Tamil….if not, another Dravidian language (Telugu, Malayalam etc.)

My reaction, too. Lots of Hindu deities’ names and the intonation make this clearly a language of India; there are no aspirated stops — voiceless or voiced — and a lot of doubled (geminate) consonants. Also the quality of the long /a:/ reminds me of what I hear when I hear Tamil spoken, so i’m certain it’s a Dravidian language, and without knowing enough to tell the difference between them, I’ll guess it’s Tamil.

I speak Tamil. It’s Tamil :)

this is definitely Tamil but not conversational Tamil and is therefore is not that easy to follow. The speaker is talking about knowing the Vedas and appeasing the gods for a son-several gods are quoted but Murugan is important. A son is born to her and she teaches him all the vedas and the prayers.

Something from India. A lot of retroflex plosives.

Before opening the answers, my thought was that it’s definitely Indian, and that it seems to have the derivational endings of a Dravidian language. I think it takes a language community of both size and political authonomy to produce that sort of radio lecture in India. Tamil is taken, so I’ll go for Malayalam.

Oops, I meant to say “consonants” instead of “plosives”.

It´s silimar to Kannada, so it´s a Dravidian language. Telugu, Malayalam or Tamil.

Not just deities’ names, but several other loanwords from Sanskrit (or one of its descendants). I’ll go with Dravidian too.

I thought it was Tamil based on the overall Dravidian sound and frequent -le’s I was hearing I was assuming they were the spoken locative (as opposed to formal locative -(v)il so I’m surprised it’s not conversational.

Before reading the comments my guess was Telugu.

Was gonna guess Malayalam, but Kerala is the only part of South India I’ve been to, so that’s where my mind went.

The answer is Tamil (தமிழ்), which is spoken in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malayasia and a number of other countries.

The recording comes from Tamil Amudham, a Tamil radio station based in Detroit.

I was going to guess Hindi, but it looks like some Tamil speakers have already spoiled it for us all. :)

My guess was Hindi too, haven’t heard much of Tamil. Maybe is time to get to know the dialect.

I wouldn’t say it’s a dialect, Tamil is Dravidian, Hindi is Indo-European. They definitely share areal features and sound similar to the untrained ear, but are unrelated languages (although there’s been a lot of vocabulary shared, mostly from Indo-European to Dravidian)

Before the comments I thought it was something from the Middle East.