Please identify the language

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby languagepotato » 2018-12-13, 18:35

My family and i can't figure out what language this song is in. my brother thinks it's Somali. I, think it's an afro-asiatic language too (mainly due to the voiced pharyngeal fricative i hear in the uncut version), but i can't place it, to me it sounds like Arabic gibberish.

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Vlürch » 2018-12-17, 5:35

languagepotato wrote:My family and i can't figure out what language this song is in. my brother thinks it's Somali. I, think it's an afro-asiatic language too (mainly due to the voiced pharyngeal fricative i hear in the uncut version), but i can't place it, to me it sounds like Arabic gibberish.

Could it just be some variety of Arabic, or some Arabic-based creole like Juba Arabic or something? Just the fact that there's [æl] all over the place makes me think that, but of course I'm probably wrong since I don't actually speak Arabic and you do, so if you don't think it could be any kind of Arabic...

...but could the word that repeats a lot be جعل or something? I mean, the fourth [d͡ʒæʔæl] or whatever especially sounds more like [d͡ʒæʔˤæl~d͡ʒæʡ͡ʕæl] to my ears even if the first three times it sounds like it just has a glottal stop, not sure about the fifth and sixth. According to Wikipedia, the ayin in Hebrew and Aramaic can be pronounced [ʔˤ], but it doesn't sound like Hebrew and I'm not sure if it's possible that you wouldn't recognise and understand Aramaic if it was that...?

I found this video that's apparently in Juba Arabic, not sure if it sounds the same as the song though since the clip you posted is so short and repetitive. Obviously, since I'm not even able to tell apart different Arabic varieties/dialects, I couldn't really figure it out anyway. I think it sounds more "African" than Arabic usually does, but maybe I'm only imagining that and I'll get called racist again... :para:

Well, whatever it is, it's a real earworm. I'm sure I'll have it stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-12-18, 6:22

It's Somali. It's this Somali song called "Jaceyl u Kac" by Mursal Faladagan (AFAICT "jaceyl u kac" means 'rise to love'):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVjzqKBAa8w
Jaceyl is pronounced something like [d͡ʒəˈʕejl] and means 'love' in Somali.
Hegetsu wrote:Hello,

Do you know what is this language and what does it mean?

Image

Like Multiturquoise said, it's Arabic, but it doesn't make any sense at least without further context. My best attempt to translate it into English is: "...available on the wall. There are bottles in it and through it, you ladies can see from your pain whether he has my refrigerator." :?:
Saim wrote:I can't make head or tails of this. The person who asked thinks it's Arabic, but I'm honestly not sure. My best guess is d-m-r-w-sh-n but I could be wrong.

I see something like دراڨنا with the qaf written like in Tunisia. دراقنا in MSA I guess would mean 'our peach', but drague in French means something else entirely, so maybe it has something to do with that? Idk. :P
Last edited by vijayjohn on 2019-06-23, 23:45, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Moraczewski » 2019-03-18, 10:42


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Re: Please identify the language

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-03-18, 19:24

With all due respect, why are your recordings so distorted? They often sound like they have more than one signal on top of each other. I guess I could see the first two being at least partly in Greek (and also partly in Russian! But maybe that's just me). I think the third one and maybe also the fourth one is in Finnish. The fifth one sounds to me like a Slavic language. I'm tempted to say it's in Serbian, but that's mostly because as I was listening to it, I was thinking of another older recording that I know was in Serbian. :P The sixth one...I have no idea, my best guess is maybe Portuguese??? The seventh and eighth ones may well be at least partly in Greek, but I hear talking in the background in Russian in the seventh one.

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Moraczewski » 2019-03-18, 20:24

vijayjohn wrote:With all due respect, why are your recordings so distorted?

Yeah, sorry for that. That's what shortwave listening hobby is - to detect various weak signals on air. The distortion is typical for shortwave amateur radio, this is due to the type of modulation. Talks on the background might be me with my friends discussing what we hear. I really appreciate your help, thank you.

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Naava » 2019-03-18, 21:03

vijayjohn wrote:I think the third one and maybe also the fourth one is in Finnish.

