Do you know or can you guess the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
14 thoughts on “Language Quiz”
There are gutterals and something that sounds like glottal stops that make me think of a Semitic language. However I also hear what I think are clicks so I think it is southern Africa. Maybe Ndebele?
I’m going to guess it’s a South Arabian language but no idea which one
I’m thinking probably Semitic as well. /li:/ means “to me” in Hebrew, and I heard it sentence-final, which would be grammatically appropriate, but it’s definitely not Hebrew.
Just out of curiosity I checked the Semitic languages here in Language Families. I found Neo-Jewish Aramaic SORT of sounded like it but it’s a bit of a stretch at best.
Total guess – Somali?
Here’s a clue – this language is spoken in Europe.
Lots of Arabic numbers: fifty, five and nine. I also think it’s Maltese.
The quiz language can’t be Maltese because Maltese is Arabic with plenty Romance (Sicilian, Italian and some French) loanwords. This one contains Arabic loanwords, presumably because its speakers are Muslims. It is Archi, a North-East Caucasian language spoken in Daghestan, Russian Federation, and Azerbaijan.
A language with so many harsh sounds can only be North-Caucasian, with so much phonetic complexity. I agree with Emanuel. this is Archi.
I found the passage being read on Youtube. Y’all are right. It’s Archi.
The answer is indeed Archi (Аршаттен чӀат), a Northeast Caucasian language spoken in the Republic of Dagestan in the Russian Federation.
There are gutterals and something that sounds like glottal stops that make me think of a Semitic language. However I also hear what I think are clicks so I think it is southern Africa. Maybe Ndebele?
I’m going to guess it’s a South Arabian language but no idea which one
I’m thinking probably Semitic as well. /li:/ means “to me” in Hebrew, and I heard it sentence-final, which would be grammatically appropriate, but it’s definitely not Hebrew.
Just out of curiosity I checked the Semitic languages here in Language Families. I found Neo-Jewish Aramaic SORT of sounded like it but it’s a bit of a stretch at best.
Total guess – Somali?
Here’s a clue – this language is spoken in Europe.
Possibly Maltese?
Not related to the current recording, but a user on Reddit recorded a woman speaking a mysterious language in a hostel and so far it has evaded identification:
https://reddit.com/r/InternetMysteries/comments/kz8g90/still_unindentified_mysterious_language_language/
Any thoughts? 🙂
No idea what language it is in that recording. All the ones I thought of have been ruled out in the reddit discussion. Here’s a cleaned up version of the recording: https://www.omniglot.com/soundfiles/blog/mysterylanguagereddit.mp3
Lots of Arabic numbers: fifty, five and nine. I also think it’s Maltese.
The quiz language can’t be Maltese because Maltese is Arabic with plenty Romance (Sicilian, Italian and some French) loanwords. This one contains Arabic loanwords, presumably because its speakers are Muslims. It is Archi, a North-East Caucasian language spoken in Daghestan, Russian Federation, and Azerbaijan.
A language with so many harsh sounds can only be North-Caucasian, with so much phonetic complexity. I agree with Emanuel. this is Archi.
I found the passage being read on Youtube. Y’all are right. It’s Archi.
The answer is indeed Archi (Аршаттен чӀат), a Northeast Caucasian language spoken in the Republic of Dagestan in the Russian Federation.
The recording comes from YouTube: