# How many Languages Can You Identify by Ear

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-you-identify-by-ear/969297>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [August 8, 2022, 9:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-you-identify-by-ear/969297 "2022-08-08T09:11:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2022, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-languages-can-you-identify-by-ear/969297/21 "2022-08-09T19:15:29Z")

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I can usually tell French, Spanish, Italian, English, Dutch and German apart. I can also tell that someone’s speaking something Slavic, but I can’t tell if it’s Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Czech or anything else. Same with Scandinavian languages.

Same with lesser Romance languages; I’d be able to recognize that Provencal or Catalan are Romance languages, but it’s unlikely that I could tell what actual language it is, without more context. Meaning that if I’m in Barcelona and I hear something Spanish-like, I’d guess it’s Catalan, but if I was on the street here in the US, I’d realize it’s not Spanish, French or Italian, and that it is a Romance language, but that’s about it.

I can probably tell a Vietnamese speaker from other Asian languages, but that’s just due to having grown up in an area with a lot of Vietnamese spoken. I can’t tell Chinese from Korean or Japanese, for example. Or Tagalog from any of them.

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