The third one is Finnish, but I have no idea what the fourth one is. It's almost like several languages spoken at the same time. It could be Estonian, but I could swear I heard lauantai and something about Pentti and Tampere (in Tampere accent) in there... :hmm:

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby md0 » 2019-03-19, 5:42

Moraczewski wrote:Hello! I return with more shortwave recordings. I guess that some of these might be Greek because that's the language that I still don't often detect.

1. https://vocaroo.com/i/s1PLYkpV03ua
2. https://vocaroo.com/i/s1LPBwmKYjUK
3. https://vocaroo.com/i/s1KkvDcAQSVz
4. https://vocaroo.com/i/s1BsRBb5YvOF
5. https://vocaroo.com/i/s1q81dY1BT19
6. https://vocaroo.com/i/s0cg5A8Rn6Ry
7. https://vocaroo.com/i/s1pbJPonONtm
8. https://vocaroo.com/i/s0cxdwiJQtns


1. Greek
2. Greek, but either non-fluent or an extremely northern Greece dialect
7. Greek, but at the end it must be a different station interfering
8. Greek, likely ham-radio amateurs because they seem to discuss broadcast setups and receptions from Kosovo and Bulgaria

1 and 7 must be Voice of Greece/ERT. The other two are probably amateurs, which is interesting because I thought they only did pirate broadcasts on MW, not on SW.
Voice of Armenia has a small news bulletin in Greek, but I don't think 2 is that.

I used to be a SWListener too, until I moved inland and the geography ruined it for me.
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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Moraczewski » 2019-03-20, 15:55

md0 wrote:1 and 7 must be Voice of Greece/ERT. The other two are probably amateurs, which is interesting because I thought they only did pirate broadcasts on MW, not on SW.
Voice of Armenia has a small news bulletin in Greek, but I don't think 2 is that.

I used to be a SWListener too, until I moved inland and the geography ruined it for me.

Thank you very much! I'll have to learn some Greek words to be able to recognize the language, because at the moment I tend to mistake it for Spanish/Romanian/Hungarian/Lithuanian especially with poor radio reception. These recordings are all of radio amateurs, mostly licensed in the assigned bands (20m, 40m, 80m).

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby md0 » 2019-03-21, 5:19

Oh, I didn't realise. The two recordings I thought was ERT sounded quite professional and they seemed to be discussing current affairs so it didn't cross my mind it was all ham radio.
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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Moraczewski » 2019-03-21, 16:52

md0 wrote:Oh, I didn't realise. The two recordings I thought was ERT sounded quite professional and they seemed to be discussing current affairs so it didn't cross my mind it was all ham radio.

If I don't bother you much, could you tell in a couple of words what they are discussing on the recordings? Also on the first recording on 0:22 another voice shouts some phrase repeatedly, what's that?

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Vlürch » 2019-04-23, 21:10


Sounds like one of the Scandinavian languages, maybe? It pretty clearly has (cognates with) the words "barometer" and "temperature", although those have been borrowed into so many languages that it's not that big of a clue. I'd assume the "tip-top" and "super special" have the same meaning as in English as well. I think I also might hear "morgen" near the beginning and "åker" or something near the end, but I'm really not sure at all; also sounds like there could be "och" at a couple of parts, but well. Overall, the intonation sounds pretty much exactly like how Swedish sounds like whenever I hear it, but...
Naava wrote:It's almost like several languages spoken at the same time. It could be Estonian, but I could swear I heard lauantai and something about Pentti and Tampere (in Tampere accent) in there... :hmm:

I can hear the "lauantai" too, but the more times I hear that part, the more it sounds like it starts with [n] instead. If the "Tampere" is at 0:20, the first syllable is what I hear as the second syllable of "tip-top". But it definitely sounds like there's some interference: right around the "top", before the syllable ends, there's in a different voice what sounds like [enːɨj] or something, so presumably something in Russian or another a Slavic language. But then, Moraczewski did say he and his friends may have been discussing what they heard, so...

