Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
7 thoughts on “Language quiz”
Not the point of the quiz, I know, but the musical style is a big clue for me, placing it somewhere in the E. Baltic/NW Russia area. I hear some Slavic phonetic influence. It does not sound like a Uralic language – which leads me to the Baltic languages. It sounds similar to Lithuanian – more so than to Latvian (with which I am quite familiar). However, Lithuanian seems too obvious a language to feature in this quiz and, since I do not know of any minority Baltic dialect spoken under Lithuanian jurisdiction that vies for ‘language’ status, I am going to guess Latgallian.
I think all clues are fair game, and I’m going to use the musical style too. I’m strongly reminded of Marie Boine, espcially her song Gula Gula, so I’m going to say something from the Sami language family.
I agree that the musical style suggests eastern Europe.
Nivkh (Нивхгу диф).
Before reading the comments, I was actually thinking this was a language native to North America. I thought it sounded like it’s Athabaskan or from another Western US language family. My first thought was “this is from Alaska”.
But seeing that others are hearing something more from the Old World, I am shifting my guess to the Asian side of the Bering Strait. (It doesn’t sound Baltic to me, in the Indo-European sense. I hear back unrounded vowel [ɤ] resembling Estonian or other Finnic languages, and I hear velarization and palatalization, which is heard throughout northern Eurasia… but then I hear uvulars in there, which pushes the likely homeland further east, at least to Siberia proper or as far as the Russian Far East.)
Using the wals database (http://wals.info/feature/6A#2/44.1/135.9), I see there are nine languages in Siberia and the Russian Far East that have uvulars. Of those, Wikipedia lists only Nivkh as having the vowel /ɤ/, although 7 others do have /ə/, which might sound similar: Ket, Selkup, Koryak, Itelmen, Chukchi, Siberian Yupik, Southern Yukaghir.
So, I’m going to guess Nivkh.
After reading the above comments, and listening again to the clip, I think my first guess is probably off the mark as far as language families are concerned. (Latgallian ought to be much more familiar to me, since I have spent two years in Latvia and would expect to be able to understand more of it.) I am, however, sticking with the general geographical area. My comment with regard to Uralic languages was based on what I know of Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian – the words sound untypically short in this clip. But I am not so familiar with the sound of the Sami languages. I am willing to go with Jonathan’s guess at something from the Sami group, but I still hear some phonetic features in common with Russian, so I would say that, if it is one of the Sami languages, it is one of those spoken in Russia. For argument’s sake, I will say Ter Sami, the most easterly of them.
The language is Nivkh (Нивхгу), a language isolate spoken in Outer Manchuria along the Amgun and Amur rivers and part of Sakhlin Island in Russia.
Not the point of the quiz, I know, but the musical style is a big clue for me, placing it somewhere in the E. Baltic/NW Russia area. I hear some Slavic phonetic influence. It does not sound like a Uralic language – which leads me to the Baltic languages. It sounds similar to Lithuanian – more so than to Latvian (with which I am quite familiar). However, Lithuanian seems too obvious a language to feature in this quiz and, since I do not know of any minority Baltic dialect spoken under Lithuanian jurisdiction that vies for ‘language’ status, I am going to guess Latgallian.
I think all clues are fair game, and I’m going to use the musical style too. I’m strongly reminded of Marie Boine, espcially her song Gula Gula, so I’m going to say something from the Sami language family.
I agree that the musical style suggests eastern Europe.
Nivkh (Нивхгу диф).
Before reading the comments, I was actually thinking this was a language native to North America. I thought it sounded like it’s Athabaskan or from another Western US language family. My first thought was “this is from Alaska”.
But seeing that others are hearing something more from the Old World, I am shifting my guess to the Asian side of the Bering Strait. (It doesn’t sound Baltic to me, in the Indo-European sense. I hear back unrounded vowel [ɤ] resembling Estonian or other Finnic languages, and I hear velarization and palatalization, which is heard throughout northern Eurasia… but then I hear uvulars in there, which pushes the likely homeland further east, at least to Siberia proper or as far as the Russian Far East.)
Using the wals database (http://wals.info/feature/6A#2/44.1/135.9), I see there are nine languages in Siberia and the Russian Far East that have uvulars. Of those, Wikipedia lists only Nivkh as having the vowel /ɤ/, although 7 others do have /ə/, which might sound similar: Ket, Selkup, Koryak, Itelmen, Chukchi, Siberian Yupik, Southern Yukaghir.
So, I’m going to guess Nivkh.
After reading the above comments, and listening again to the clip, I think my first guess is probably off the mark as far as language families are concerned. (Latgallian ought to be much more familiar to me, since I have spent two years in Latvia and would expect to be able to understand more of it.) I am, however, sticking with the general geographical area. My comment with regard to Uralic languages was based on what I know of Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian – the words sound untypically short in this clip. But I am not so familiar with the sound of the Sami languages. I am willing to go with Jonathan’s guess at something from the Sami group, but I still hear some phonetic features in common with Russian, so I would say that, if it is one of the Sami languages, it is one of those spoken in Russia. For argument’s sake, I will say Ter Sami, the most easterly of them.
The language is Nivkh (Нивхгу), a language isolate spoken in Outer Manchuria along the Amgun and Amur rivers and part of Sakhlin Island in Russia.
The recording comes from YouTube.