Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
8 thoughts on “Language quiz”
I can hear the Portuguese accent a few latinate words, but that’s all, so I’ll guess it’s spoken in Brazil but I’ve no idea what the language is.
I’m inclined to think it is something European, and more connected with Italian than Portuguese. The alveolar approximant /ɹ/ (clearly audible in the last word) is a fairly rare sound, only occuring in a handful of European languages (English being among them). Whilst all the vocabulary I can make out sounds to be of Romance origin, I am going to take a stab in the dark and suggest that this could be Europe’s only Afro-Asiatic language, Maltese.
A strange one. I would guess a European language, but not from any major language family. Albanian?
I’d rule out both Maltese and Albanian and focus on Jonathan’s Portuguese suggestion, instead.
Could it be Papiamentu spoken on the Carribean islands which used to be known as the Netherlands Antilles?
Here’s a clue – this is a Malayo-Polynesian language.
Aargh… Tetun Dili? That explains Portuguese loanwords.
Well that’s a surprise. I’m going keep with an implicit hypotheses of Portuguese imperialism, and, unlike David Eger, who’s figuring it out linguistically, I’m going to cheat with Wikipedia and cultural history and switch my guess to something from the Ambonese.
The language is Chamorro (chamoru), a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken mainly in Guam.
I can hear the Portuguese accent a few latinate words, but that’s all, so I’ll guess it’s spoken in Brazil but I’ve no idea what the language is.
I’m inclined to think it is something European, and more connected with Italian than Portuguese. The alveolar approximant /ɹ/ (clearly audible in the last word) is a fairly rare sound, only occuring in a handful of European languages (English being among them). Whilst all the vocabulary I can make out sounds to be of Romance origin, I am going to take a stab in the dark and suggest that this could be Europe’s only Afro-Asiatic language, Maltese.
A strange one. I would guess a European language, but not from any major language family. Albanian?
I’d rule out both Maltese and Albanian and focus on Jonathan’s Portuguese suggestion, instead.
Could it be Papiamentu spoken on the Carribean islands which used to be known as the Netherlands Antilles?
Here’s a clue – this is a Malayo-Polynesian language.
Aargh… Tetun Dili? That explains Portuguese loanwords.
Well that’s a surprise. I’m going keep with an implicit hypotheses of Portuguese imperialism, and, unlike David Eger, who’s figuring it out linguistically, I’m going to cheat with Wikipedia and cultural history and switch my guess to something from the Ambonese.
The language is Chamorro (chamoru), a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken mainly in Guam.
The recording comes from YouTube.