6 thoughts on “Language quiz”

1. Being more knowledgeable about music than languages, I identified the clip as being from somewhere in Central Asia before the first word was uttered. But listening on, it is a Turkic language. My first thought was Kazakh, but it does not quite match the vowel inventory. My guess is the closely related Karakapak, spoken in S.W. Kazakhstan, N. Turkmenistan and N.W. Uzbekistan.

2. Correction: Karakalpak

3. I know nothing about musical styles, but the language struck me as Turkic and Central Asian too. I’m only thinking of cutting Turkmen (which has theta and edh instead of /s/ and /z/) and Uzbek (which has an Iranian-style rounded low vowel and no vowel harmony), but other than that I can’t say whether it’s Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Karakalpak, or Uyghur. I’ll go for Kyrgyz just to have a different answer from David’s.

4. The language is Nogai (Ногай тили), a Turkic language spoken mainly in Dagestan in the Russian Federation.

   The recording comes from YouTube.

5. Neither of us was too far off, Sameer.

6. Hey, not bad huh! At least we chose (North)west Turkic/Kipchak languages…