Language quiz
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Can you guess the language and where it’s spoken?
May 30th, 2010 in
Language, Quiz questions
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Can you guess the language and where it’s spoken?
On first listening my initial thought is that it is a language of the Indian sub-continent?
My first wild guess is Assamese.
Somewhere in the Caucasus is my guess.
Definitely from India. Marathi?
Very clearly an Indian language. Not Dravidian.
Quite conservative as a branch from Sanskrit I’d say…not anything major like Marathi Hindi Gujarati Punjabi or Bengali.
I’m going for the Indian subcontinent too.
Wilder guess: BBC broadcast in the local language. (Okay, just because I think I heard “Englander” in intro.)
Good heavens! It’s full of Sanskrit-origin words, but the prosodic features sound quite non-IE.
Meitei? northeastern Indian perhaps. sounds rather proper, like a newscast though.
it’s definitely not hindi or urdu, and i’m not particularly familiar with much of other South Asian languages, which it clearly is. Oriya, perhaps? or maybe a Maithili language from Bihar?
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I’m also thinking vaguely of Manipuri. I’m getting some very non-Indian prosodic features so I think of north/northeast India (also related to my Assamese guess).
Haven’t found any samples of Oriya or Marathi that sound much like it, Assamese is maybe the closest sounding so far…
Could it be Kashmiri? – I’m not that au fait with Indian languages to be honest.
This has got to be Sinhala (Sinhalese).
The language is Sinhalese (සිංහල), which is spoken in mainly in Sri Lanka.
The recording comes from China Radio International (CRI).
FYI, I think there’s a mis-link. Your ‘Sinhalese’ link to Omniglot goes to Sundanese. My mind was severely bent getting a Polynesian language over to Sri Lanka.