Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
9 thoughts on “Language quiz”
First guess is a French based creole, but I could be entirely off base.
Sounds vaguely African/Bantu to me, but I could also swear that I heard the word ‘watashi’ (Japanese for ‘I’) a few times so who knows.
The very strange feature that the last syllable or word of a sentence is almost being sung reminds me of Jingpho spoken in Myanmar.
With lexical tone + that characteristic sentence-final tone, presence of reduced syllables, voiceless aspirated stops (but no breathy-voiced ones), and fairly unmarked vowels, my thought was also “Tibeto-Burman language of Burma (and surroundings)”, but it’s not a confident guess, and I can’t get more specific.
The language is S’gaw Karen (စှီၤ), a Karen language spoken in parts of Burma and Thailand.
Me too. But I figure this is a place for amateurs and we can have fun speculating until Sameer gives us actual facts. Interesting to learn that the sentence-final tone is characteristic of the language, and not just this speaker (or recitation).
Hahaha, it’s pretty rare that I can get any narrower than a broad region of the world, so really I’m just speculating too 🙂
First guess is a French based creole, but I could be entirely off base.
Sounds vaguely African/Bantu to me, but I could also swear that I heard the word ‘watashi’ (Japanese for ‘I’) a few times so who knows.
The very strange feature that the last syllable or word of a sentence is almost being sung reminds me of Jingpho spoken in Myanmar.
With lexical tone + that characteristic sentence-final tone, presence of reduced syllables, voiceless aspirated stops (but no breathy-voiced ones), and fairly unmarked vowels, my thought was also “Tibeto-Burman language of Burma (and surroundings)”, but it’s not a confident guess, and I can’t get more specific.
The language is S’gaw Karen (စှီၤ), a Karen language spoken in parts of Burma and Thailand.
The recording comes from the GRN.
As I said, I was way off base.
Me too. But I figure this is a place for amateurs and we can have fun speculating until Sameer gives us actual facts. Interesting to learn that the sentence-final tone is characteristic of the language, and not just this speaker (or recitation).
Hahaha, it’s pretty rare that I can get any narrower than a broad region of the world, so really I’m just speculating too 🙂
Here’s clue: this language is spoken in Dagestan.