Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
9 thoughts on “Language quiz”
Something Philippine?
Not Philippine, but it is Austronesian.
I hear contraceptive vowel length and .
I have no idea which language it is but they sound happies.
Oops. I meant to say that I heard /ao/.
Well, it doesn’t sound like Malagasy, Malay, Indonesian, Chamorro, or any of the Polynesian languages… so I suppose that if it’s not a Philippine language, it could be a minority language of Indonesia, or maybe a Formosan language?
It is a Formosan language, according to some sources, or may belong to it’s own branch of the Austronesian language family, according to others.
Ah! Makes sense – is it in the Batanic group? I won’t be able to guess the language with certainty, but the language sub-family makes sense given its intermediate (and hard-to-place) position between the Formosan languages and the Philippine languages.
Sounds more on the Philippine side to me, so if I had to guess, I’d say Ivatan or another language of the Batanes Islands, rather than Yami or another language of Orchid Island. Also makes sense since Ivatan has native words with [f] (like the recording does in a few places), while Yami doesn’t, and also Ivatan uses /ʔoʔon/ for ‘yes’, which is closer to the Tagalog /ʔoʔo/ (which I seem to hear a f w of in the recording) than the Yami /nohon/ is.
The language is Bunun, an Austronesian language spoken mainly in central and southern Taiwan.
Something Philippine?
Not Philippine, but it is Austronesian.
I hear contraceptive vowel length and .
I have no idea which language it is but they sound happies.
Oops. I meant to say that I heard /ao/.
Well, it doesn’t sound like Malagasy, Malay, Indonesian, Chamorro, or any of the Polynesian languages… so I suppose that if it’s not a Philippine language, it could be a minority language of Indonesia, or maybe a Formosan language?
It is a Formosan language, according to some sources, or may belong to it’s own branch of the Austronesian language family, according to others.
Ah! Makes sense – is it in the Batanic group? I won’t be able to guess the language with certainty, but the language sub-family makes sense given its intermediate (and hard-to-place) position between the Formosan languages and the Philippine languages.
Sounds more on the Philippine side to me, so if I had to guess, I’d say Ivatan or another language of the Batanes Islands, rather than Yami or another language of Orchid Island. Also makes sense since Ivatan has native words with [f] (like the recording does in a few places), while Yami doesn’t, and also Ivatan uses /ʔoʔon/ for ‘yes’, which is closer to the Tagalog /ʔoʔo/ (which I seem to hear a f w of in the recording) than the Yami /nohon/ is.
The language is Bunun, an Austronesian language spoken mainly in central and southern Taiwan.
The recording comes from YouTube.