14 thoughts on “Name the language”

  1. It’s Shanghainese! (Or 上海话…) My first thought upon reading the clue was Shanghainese and when I listened to the clip I had my suspicions confirmed. I really like Shanghainese (and Shanghai!!!) and plan to learn it some day.

  3. To me it kinda sounds like Japanese. I think it doesn’t really sound like other Chinese 话s b/c Shanghainese only has high and low tones and not 4 to 9 depending on the 话.

  4. Sounds like a mix of Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, and similar languages- Most notably like Japanese, but isn’t any of the above. Would be fascinating to hear a radio station in this unusual language.:)

    d.m.f.

  5. Try doing some language identification tests with some other language families. I have zero experience with Asian languages, but I do with others, and I’d love to try your challenges.

  7. This is the first one that really stumped me. I thought it sounded Slavic and was dumbfounded trying to think of a slavic language without official status spoken mainly in one city.
    AND I even speak Mandarin, so it’s a testament to the differences between Chinese dialects/languages that I was waaay out of the ballpark on this one.

  8. d.m.falk – as far as I know there aren’t any radio stations that broadcast in Shanghainese.

    jdotjdot89 – which language families are you familiar with?

  9. Many turkic-altaic languages sound slavic, at least to those not familiar with either. Shanghainese, or more properly Wu, may or may not be an altaic language. It has the added similarity to Korean (which is) and Japanese (which officially, no-one’s sure what family of languages it belongs to, if any). It certainly has the Japanese syllabic regularity. It is certainly unique being in a land otherwise surrounded by primarily sino-tibetan languages and dialects!

    d.m.f.

  10. The intonation makes it sound like a muddled korean, and like Trevor I speak a little mandarin, and was amazed at the difference

  11. At first I thought it sounded like a mix between Mandarin and Hebrew. I could tell it wasn’t either of course. Just some of the harsh kh sounds remind me of Hebrew.

  12. How weird! It almost sounded like an oscure dialect of Armenian. Really! I live in a city with 50,000+ Armenians and I almost thought I recognized a word here and there. Oh well! 🙂

  13. It is definitely Shanghainese, Chinese. I am Shanghainese and it is my first language. The guy was asking about the library.

    Chinese has so many different dialects, so you can’t say “this doesn’t sound Chinese,” because it’s like…well…what Chinese? Mandarin? Cantonese? What? Ya know?

  14. Shanghainese! my first language, people consider me amazing when i was spending time in Shanghai, according to them, not many people at my gae can speak the language fluently anymore. (im 17 years old). lol
    my mom’s side family are native Shanghainese, so thats why i know how to speak the language. 🙂

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