Hear that language!

[alice]

Apologies if this has already been posted:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKpLVH ... 6Fb0HocbvQ

It's a channel with audio samples of *lots* of different languages, and is useful for hearing what a particular language actually sounds like. It's interesting to try to reconcile it with what you've previously read about the phonetics.

[Frislander]

The sample texts are generally the most useful as they're the ones that are most consistently being read by native speakers (the only exceptions being the ancient languages for obvious reasons). The phrases are frequently either the channel hos (who's alright but rather frequently misses out some bits) or in a few cases they're people who've been learning the language non-natively for revitalisation (this is most obvious in the Blackfoot video).

[bradrn]

Looks like an excellent resource, so thanks for posting! But my absolute favourite for this is the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive, which has recordings of lots of different languages collected for the UCLA Phonetics Lab. It doesn’t have quite as many sample texts or long conversations as that YouTube channel (though there’s good ones for Tamazight and ǃXóõ), but it makes up for it with all its other recordings: since they were made for phonetic purposes, there’s often lots of words demonstrating how to say particular phonemes (e.g. Qʼeqchiʼ and Tzotzil have some particularly clear ejectives, while Hausa has some weak implosives).

[Yalensky]

I've spent a lot of time browsing through this youtube channel when I've wanted to hear how a language sounds: it's just lots and lots of dubbings of Jesus biopics (one movie for adults, one movie for kids, and sometimes the intro to the former differs a little). It's got the advantages of having long stretches of speech and of all translating the same text, which makes it useful for comparing closely related languages. For example, I've gone on that channel when I've wanted to test how much I can understand of various Slavic languages based on what I know of Russian. And as far as I can tell all the voice actors sound like native speakers.

[RichardFromMarple]

I've spent a lot of time browsing through this youtube channel when I've wanted to hear how a language sounds: it's just lots and lots of dubbings of Jesus biopics (one movie for adults, one movie for kids, and sometimes the intro to the former differs a little). It's got the advantages of having long stretches of speech and of all translating the same text, which makes it useful for comparing closely related languages. For example, I've gone on that channel when I've wanted to test how much I can understand of various Slavic languages based on what I know of Russian. And as far as I can tell all the voice actors sound like native speakers.

I've heard of this film as it was mentioned on a programme about religious films. It mentioned it's been dubbed into almost every language possible for missionary use. Certainly it's available in Luganda, which is one of the languages my wife speaks.

[Vijay]

FWIU it's not always accurate.

[Pabappa]

original page is down now so i guess we'll have to look for something else. i found Wikitongues yesterday just because i wanted to hear what Basque sounded like .... the video i found is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suK34prc56o .

[Travis B.]

original page is down now so i guess we'll have to look for something else. i found Wikitongues yesterday just because i wanted to hear what Basque sounded like .... the video i found is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suK34prc56o .

The comment it showed said that was in a really strong Spanish accent but none of the words were Spanish.

[Kuchigakatai]

The comment it showed said that was in a really strong Spanish accent but none of the words were Spanish.

To be honest that's practically a valid accent these days. Same goes for native Galician, some of which sounds very very Spanish-y, and some of it really not...