Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
3 thoughts on “Language quiz”
About the only significant clue I can pick out is that every line ends with /vai/. What language would tend to have that grammatical construction?
On the one hand, /-ay/ is said to be a verb suffix indicating 2nd person singular in Dravidian languages where the verb seems to be sentence final. And it’s not unusual to address a person in a song.
On the other hand, the singing style and the lack of retroflex sounds tell me that the language is not spoken or sung on the Indian subcontinent.
The language is Oroqen, a Tungusic language spoken in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang in northern China.
About the only significant clue I can pick out is that every line ends with /vai/. What language would tend to have that grammatical construction?
On the one hand, /-ay/ is said to be a verb suffix indicating 2nd person singular in Dravidian languages where the verb seems to be sentence final. And it’s not unusual to address a person in a song.
On the other hand, the singing style and the lack of retroflex sounds tell me that the language is not spoken or sung on the Indian subcontinent.
The language is Oroqen, a Tungusic language spoken in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang in northern China.
The recording comes from YouTube: