I’m going to guess Kalmyk, because I thought I heard the name of the language (xalmg) in there. But I won’t be surprised if this is totally wrong.

Yes, it sounds like one of Asian languages. Member of the Altaic branch?

Sounds Turkic somehow… but also like Mongolian when I listen again!

My first thought was and former USSR but but I’ll broaden that to “Altaic”.

FM is correct, it is not difficult at all to find the source.

Sounds like a hybrid between Turkish and Russian.

I was going to say something Kartvelian, from the Caucasus. but that’s mostly because I like the word “Kartvelian”.

The more I listen to it the more I’m certain it’s Mongolian. I hear some words that I recognize very clearly. The younger voices sound very standard modern Mongolian to me, but I was thrown off by the elderly woman’s accent, which doesn’t sound quite as standard.

At one point the man asks her:
ямаар мал? what animals?

And she lists three things:
морин horse(s)
хонь sheep
тэмээ camel(s)

I also heard a couple forms of the verb “be”. You can hear the first suffix at the beginning quite a bit.
байдаг, -дVг (iterative suffix)
байгаа, -(г)VV (imperfective suffix)

Ha! I listened to some Kalmyk news, and it sounds insanely similar to Khalkha Mongolian. Apparently there is mutual intelligibility, so I’m not as sure anymore. Now that I’ve checked, my suspicions seem to make sense after all…

So it is some “dialect” within Mongolian?

Rauli-Russian it certainly isn’t

The answer is Kalmyk (Хальмг келн), a Mongolic language spoken in Kalmykia in the Russian Federation, and also in China and Mongolia.

The recording comes from YouTube.

Jurčík: Thanks. That was just what I thought it sounded like, because I had no idea what it really was.