10 thoughts on “Language quiz

  1. I’m going to stay as quiet as I can, but it’s also too much of a coincidence that this is also the language we’re learning in my linguistic field methods class (if not its sister language).

  2. My brother-in-law is a Telugu speaker and I agree that this sounds a lot like it. My only reason to doubt it is that the clips in this quiz usually feature rare or minority languages, whilst Telugu is the 4th most spoken language in India.

  3. I’ve noticed that recently Simon has occasionally posted the article on the mystery language about the same time as the quiz. Based on this, I’m going to guess Irula.

  4. You’re right about me using languages I have added to Omniglot recently in the language quiz, Daniel, but not in this instance.

    This is a Dravidian language, but isn’t Telugu or Irula.

  5. David, I also was thinking that it was the case that these are usually minority languages, but in this case I think this *is* a widely spoken language.

    Simon, I hope it’s okay to guess now! Is it Malayalam?

  6. The answer is Badaga (படகா / ಬಡಗ), a Southern Dravidian language spoken mainly in the Nilgiri Hills of Tamil Nadu State in southern India.

    The recording comes from YouTube:

  7. Oh wow! I’m amazed at how similar it is to Malayalam, and how *unlike* Kannada it sounds. I suppose that sort of makes sense given that it’s spoken in the region between Malayalam-, Tamil-, and Kannada-speaking areas, but still I’m surprised at how many words are identical to those of Malayalam. I’d be curious to see if Malayalam speakers would feel the same way, or if the grammar (and presumably fewer loans from Sanskrit) would make this less intelligible to them.

  8. I’m Malayalee, and this doesn’t sound similar to Malayalam to me at all. Waaaay too many “st”s, plus Malayalam doesn’t have a voiced retroflex geminate plosive in any words I can think of, and the “bEDa” gives away the fact that it must be spoken somewhere in Karnataka since that’s a Kannada word. I can’t identify any Malayalam words in this clip.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *