Language quiz

Here’s a recording in a mystery language.

Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?

September 27th, 2009 in Language, Quiz questions

Comments (12)

spl0ufSeptember 27th, 2009 at 10:09 am

An east-Asian language closely related to Chinese, probably… Taiwanese?

peter j. frankeSeptember 27th, 2009 at 10:24 am

Cantonese????

IsaacSeptember 27th, 2009 at 10:55 am

It’s Shanghainese, or called Wu, spoken mainly in Shanghai, Chinese

doviendeSeptember 27th, 2009 at 10:29 pm

Interesting! It felt like my brain was broken there for a minute, because it’s similar to mandarin, but i couldn’t understand any of it. I can pick out a couple words here and there, i think. Last time i had that feeling was when i heard two guys speaking swiss-german on the bus…sounded like german, but i couldn’t understand.

Christopher MillerSeptember 27th, 2009 at 10:46 pm

My guess is also Shanghainese/Wu, because it sounds so similar to Mandarin, but the tonal contours *seem* to be more limited (just my impression), and I can *definitely* hear voiced initial stops, which as far as I know only remain in Wu dialects.

Christopher MillerSeptember 27th, 2009 at 11:02 pm

…I should add that there are also the voiced z initials near the beginning of the recording, too…

Petréa MitchellSeptember 28th, 2009 at 4:05 am

I’m going to commit myself to the highly precise guess that it is somewhere in the Sino-Tibetan language family. The sound inventory made me think of Mandarin, but I’m fairly sure that isn’t it. Partly because I agree with #5 that it doesn’t sound tonal enough, and the rest is just a sense of “I don’t think it sounds quite like that”.

Bear in mind, though, that it’s been about 25 years since my last Mandarin lesson…

d.m.falkSeptember 28th, 2009 at 5:27 am

Considering casual Mandarin drops most of the tones (usually first tone in a word or sentence is used- others dropped), I’ll go with Mandarin. Not Shanghainese, which sounds almost Japanese, but is not- It’s very distinct and unusuas to listen to!

Now watch, it’ll probably be something like Naxi or Yi, my luck. ;)

d.m.f.

SimonSeptember 28th, 2009 at 4:06 pm

The language is Shanghainese (上海闲话 / Zanhe-ëwo) which is spoken mainly in Shanghai.

The recording comes from 上海话学习网 (Shanghainese Study Site).

Alonso DaySeptember 29th, 2009 at 3:16 am

While we’re playing “Name that Sino-Tibetan Language”, this article comes to mind…
http://wiki.frath.net/Fusangese

HalabundSeptember 30th, 2009 at 12:43 pm

This sounds very different from the previous Shanghainese recording featured on Omniglot. Are these two languages the same?

SimonSeptember 30th, 2009 at 5:01 pm

Halabund – as far as I know the two recordings are of the same language.