Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
4 thoughts on “Language quiz”
Things I’m hearing that could be useful:
Uvular stop [q]
Voiced consonants like [ɡ dʒ]
Palatalized consonants like [mʲ sʲ nʲ~ɲ lʲ~ʎ]
Some sort of high-ish central-ish vowel like [ɨ], [ɯ], or [ə]
The atypical vowel and the uvular stop made me think “something core Altaic”, i.e. something in the Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic families. But it couldn’t be a Turkic language, which all have full vowel harmony (or at least a set of front rounded vowels), which I’m not hearing here. If it were Mongolic, that would explain the palatalization… but Mongolic languages have such notable lateral fricatives and dorsal fricatives that I don’t think it’s that either. So that just leaves Tungusic, which I know the least about. What Wikipedia tells me about this family, though, suggests this could be a good guess.
So, I’ll go for the most widely-spoken Tungusic language: is it Evenki?
I’m not sure I hear vowel harmony, which might suggest that it isn’t Turkic
The language is Nanai (Нанай), a Manchu-Tungus spoken in Siberia in the Russian Federation.
Things I’m hearing that could be useful:
Uvular stop [q]
Voiced consonants like [ɡ dʒ]
Palatalized consonants like [mʲ sʲ nʲ~ɲ lʲ~ʎ]
Some sort of high-ish central-ish vowel like [ɨ], [ɯ], or [ə]
The atypical vowel and the uvular stop made me think “something core Altaic”, i.e. something in the Turkic, Mongolic, or Tungusic families. But it couldn’t be a Turkic language, which all have full vowel harmony (or at least a set of front rounded vowels), which I’m not hearing here. If it were Mongolic, that would explain the palatalization… but Mongolic languages have such notable lateral fricatives and dorsal fricatives that I don’t think it’s that either. So that just leaves Tungusic, which I know the least about. What Wikipedia tells me about this family, though, suggests this could be a good guess.
So, I’ll go for the most widely-spoken Tungusic language: is it Evenki?
I’m not sure I hear vowel harmony, which might suggest that it isn’t Turkic
The language is Nanai (Нанай), a Manchu-Tungus spoken in Siberia in the Russian Federation.
The recording comes from YouTube.
Oooffff so close!