But yeah, you could be right, maybe it's Estonian. It does have the kind of jolliness to it, anyway. Ugh, how embarrassing is it that Fins can't tell apart Estonian and Swedish? Or at least I can't. I mean, usually I could, but when it's distorted like that... :oops:

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-04-24, 4:18

Vlürch wrote:maybe it's Estonian. It does have the kind of jolliness to it, anyway. Ugh, how embarrassing is it that Fins can't tell apart Estonian and Swedish?

:lol:

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Johanna » 2019-04-24, 8:34

Vlürch wrote:

Sounds like one of the Scandinavian languages, maybe? It pretty clearly has (cognates with) the words "barometer" and "temperature", although those have been borrowed into so many languages that it's not that big of a clue. I'd assume the "tip-top" and "super special" have the same meaning as in English as well. I think I also might hear "morgen" near the beginning and "åker" or something near the end, but I'm really not sure at all; also sounds like there could be "och" at a couple of parts, but well. Overall, the intonation sounds pretty much exactly like how Swedish sounds like whenever I hear it, but...
Naava wrote:It's almost like several languages spoken at the same time. It could be Estonian, but I could swear I heard lauantai and something about Pentti and Tampere (in Tampere accent) in there... :hmm:

I can hear the "lauantai" too, but the more times I hear that part, the more it sounds like it starts with [n] instead. If the "Tampere" is at 0:20, the first syllable is what I hear as the second syllable of "tip-top". But it definitely sounds like there's some interference: right around the "top", before the syllable ends, there's in a different voice what sounds like [enːɨj] or something, so presumably something in Russian or another a Slavic language. But then, Moraczewski did say he and his friends may have been discussing what they heard, so...

But yeah, you could be right, maybe it's Estonian. It does have the kind of jolliness to it, anyway. Ugh, how embarrassing is it that Fins can't tell apart Estonian and Swedish? Or at least I can't. I mean, usually I could, but when it's distorted like that... :oops:

I't definitely not Swedish or Norwegian (unless they speak in a very garbled non-native accent), apart from the couple of words you mentioned, I couldn't understand a thing. To me, it sounds a lot more like Finnish than any North-Germanic language...

Meänkieli perhaps? It sometimes sounds very much in the middle between Swedish and more southern dialects of Finnish when it comes to prosody, and it has more fricatives than most of Finnish too.
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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Naava » 2019-04-24, 10:24

Vlürch wrote:
Naava wrote:It's almost like several languages spoken at the same time. It could be Estonian, but I could swear I heard lauantai and something about Pentti and Tampere (in Tampere accent) in there... :hmm:

I can hear the "lauantai" too, but the more times I hear that part, the more it sounds like it starts with [n] instead. If the "Tampere" is at 0:20, the first syllable is what I hear as the second syllable of "tip-top". But it definitely sounds like there's some interference: right around the "top", before the syllable ends, there's in a different voice what sounds like [enːɨj] or something, so presumably something in Russian or another a Slavic language. But then, Moraczewski did say he and his friends may have been discussing what they heard, so...

But yeah, you could be right, maybe it's Estonian. It does have the kind of jolliness to it, anyway. Ugh, how embarrassing is it that Fins can't tell apart Estonian and Swedish? Or at least I can't. I mean, usually I could, but when it's distorted like that... :oops:

I'll try to listen to it once more and write down in more detail what I can hear when I have a chance. :hmm:

Johanna wrote:I't definitely not Swedish or Norwegian (unless they speak in a very garbled non-native accent), apart from the couple of words you mentioned, I couldn't understand a thing. To me, it sounds a lot more like Finnish than any North-Germanic language...

Meänkieli perhaps? It sometimes sounds very much in the middle between Swedish and more southern dialects of Finnish when it comes to prosody, and it has more fricatives than most of Finnish too.

I agree that it's not Swedish, but it's not meänkieli either. Meänkieli is so close to my native dialect that if the recording was in meänkieli, I should've been able to understand what they said.

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Linguaphile » 2019-04-24, 15:05

Naava wrote:It's almost like several languages spoken at the same time.

Vlürch wrote:But yeah, you could be right, maybe it's Estonian. It does have the kind of jolliness to it

Johanna wrote:It sometimes sounds very much in the middle between Swedish and more southern dialects of Finnish when it comes to prosody, and it has more fricatives than most of Finnish too.

Yeah, I agree with the above three quotes. :yep: I do hear what sound like Estonian-esque overlong consonants in there... I think this may be part of both the "jolliness" that Vlürch referred to and the "prosody of southern dialects of Finnish" that Johanna mentioned. But then there's the fact that I can't understand a word, and for Estonian the phonology is also off, especially in the second half. After the recording plays I keep imagining that I might have heard kujutame ette in there somewhere, because my brain really wants to make sense of the intonation patterns and tries to fill in what they could have meant rather than what I actually hear, but if I go back and listen again it's just not there. (And there's irony in that, because kujutame ette means "let's imagine" in Estonian.) :P
Too bad it's not a longer and clearer clip! All I can say is that to me it sounds like an Estonian (or related-language) version of one of those videos where someone says "This is what X language sounds like to me" and then proceeds to fire off random nonsense with the right intonation patterns and some (but not all) of the right phonemes but no actual words. :D

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Vlürch » 2019-04-24, 16:59

The more I listen to it, the clearer I hear [pɛreːʃta] or something like that around 0:15-0:16, which could be a cognate with or loanword from Persian فرشته (ferešte), meaning "angel". It's probably not that word, though, because what could angels have to do with barometers and the temperature? And it doesn't really sound like any language that'd have had much contact with Persian AFAICT, or at least doesn't sound Turkic or Indo-Aryan or anything...

Could it be Albanian? Basque? Bulgarian?

I swear, if it turns out to be Brazilian Portuguese again... :lol:

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby h34 » 2019-04-25, 12:22

The intonation and some of the words make it sound a bit like Swiss German. I think I can hear [bɑro'mɛ:tr] ('barometer'), ['tu:si(n)t] ('a thousand'), [dɛ 'mɔrgə] ('the morning'), ['nɛkʃtə 'vʊxə]('next week'), [gə'nau]('exactly'; although this would be Standard German), [tɛmpəratu:r] ('temperature'), [… 'grɑ:t 'vo:rdə] ('reaching/going to reach/up to X degrees'), ['su:pr ʃpɛtsi'ɑ:l] ('super special') and [ɑ:br] ('but'). I might be completely wrong, though.

Edit: Adding the link again
4. https://vocaroo.com/i/s1BsRBb5YvOF

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Linguaphile » 2019-04-25, 14:54

h34 wrote:The intonation and some of the words make it sound a bit like Swiss German. I think I can hear [bɑro'mɛ:tr] ('barometer'), ['tu:si(n)t] ('a thousand'), [dɛ 'mɔrgə] ('the morning'), ['nɛkʃtə 'vʊxə]('next week'), [gə'nau]('exactly'; although this would be Standard German), [tɛmpəratu:r] ('temperature'), [… 'grɑ:t 'vo:rdə] ('reaching/going to reach/up to X degrees'), ['su:pr ʃpɛtsi'ɑ:l] ('super special') and [ɑ:br] ('but'). I might be completely wrong, though.

h34, I think you've got it! :mrgreen:

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Re: Please identify the language

Postby Car » 2019-04-25, 18:32

h34 wrote:The intonation and some of the words make it sound a bit like Swiss German. I think I can hear [bɑro'mɛ:tr] ('barometer'), ['tu:si(n)t] ('a thousand'), [dɛ 'mɔrgə] ('the morning'), ['nɛkʃtə 'vʊxə]('next week'), [gə'nau]('exactly'; although this would be Standard German), [tɛmpəratu:r] ('temperature'), [… 'grɑ:t 'vo:rdə] ('reaching/going to reach/up to X degrees'), ['su:pr ʃpɛtsi'ɑ:l] ('super special') and [ɑ:br] ('but'). I might be completely wrong, though.

Edit: Adding the link again
4. https://vocaroo.com/i/s1BsRBb5YvOF

So I wasn't the only one who thought of Swiss German. Actually, I feared I might be so far off I didn't even post. :lol:
Please correct my mistakes!


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