It has a persian sound to me, but I don’t think that’s the direction. It has a tendency to put in a lot of english words which i think happens a lot in indian languages, but I don’t know enough to say which.

Wild guess, Kannada?

Malayalam? I am fairly sure it is an indian language, and Malayalam is my only guess.

This isn’t Hindi but it’s close – I don’t think it’s Panjabi, though I may be wrong. Marathi or Gujerati?

I agree, it sounds almost like Hindi, but not quite and the pronunciation is much softer and more blended than Hindi.

My first idea was Indic, not Dravidian (the chances of it not being from the Indian sub-continent are basically non-existent) but was distracted by what sounds like potentially Dravidian case markers (like Tamil -le though overall it doesn’t sound very Tamil-like to me) and sentence finals (pile ups of syllables with l’s and/or r’s .

I’m sticking with Kannada for the time being but I wouldn’t be that surprised if it turned out to be Indic after all.

I would say it’s not malayalam. My grandmother speaks that natively and it doesn’t sound like what she jabbers on the phone :p. Reminds me of Kannada so that’s what I’ll guess

I think maybe Indic perhaps, Bengali possibly?

I can’t get any closer than the Indian subcontinent.

Well it’s definitely Indian subcontinent.

And the phonetic inventory sounds north Indian rather than south Indian.

But it doesn’t sound like Hindi.

So I’m guessing Punjabi.

It’s clearly about the forthcoming football (soccer) matchup between The Netherlands and Uruguay at the World Cup (Go Holland!), and very much so on a language from India, but definitely not Hindi (and by extension, not Urdu, either)… I’m not entirely sure which, but just as a stab in the dark, I’m gonna go with modern Sanskrit as my guess. :)

d.m.f.

This is definitely not Kannada. Could be Bengali or perhaps Oriya

My guess is Bengali because of the non-Dravidian sounds and the very “rounded” vowels. (Sorry about the improper terminology)

- Most probably Bengali, perhaps the ‘Sylheti’ dialect (?)…

My guess is a language of the north, perhaps northwest of India. The aspirated /kh/ sounds are definitely north Indian, and the repeated ‘char’ after mentions of teams sounds like it could be ‘four’ as in score count. I also hear a ‘shesh’, which is the same as Persian/Farsi ‘six’ but it could be something completely different — who knows. It doesn’t sound like the Punjabi I’ve heard, especially not like Bengali, nor like Hindi/Urdu or Gujarati. It doesn’t seem to be Kashmiri, which I would have hazarded a guess at…

Hmmm…???

The answer is Bengali (বাংলা), which is spoken mainly in Bangladesh and India.

The recording comes from BBC World Service.

It seems I may have to revise my mental image of how Bengali sounds…!

Bengali (বাংলা)