Name the language

Here’s a recording in a mystery language.


This entry was posted in Language, Quiz questions.

12 Responses to Name the language

  1. William says:

    A Native American language? Maybe a central or south Asian language?

  2. Greg says:

    I realize this covers a lot of bases, but to me it sounds simultaneously as a Bantu/Arabic hybrid (like Swahili or a Sahel language) and a Malay-related language.

  3. xarxa says:

    a language from the horn of africa, amharic, tigre, something like that

  4. Halabund says:

    I think it is Hausa, based on googling for fragments that I tried to spell out.

  5. dmh says:

    I found the word “amarka” in an article about Somaliland. So, Somali?

  6. pennifer says:

    Closest I can get is Africa.

  7. Halabund says:

    dmh, however, if you spell it ‘Amurka’, Google will serve up a pile of Hausa pages, many of them radio stations. Apparently it was not only I for whom this was the most noticeable word in the recoding. Ironically, ‘Amurka’ is not even a true Hausa word: it simply means ‘America’.

  8. michael farris says:

    After some initial indecision, my guess was Hausa, so I’ll stick with that.

  9. formiko says:


  10. Simon says:

    The language is Hausa (حَوْسَ), which is spoken mainly in Nigeria and Niger.

    The recording comes from Deutsche Welle.

  11. Eelkje says:

    The only thing i got out of it was ‘something arabic’ (sorry, i’m no linguist) AND a sort of weird German ring to it. I felt sort of proud when i read the fragment came from deutsche welle!

  12. Julia says:

    At first thought something slavic (talking about Barack Obama), but then there were some glottal stops, so not quite sure …

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