What languages are these?

[jbsegal]

So, one of the justices of the peace listed on Somerville's hand-out sheet speaks the following languages:

English, Afrikaans, Arabic, Dutch, Gujarati, Hindi, Laapa-Laapa, Nchiyanja, Nshona, Persian Farsee, Portuguese, and Urdu.

The internet... in the form of Google, and of Wikipedia, has never heard of 3 of them.

I'd guess that they're African, but... I don't know!!!

Anyone?

Comments

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna guess:
Laapa-Laapa - a dialect of Swahili
Nchiyanja - poor romanization of 'Chinyanja', the language of Malawi
Nshona - poor romanization of 'Shona', the language of Zimbabwe

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

So where do these guesses come from? Not that they seem /wrong/... just... sourceless?

Also, Hi... who are you? :)

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

They're guesses. They come from... ...brainspace? I dunno. I started making typos on purpose into Google, and those second two seemed like good guesses based on the results I got from that. The first one, I was reading (well, okay, 'looking at', since I can't actually read it) some articles in Swahili, and the word 'Laapa' kept showing up. That may not be terribly conclusive though, since it also shows up in romanized Russian (or something cyrillic-looking) and something else Scandanavian - but I figured you were probably on the right track with 'African', so I kept going with that.

As for who I am-

...uh- ...Telegram!

[sauergeek.livejournal.com]

also_huey is a long-haired Republican former Army hippie redneck. Despite all this, he is not terminally confused -- or at least it doesn't seem that way most of the time. He also regularly goes exploring friends-of-friends journals, which is assuredly how he ended up here. You have numerous people in common with him, so who knows whose journal he chased through to get here.

[avram]

"Persian Farsee"? There's such a thing as non-Persian Farsi?

[dsrtao]

It would be difficult, since Persi and Farsi are the same word, just like Beijing and Peking.

[dpolicar]

I like the idea of making up languages and claiming to speak them. It's not exactly a lie... though it's not exactly true, either.

[weegoddess.livejournal.com]

I didn't check Wikipedia, but I do know that Afrikaans is the Dutch dialect that many speak in South Africa. Living in Belgium (the Flemish part) taught me that, since there were lots of South African immigrants coming in.

[naiaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the fact that Ethnologue doesn't know about these languages is extremely suspect. Along the lines of what also_huey said before:

Nshona *could* mean Northern Shona, which is a dialect of Shona spoken in Zambia.
Nchiyanja is an anagram of Chinyanja... take that as you will.
Laapa-Laapa is very suspicious.

And in case you didn't know:
Afrikaans is a Germanic language spoken in South Africa.
Gujarati is an Indian language spoken in Gujarat, which is in India.
Urdu is spoken in Pakistan.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

The internet does suggest that Laapa-Laapa (or Lapalapa) is a variant of Fanakalo / Fanagalo, an African lingua franca. I'm guessing that also_huey is right about Shona -- it's a Bantu language that is spoken in Zimbabwe (though it is far from "the language of Zimbabwe", I believe). I'm guessing that either they overgeneralized the N- from, say, Ndebele and Ngani, or I have no idea what the N- prefix means in Bantu languages and "Nshona" is a perfectly intelligible thing for a Shona to say. So, if you remove the N- from Nchiyanja and add an extra n, you get another Bantu language, Chinyanja / Chichewa, spoken in Zimbabwe and Malawi and Mozambique and Zambia.

According to the internet.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

(also note that you can find references to the Nshona *tribe*.)

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

I'm going to guess that they're from the Indian sub-continent. Gujarati, Hindi, and Urdu are all Indian languages. OTOH Afrikaans, Dutch, and Portuguese are very much languages of European colonies in Africa, so. . . maybe you're right.

Which three have never been heard of?

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

Try asking thnidu...