.
- •One entry is linked to a New Zealand place name near Waipukurau in Central Hawke’s Bay, North Island.