Language quiz

By Simon

Today we have a song in a number of different languages. Can you work out what they are?

If you recognise the song, it’s not too difficult to find out the languages, but try to guess them first.

Please note, the audio file is quite large – 3MB – so may take a while to download.

21 thoughts on “Language quiz”

  1. I think I hear at least 15 languages. I can identity English, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Mandarin, Japanese.

    Not sure if I hear Korean in the middle of the song.

    My guess for others: Portuguese, Swetish, Polish, Czech, Greek, Russian.

    May I know who the singer is?

  2. From the beginning I hear: English, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Korean(?) and French, but then I get lost. But there is definitely some mandarin and japanese later on. And some form of slavic.

  3. the song won’t load……………down the bottom of the webpage it says it has finished loading but the page is just blank.

  4. English, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Korean, Quebecois, Turkish, Portuguese, Chinese (Mandarin?), Japanese, Castellano, Slovak, Icelandic, Polish, and French. The only one I’m not certain about is which Chinese was used.

  6. I got English, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese and French. I recognised the song but couldn’t remember the name of the song until the very last line though. I do remember liking that song as a child though, so thanks! 🙂

  7. wow I love this 😀 The song was terribly familiar but only the video helped 🙂 unfortunately they didn’t include Hungarian 🙁

  8. The one thing Logan got wrong is Québécois (which isn’t a language)

    And out of curiousity, is this song The colors of the rainbow (from Pocahontas)?

  9. Edit: I just looked at the YouTube video, it’s ‘of the Wind’* Bah, close enough.

  10. [Zachary R.]
    Okay, le français québécois, then. Close enough 🙂 I’d typed in ‘French’ the first time I listened to it and then went back and changed it when there was French at the end of the song, too. The first is unmistakably the Quebec dialect.

  12. I got 7 out of 15, not bad going for someone who is not a linguist I guess.

    I have to admit that the intricacies of the differences between Spanish and Castilliano are lost me though – as far as I ‘know’ (which quite obviously must be wrong) Castilliano == Spanish or rather is the ‘proper’ Spanish, like you have English and ‘the Queen’s English’, so making a distinction between the two in this case seems strange to me.

    Anyways, I love this version of the song ! Thanks for introducing me to it.
    In a strange way it reminds me of a far less lovely, but also very multilingual song called ‘Vlieg met me mee (naar de regenboog rainbow)’ by Paul de Leeuw.
    That might be a nice one for a next quiz, though I have to admit that I am not sure whether the content is appropriate as I haven’t got a clue what he’s singing in some of the other languages, might just as well be nonsense which just sounds like some other language.
    Drop me a line if you want a sound file of (one of the several versions available of) the song.

  14. The song is ‘Colors of the Wind’ from the movie, Pocahontas. You can find a transcription of the words of this multilingual version at:
    http://www.lingulangu.org/?p=33

    There are quite a few other songs in multiple languages on YouTube, most of which are from cartoons.

    David – you can find the Dutch lyrics to ‘Vlieg met me mee’ here, and the multilingual lyrics here, and there’s a recording of the song on YouTube.

  15. Juliette: Actually, in this case Spanish refers to “Spanish as spoken in (some country of) latin-america”, while Castillian refers to “Spanish as spoken in Spain”. In Spain, “Castellano” is a widely used term since it isn’t the only official language of the country.

  17. Anònim:
    Thanks for the explanation, I realized that Castelliano is used in Spain quite a lot and the reason why, I just didn’t realize that people used it to contrast Spanish Spanish against Latin American Spanish.

    Simon:
    The first lyrics link you provided links to a completely different song which just happens to have the same title.
    >>> So for anyone interested: please disregard that link.

    The second link is correct for one version of the song – the song was only ever multilingual and there are several versions of it, most in some way taking the mickey out of the Eurosong Festival (which I believe was part of the song’s inspiration).

    The YouTube version of the song is a combination with another song and is actually quite a non-standard version of the Vlieg met me mee song – it has lots of references included to things which were happening at that specific time in NL in a stand-up comedian type of way.

    David:
    There is no Dutch-only version.

    This link will take you straight to a mp3 of one of the ‘songfestival’ versions of the song which is a sort of standard version of the song.
    Hope this helps 😉

  18. Thanx Halabund 🙂

    I luv both multi-songs but it is really sad that while Pocahontas speeks several languages (even Hungarian or icelandic) she does not speak at least one Native American…

  19. Sorry to change the subject, but, I went to lingulangu.com and I took a language quiz there to find out which language I should learn. It was a very interesting quiz. I ended up getting Swedish because I’m laid back and I enjoy life or something like that. I just used the link Simon put up to find the transcription of the Pocahontas song.

  20. Thanks ISPKN for the mention 😉 the site is lingulangu.org
    Maybe Simon shares the link here 😉 That would ben nice.

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