Probably the next best thing is Mercury.
https://mercurylang.org/ I'd also say that if you get a chance to definitely learn Prolog! One nice thing about Prolog is that you can start more from an application angle and explore the language in a way that might motivate you and interest you more than the dryer approach of more general language learning. Classic NLP can be a lot of fun, for example.
https://cs.union.edu/~striegnk/courses/nlp-with-prolog/html/ is a good free starting point, but the best starting point is one of Covington's classic texts on the subject.