Spoken Language Quiz.

March 4, 2015 by languagehat 5 Comments

Can you guess the language being spoken? Takes a while to load (at least it did for me), but worth it. I got fewer wrong than I would have expected; I was not at all surprised that one of the ones I missed was European Portuguese (see this LH post). Thanks, Bathrobe!

Update. It seems to be loading pretty much instantaneously now; perhaps they fixed something. Give it a try!

Comments

squadron leader squiffy von bladet says

March 6, 2015 at 3:25 am

I guessed roughly the ones I guessed I would guess, so I guess my metaguessing is in pretty good shape at least?
Il vergognoso says

March 6, 2015 at 4:51 am

Tried twice, got all for both.
Hans says

March 6, 2015 at 5:21 am

Nice when you do it the first time, but they keep repeating not only the samples, but even the sets, so trying it several times is a bit futile (except if people want to deceive themselves concerning their language recognition skills).
languagehat says

March 6, 2015 at 10:04 am

Yeah, that disappointed me too. It would be great if they expanded it.
George Gibbard says

March 7, 2015 at 2:12 am

I got tripped up on Swahili: the sample had examples of pre-pausal consonants v and z, which were not something I expected to happen in Swahili (even Arabic tafaðˠðˠal ‘please (e.g. come in, sit down)’ has to become tafadhali in standard Swahili), so I guessed Zulu, but it was indeed Swahili.

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Spoken Language Quiz.

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