From my experience in Scala

if you want to write functional code, you can’t do it directly in pure Scala and you must use some libraries like GitHub - scalaz/scalaz: Principled Functional Programming in Scala · GitHub or GitHub - typelevel/cats: Lightweight, modular, and extensible library for functional programming. · GitHub. And syntax will be never so nice as in ML languages like F#, Haskell. And above that you need to fight with limitation of JVM

For those reasons if I will need to choose some static typed functional language I think I would go F#, OCaml, Haskell

You are asking this question in ElixirForum, so definitely the answer will be biased.
Elixir will be easier to learn, it doesn’t have too many ways to do anything like Scala does, and you won’t hate it the way you’ll hate Scala.

Edit: If you don’t know much about Elixir, please watch the following video. It will give you an overview about the history and the strengths of Erlang/Elixir.