Name the language

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?

November 22nd, 2009 in Language, Quiz questions

Comments (12)

WilliamNovember 22nd, 2009 at 1:39 pm

A Native American language? Maybe a central or south Asian language?

GregNovember 22nd, 2009 at 2:25 pm

I realize this covers a lot of bases, but to me it sounds simultaneously as a Bantu/Arabic hybrid (like Swahili or a Sahel language) and a Malay-related language.

xarxaNovember 22nd, 2009 at 2:29 pm

a language from the horn of africa, amharic, tigre, something like that

HalabundNovember 22nd, 2009 at 3:11 pm

I think it is Hausa, based on googling for fragments that I tried to spell out.

dmhNovember 22nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm

I found the word “amarka” in an article about Somaliland. So, Somali?

penniferNovember 22nd, 2009 at 3:23 pm

Closest I can get is Africa.

HalabundNovember 22nd, 2009 at 3:41 pm

dmh, however, if you spell it ‘Amurka’, Google will serve up a pile of Hausa pages, many of them radio stations. Apparently it was not only I for whom this was the most noticeable word in the recoding. Ironically, ‘Amurka’ is not even a true Hausa word: it simply means ‘America’.

michael farrisNovember 22nd, 2009 at 6:19 pm

After some initial indecision, my guess was Hausa, so I’ll stick with that.

formikoNovember 23rd, 2009 at 5:35 am

Ainu

SimonNovember 23rd, 2009 at 3:34 pm

The language is Hausa (حَوْسَ), which is spoken mainly in Nigeria and Niger.

The recording comes from Deutsche Welle.

EelkjeDecember 7th, 2009 at 7:38 pm

The only thing i got out of it was ‘something arabic’ (sorry, i’m no linguist) AND a sort of weird German ring to it. I felt sort of proud when i read the fragment came from deutsche welle!

JuliaDecember 9th, 2009 at 12:54 pm

At first thought something slavic (talking about Barack Obama), but then there were some glottal stops, so not quite sure …