Language quiz

Here’s a recording in a mystery language.


This entry was posted in Language, Quiz questions.

6 Responses to Language quiz

  1. Ned says:

    Another Romance one! Something similar to Italian but not. Is this one Sardinian?

  2. Roger Bowden says:

    Not european, probably South American but that is my best guess.

  3. jonathan says:

    I’m going to guess something from Africa, Bantu family.

  4. Christopher Miller says:

    Definitely an eastern Bantu language, but which one I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to give it another listen, though since it doesn’t seem to be tonal, I would imagine it’s one of the northern/interior Tanzanian languages.

  5. Christopher Miller says:

    From the phrasing and some dribs and drabs of vocabulary I can make out, it sounds like the Christian Lord’s Prayer/Our Father. At one point I seem to make out ‘korera’, which sounds like the applicative of a verb ‘-kora’ (do) found in Great Lakes Bantu languages like Kirundi — and the lengthening of vowels before nasals and the voiced bilabial fricatives are also something shared with Kirundi, so it does sound like a Great Lakes area language. I just don’t know which language(s) in the area might be non-tonal, so I’ll just toss out a guess and say that just maybe this might be Kinyamwezi, spoken on the south shore of Lake Victoria and if I remember right, the mother tongue of Tanzania’s first president, Julius Nyerere.

  6. Simon says:

    The answer is Ngonde, which is also known as Nyakyusa, or Nyakyusa-Ngonde, a Bantu language spoken in Tanzania and Malawi.

    The recording comes from the GRN.