Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
15 thoughts on “Language quiz”
Sounds like a Southeast Asian language, perhaps a Filipino or eastern Indonesian ethnic language.
Sounds Philippine but not quite. If it’s Austronesian then “tao” means “person”. Other than that, I’m not hearing many words I recognize. From the few words that I think I can identify as verbs, I think it’s verb medial, which would put it in Indonesia/New Guinea rather than Taiwan/Philippines? I’ll go out on a limb and guess Tukangbesi.
I’d go further North to mainland Southeast Asia and tend towards a Mon-Khmer language spoken in Indochina.
South-East Asian, obviously. My nine-year-old daughter says it sounds Indonesian, and I agree, but since I don’t recognise any of the few words I know, it’s not likely to be Bahasa Indonesia or a close kin of it. So I’ll just guess some variety of Dayak.
(I even thought of picking a Formosan language, but couldn’t find one with the right phonology.)
(But I’m probably wrong. My wife’s reaction was “like Vietnamese, but not quite”, and she pinned Vietnamese.)
Cham?
d.m.f.
I’m wondering if I should change my guess to a Formosan language. Choosing one would be no more than a guess.
I speak some Indonesian, and it’s not that or one of its close relatives. It sounds potentially tonal, so I am going to guess Lao.
I also recognized a similarity to Vietnamese, but I don’t think it’s tonal.
Probably in the Mon-Khmer family.
So what about Sedang, a Mon-Khmer language spoken in Vietnam?
The more comments I read the more I change my mind. I still think it’s Austronesian, and a Chamic language would fit best with all the Mon-Khmer influence. Since dmf said Cham already, I will say Jarai.
Here’s a clue – this language is spoken in the Philippines.
So, what language of the Philippines has /f/ (in what I can’t discern as a loan)? Ibanag?
The answer is Tboli (aka T’boli, Tagabili, Tiboli), a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by about 95,000 people in South Cotabato Province in south west Mindanao in the Philippines.
Ouch. I wanted to go to Mindanao, but that /f/ drove me up north.
Dang, I was closest when I went to Sulawesi for my first guess.
@Trond: From the sparse sources of words I can find, it looks like there has been some shifting of /p/ to /f/ in Tboli. Looks like it’s also happened in some other southern Philippine languages. I have never heard it in any of the widely spoken ones, or any up north.
Sounds like a Southeast Asian language, perhaps a Filipino or eastern Indonesian ethnic language.
Sounds Philippine but not quite. If it’s Austronesian then “tao” means “person”. Other than that, I’m not hearing many words I recognize. From the few words that I think I can identify as verbs, I think it’s verb medial, which would put it in Indonesia/New Guinea rather than Taiwan/Philippines? I’ll go out on a limb and guess Tukangbesi.
I’d go further North to mainland Southeast Asia and tend towards a Mon-Khmer language spoken in Indochina.
South-East Asian, obviously. My nine-year-old daughter says it sounds Indonesian, and I agree, but since I don’t recognise any of the few words I know, it’s not likely to be Bahasa Indonesia or a close kin of it. So I’ll just guess some variety of Dayak.
(I even thought of picking a Formosan language, but couldn’t find one with the right phonology.)
(But I’m probably wrong. My wife’s reaction was “like Vietnamese, but not quite”, and she pinned Vietnamese.)
Cham?
d.m.f.
I’m wondering if I should change my guess to a Formosan language. Choosing one would be no more than a guess.
I speak some Indonesian, and it’s not that or one of its close relatives. It sounds potentially tonal, so I am going to guess Lao.
I also recognized a similarity to Vietnamese, but I don’t think it’s tonal.
Probably in the Mon-Khmer family.
So what about Sedang, a Mon-Khmer language spoken in Vietnam?
The more comments I read the more I change my mind. I still think it’s Austronesian, and a Chamic language would fit best with all the Mon-Khmer influence. Since dmf said Cham already, I will say Jarai.
Here’s a clue – this language is spoken in the Philippines.
So, what language of the Philippines has /f/ (in what I can’t discern as a loan)? Ibanag?
The answer is Tboli (aka T’boli, Tagabili, Tiboli), a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by about 95,000 people in South Cotabato Province in south west Mindanao in the Philippines.
The recording comes from the Global Recordings Network.
Ouch. I wanted to go to Mindanao, but that /f/ drove me up north.
Dang, I was closest when I went to Sulawesi for my first guess.
@Trond: From the sparse sources of words I can find, it looks like there has been some shifting of /p/ to /f/ in Tboli. Looks like it’s also happened in some other southern Philippine languages. I have never heard it in any of the widely spoken ones, or any up north.