Some Germanic language…Frisian? Faroese? I recognize the th’s, so maybe it’s somewhere near Icelandic…?

Sounds to me like Old English.

@1
It’s not Frisian…

I also think, that it’s Old English.

Yup I also go for Anglo-Saxon / Old-English.

Sounds like the 23′rd Psalm.

The answer is Anglo-Saxon / Old English. The recording comes from:

Anglo-Saxon Aloud – A daily reading of the entire Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, which includes all poems written in Old English. By Michael D. C. Drout, Prentice Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College, Norton, MA.

VERY cool…it doesn’t sound exactly like Icelandic, but there is something reminiscent of it. Thanks for the site, Simon–it’s been bookmarked. :-)

Considering there’s a region in northern Germany called Saxony, it should give a clue as to where the Angles & Saxons of what is now England really originated- Old English was indeed a Scandinavian language, eventually to be influenced successively by Latin and later, Norman French. English would lose its Germanic flavour by the 15th or 16th Centuries- Sometime between Chaucer and the advent of Elizabethan English, probably the earliest for intelligibility with modern English. (Chaucer’s (Middle) English is readable, in spite odd spelling, but it followed Germanic pronunciation, thus as spoken, wouldn’t be intelligible with modern listeners.)

So English as we know it is really only about 500 years old. :)

d.m.f.

@d.m.falk: I don’t think Old English was quite a Scandinavian language. English is a West Germanic language (along with German, Dutch, Frisian, etc.), while the Scandinavian languages are North Germanic languages. When the vikings came to England, Old Norse influenced the vocabulary of the English of the time (late Old Englsih, I’m guessing), but this does not make English a Scandinavian language. Just a note.

without looking at the other posts:

germanic, sounds a lot like one of the scandinavian ones, but it´s not Swedish, Norwegian, Danish or faroese (I know speakers of all these languages and the intonation patterns and sounds are different).

I suspect that the speaker is not a native, and that it´s a dead language. I have a feeling it´s old english.

J