This is just a guess from a non-linguist. Is it Bengali?

It is Bengali. It’s from the BBC. I listen to this all the time to help me learn the language.

I’m going to guess the same as Halabund and AR… Bengali?

It’s sounds a lot like its from the BBC, and it also sounds very Indian with the retroflex stops and flaps, and Bengali, Hindi, Nepali, and Sinhala are the only ones in a ‘large language family’. Of those, Bengali and Sinhala are the ones with thier own alphabet. I’m gonna go against the grain and say Sinhala.

I must disagree. I am part Bengali, and I understand quite a bit of this language. Bengali has a lot of the /o/ and /ʃ/ sounds because of sound shifts. Sinhalese has short versions of /e/ and /o/ (a feature absorbed from dravidian lanugages) and the phoneme /ʋ/ which is not present in Bengali (replaced with /b/).

I’ll just confirm that it is Bengali, and is from the BBC World Service.

My hunches are starting to be wrong everytime! I thought it was Armenian… at least my guess was in the right language family.

Chase Boday didn’t mention Panjabi and Oriya – they have their own alphabets and have retroflex stops, don’t they? Also, Bengali is not the only language written in the Bengali alphabet.

I left out many languages, because I was concentrating on which ones were represented by the BBC world service. Panjabi and Oriya aren’t part of the BBC’s reporting languages, but yes they do have retroflex stops. I think most Indian languages do… I’m sure there are exceptions. Does anyone know what they are? I’m just interested, that’s all…