Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
5 thoughts on “Language quiz”
That is Spanish, sung as flamenco…
Listening a bit more, there’s a sentence, “La muller de buen mariu siempre parece soltera” that seems galician or asturian… I think the whole thing is too close to standard Spanish to be ladino. Interesting.
Interesting. In the sentence at 0:56 I hear “La muller de bom mariu”, that’s not Galician (which has “bo marido”), but sounds closer to Asturian (“bonu mariu”). So I would guess an Astur-Leonese group, perhaps a western/south-western type (influences by Galician/Portuguese). Eonavian, perhaps?
I was also thinking something Ibero-Romance, with a few features clearly native to Castilian Spanish and its very closest sisters (like the [θ] in ‘parece’ and the diphthong [je] in ‘siempre’). Some of those features would be rather archaic in Spanish (like ‘muyer/muller’ for ‘mujer’ as Juanma Barranquero noted), but preserved in Astur-Leonese varieties.
At first I thought the chanting sounded more Moorish-influenced, so I was going to guess Ladino, but the [θ] in ‘parece’ and the final [u] in ‘mariu’, is pushing me to something in Astur-Leonese. If I have to guess more specifically, I’d say Extremaduran, since it’s spoken in a former Moorish region.
The language is Asturian (Asturianu), a Romance language spoken in Asturias (Asturies) in the northwest of Spain.
I made the recording myself at a music session at a friend’s house. The singer is Llorián García-Flórez from the University of Oviedo in Asturias, who was in Bangor for a conference about Spain.
That is Spanish, sung as flamenco…
Listening a bit more, there’s a sentence, “La muller de buen mariu siempre parece soltera” that seems galician or asturian… I think the whole thing is too close to standard Spanish to be ladino. Interesting.
Interesting. In the sentence at 0:56 I hear “La muller de bom mariu”, that’s not Galician (which has “bo marido”), but sounds closer to Asturian (“bonu mariu”). So I would guess an Astur-Leonese group, perhaps a western/south-western type (influences by Galician/Portuguese). Eonavian, perhaps?
I was also thinking something Ibero-Romance, with a few features clearly native to Castilian Spanish and its very closest sisters (like the [θ] in ‘parece’ and the diphthong [je] in ‘siempre’). Some of those features would be rather archaic in Spanish (like ‘muyer/muller’ for ‘mujer’ as Juanma Barranquero noted), but preserved in Astur-Leonese varieties.
At first I thought the chanting sounded more Moorish-influenced, so I was going to guess Ladino, but the [θ] in ‘parece’ and the final [u] in ‘mariu’, is pushing me to something in Astur-Leonese. If I have to guess more specifically, I’d say Extremaduran, since it’s spoken in a former Moorish region.
The language is Asturian (Asturianu), a Romance language spoken in Asturias (Asturies) in the northwest of Spain.
I made the recording myself at a music session at a friend’s house. The singer is Llorián García-Flórez from the University of Oviedo in Asturias, who was in Bangor for a conference about Spain.