17 thoughts on “Name the language

  1. Sounds like Arabian to me, but I guess that would be to easy for a mystery language. I guess Maltese on Malta.

  2. I change my mind. I have lisstened to it again. I think he said akshamlar. That makes it a turkic language.

  3. Not being sure, I guess it’s the Sorani dialect of Kurdish spoken in Northern Iraq.
    Because
    a) “Iraq” is mentioned
    b) the speaker is greeting the audience with the
    Arabic “salem aleykum”
    c) the Turkish word “zaman” (“time”) is clearly
    uttered twice,
    d) while the intonation points to an Iranian language.

  4. I think it’s Turkic too. There is a gutteral consonant that doesn’t exist in Turkish, but it sounds like an agglutinated language with all the similarities the other bloggers mentioned. I think I heard the words “English Woman” followed by a quick little ending… like -ettede, makes me wonder if it’s similar to Turkish etti or eydi for the past tense, if I remembered those forms correctly. It’s been a long time. The Arabic introduction could probably be heard in any moslem country’s broadcast worldwide, not being a particularly strong geographic clue. It was certainly unrelated linguistically to the rest of the tape.

  5. @ Travis

    If you compare today’s mystery language with the one Simon gave us on July, 1st, and which turned out to be Uzbek, you’ll notice that Uzbek has more similarities to Turkish (including vowel harmony) than today’s language.
    So, I can’t help thinking that our mystery is Kurdish being an Iranian language but strongly influenced by surrounding Turkish.

  6. My guess is also with Kurdish, but probably Kurmancî, not Sorani. It would be spoken, of course, in Kurdistan, if that’s the case. The lack of ع (‘ain) in selamu alaykum is the shibboleth. Additionally, there are “w” sounds, ruling out Farsi.
    Thinking, it could also be Zaza. It’s hard for me to hear the difference.

    -Ben

  7. The speaker says “yak shanbeh” which means “Sunday” in persian as well … although I’m not expert with Farsi anyway.
    So I guess it is either kurdish (don’t know which dialect, but it can be the one closer to Iran!) … or it could be one the languages in around Iran … like azeri for example.

  8. The begining is a muslim “Hello” type thing.. the rest… Uh either the rest of the arabic muslim thingy or some thing else 🙂

  9. I am gonna nitpick a little here and say that Zaman/Zamaan are Arabic in origin, not Turkish.

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