My first guess would be Zulu.

d.m.f.

It sounds very much like a Portuguese dialect, or perhaps a creole based on that language.

Sounds vaguely Bantu, and I think I heard the root “rundi”, so my guess is Kirundi.

i heard ‘[bu]rundi’ too, and id go for bantu as well…

Hi,
I’ve been visiting this blog for a while, but this is the first time I will leave a comment. I like very much your blog and your language quizzes.

As for this quiz, it sounds like a Bantu language but with Portuguese influence. So my guess would be Kimbundu.

It is indeed a Bantu language, but not Zulu, Kimbundu or Kirundi.

tswana?

I will guess in the same general area and say that it’s Swazi.

I’m going to guess it’s Luganda, one of the major languages spoken in Uganda.

It isn’t Tswana, Swazi or Luganda either.

Another clue: this language is mutually intelligible with Kirundi.

aaa… what is Kirundi? :)

“Kirundi is closely related to Kinyarwanda, the main language of neighbouring country Rwanda and to Giha, a language spoken in western Tanzania. Kirundi and Kinyarwanda are mutually intelligible.”

So probably it’s Kinyarwanda :)

Kinyarwanda?

Kinyarwanda.
It’s interesting that many news agencies combine their Kinyarwanda and Kirundi services in one because of the mutual intelligibility.

Boy, I guess I was waaaaaaay off. I immediately thought of some distant dialect of Farsi.

My first guess (with no clues) was either Kinyrwanda or Kirundi

@VJ: Farsi actually came to my mind too, but I wasn’t confident enough to post it and as soon as I saw the Bantu comments I knew they were right.

I am going with Kinyarwanda.

It is indeed Kinyarwanda (Ikinyarwanda), a Bantu language spoken by about 7 million people mainly in Rwanda

The recording comes from the BBC World Service.

Like Strika above, I enjoy these quizzes despite most of them being way too hard for me. Both Mike and Strika thought this language had some sort of Portuguese influence and I had the same feeling. Can anybody analyse why this might be?

My guess was also that it was a Portuguese-African creole, possibly from Cape Verde islands. It probably sounded like that to us because of the nasal vowels and all the ‘zh’ sounds it shares with Portuguese. :)

I know nothing about African dialects, and my first thought was Tamil or some other north Indian dialect.

However, the dipthong slurring makes it sound Bantu.

Hey, I’m getting better at this.

I was way way off as well. I was thinking something European.