Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
6 thoughts on “Language quiz”
Another Romance one! Something similar to Italian but not. Is this one Sardinian?
Not european, probably South American but that is my best guess.
I’m going to guess something from Africa, Bantu family.
Definitely an eastern Bantu language, but which one I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to give it another listen, though since it doesn’t seem to be tonal, I would imagine it’s one of the northern/interior Tanzanian languages.
From the phrasing and some dribs and drabs of vocabulary I can make out, it sounds like the Christian Lord’s Prayer/Our Father. At one point I seem to make out ‘korera’, which sounds like the applicative of a verb ‘-kora’ (do) found in Great Lakes Bantu languages like Kirundi — and the lengthening of vowels before nasals and the voiced bilabial fricatives are also something shared with Kirundi, so it does sound like a Great Lakes area language. I just don’t know which language(s) in the area might be non-tonal, so I’ll just toss out a guess and say that just maybe this might be Kinyamwezi, spoken on the south shore of Lake Victoria and if I remember right, the mother tongue of Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere.
The answer is Ngonde, which is also known as Nyakyusa, or Nyakyusa-Ngonde, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania and Malawi.
Another Romance one! Something similar to Italian but not. Is this one Sardinian?
Not european, probably South American but that is my best guess.
I’m going to guess something from Africa, Bantu family.
Definitely an eastern Bantu language, but which one I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to give it another listen, though since it doesn’t seem to be tonal, I would imagine it’s one of the northern/interior Tanzanian languages.
From the phrasing and some dribs and drabs of vocabulary I can make out, it sounds like the Christian Lord’s Prayer/Our Father. At one point I seem to make out ‘korera’, which sounds like the applicative of a verb ‘-kora’ (do) found in Great Lakes Bantu languages like Kirundi — and the lengthening of vowels before nasals and the voiced bilabial fricatives are also something shared with Kirundi, so it does sound like a Great Lakes area language. I just don’t know which language(s) in the area might be non-tonal, so I’ll just toss out a guess and say that just maybe this might be Kinyamwezi, spoken on the south shore of Lake Victoria and if I remember right, the mother tongue of Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere.
The answer is Ngonde, which is also known as Nyakyusa, or Nyakyusa-Ngonde, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania and Malawi.
The recording comes from the GRN.