Other the past few days there was a conference at Trinity College Carmarthen entitled Reversing Language Shift: How to Re-awaken a Language Tradition, which was run by the Foundation for Endangered Languages. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to intend myself, but have found an interesting report and multilingual video from it on the BBC News.
Here’s a recording of delegates from the conferences speaking in their own languages. How many of the languages can you identify?
Did any of you attend the conference?
A nice collection! Phew, there are not many that I recognize, but here’s my go at them:
1. No idea, but possibly related to 2, because of the [ma:j] element.
2. Welsh (shwmae) (I looked that one up in the ‘Useful Phrases’ list)
3. ?
4. Hindi (namaste)
5. Some Frisian, or perhaps Danish dialect? [guj da:i me:jnskan] = ‘good day people’?
6. ?
7. Lakota / Sioux? It reminds me of the language spoken in Dances with Wolves, hence my guess.
8. English (yay!)
9. Something Semitic? Ethiopian?
10. A very peculiar type of French. Cajun?
11. ?
12. ?
13. English.
14. ?
I can’t list them all but Welsh was in there and Gaelic which I can’t tell whether it’s Irish or Scots or maybe bother? I think the unusual French spoken is possibly Channel Island French perhaps Guernésiais (Dgèrnésiais) or Jèrriais?
Not so diverse a selection: of the nine six are native North Sea / British Isles languages and three of those are Goidelic.
I agree with Drabkikker about #4, #8, and #13. I thought #7 sounded Polynesian; it’s not Hawai’ian, but maybe Samoan?
I think
#1 is Cornish and both
#2 (shwmae!) and
#11 are Welsh.
#4 being such a generally used salutation (namaste) and not indicative of one language could be a number of Asian languages: Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Nepali etc.
Correction:
#1 is Manx Gaelic: (fastyr mie) – ‘good afternoon’.
#5 is a Jutlandish dialect of Danish, probably South Jutlandish. “Good day, people.”
I heard “namaste” (some Asian language), and then some Welsh, and then English. Those were the only ones I knew.
The first seven languages aren’t named in the subtitles. Here’s what I think they are:
1. Manx
2. Welsh
3. Scottish Gaelic
4. One of the languages of South Asia
5. Sounds Northern Germanic – Faroese?
6. Irish
7. English
The other languages are:
8. Maori
9. Berber
10. Dgèrnésiais (Guernsey Norman)
11. Welsh
12. Scottish Gaelic
13. English
14. Manx
1. ? 2. ? 3. Hindi 4. Danish 5. Scottish Gaelic 6. ? 7. English 8. ? 9. Breton? 10. Welsh 11. ? 12. English
Ouch. I even didn’t get the correct number.
Number 5 definitely isn’t Danish.I would agree with Simon and say that it’s Faroese.
I think that the last one was Manx because, as usually happens when I listen to that language, I hear the occasional “fully-formed” Irish word popping up. In this case it was “teanga” (language) and “an rud” (the thing) — though doubtless these words are spelt quite differently in Manx!
(Incidentally, I could swear that the Welsh voice on this recording was that of my tutor at the Cwrs Haf I attended at Coleg y Drindod a few months ago. Have forgotten his name, unfortunately.)
Oops! Just read the thread again and realized (too late, once again) that when “Simon says” something then *that* is the correct answer — so I was trying to jump there on a train which had already left the station… 😉
I’m pretty sure #5 is some form of Frisian. It doesn’t sound like any of the Nordic languages to me. Most likely it’s West Frisian in which case the person says something like “goeie dei minsken”.
1.? 2.?3.Scottish Gaelic 4.? 5.? 6. Irish 7.? 8. Maori? 9.English 10.? 11. A French patois possibly from one of the Channel Islands 12. Welsh 13. Scots Gaelic again 14. English again 15. Manx?
#5 could be W. Frisian “goendei minsken” but if so it’s almost exactly the same as S. Jutlandish “goidaw meesker.” Hard to tell with the wind.