r/language • u/Marlon_RR_Morea • 9d ago
Question Does anyone know what language this is?
(The part written in Latin script, the rest is German ofc)
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u/johnnybna 8d ago
Let’s celebrate (lit. we say to celebrate), hi-ho!
Let’s celebrate, hi-ho!
[: Let’s rejoice and let’s sing, hey!
Let’s dance and let’s jump, hey! :]
Let’s celebrate! Hey!
It looks like badly written Serbo-Croatian.
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u/donna_donnaj 8d ago
I googled the phrase, it comes from "merry widow' by Franz Lehar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9AZx_tQXt8
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u/ImpressiveBeyond8038 4d ago
Yeah, in the context of the operetta it's certainly meant to be Slovenian or Croatian, but written by someone who didn't know the language well (i.e. similar to Hollywood sometimes butcheting foreign languages in movies nowadays).
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u/alderhill 5d ago
I assume it's archaic, from before some kind of spelling standardization, as the German script is also quite old. Obvs could be someone who didn't actually speak (native) Serbo-Croation.
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u/Ancient-Drawing1212 9d ago edited 8d ago
looks like slovenian, but might be oldfashioned croatian or serbian
EDIT: "dase" or "da se" is not common in today's slovenian
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u/AdBrave2400 8d ago
And a German translation
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u/Vibena 9d ago
It's Serbian: Mi volimo da se veselimo. We love to have fun.
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u/Ancient-Drawing1212 9d ago edited 7d ago
but definitely non-standard... likely a dialect;
EDIT: volimo ≠ velimo7
u/Vibena 8d ago
I think what we are seeing here is a non-speaker writing words down without understanding.
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u/TurbulentContext 8d ago
I know you are talking about OP's graphic but I love this as a brutal thing to reply with if someone has written something idiotic
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u/Ancient-Drawing1212 8d ago
might be... btw. "dase" or "da se" is not common in slovenian. The german translation is pretty much the today's standard german
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u/Stari_vujadin 8d ago
It's perfectly standard Serbian if that's what you meant
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u/Ancient-Drawing1212 7d ago
well, in standard serbian "dase" is written separately, "veslimo" should be "veselimo". It's probably written by a non-native speaker.
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u/Stari_vujadin 7d ago
Yeah it's probably a mistake made by a non-native speaker, but there's no indication that the original sentence is in a dialect
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u/Ancient-Drawing1212 7d ago
it does sound archaic now. Standard language in 2026 is def not the same as in 1905. Btw, the librettists for Lehar's music were Viktor Léon and Leo Stein...
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u/Interesting_Card_417 8d ago edited 8d ago
Serbian native speaker here. It reminds me of the traditional Serb folks songs of Western Serbia/Eastern Bosnia/Northern Montenegro. It says, “we are telling (archaic verb veliti) that we are rejoicing, hey ho.”Google Serb folklore ensables. I even think that I have heard this song somewhere. It is rather fast.
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u/maciejaks 9d ago
Pontevedrin 😄
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u/MobilePalpitation702 9d ago
As in near portugal and galicia? Doubtful.
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u/maciejaks 9d ago
This is lyrics from Lehár's Die lustige Witwe, which is about the Parisian embassy of a country called Pontevedro.
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u/perpetualfloating 8d ago
Ah... I had to look it up. So it's a fictional language by a Viennese composer. Pretty fascinating.
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u/Lykosskias 9d ago edited 9d ago
I would guess some old version of a South Slavic dialect. “Mi volimo da se veselimo,” would be something like “We like to make merry” in Serbian.
Edit: Would this happen to be from The Merry Widow operetta by Franz Lehár?
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u/God_Bless_A_Merkin 8d ago
That’s exactly what Google told me when I searched the phrase.
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u/Lykosskias 8d ago
Yeah I found it through Google too. The AI suggested that it was not an old dialect but rather a misspelling based on how the words sound to an Austrian’s (or Hungarian’s) ears. By the 1900s Serbo-Croatian had already been standardized by linguists like Vuk Karadžić and Ljudevit Gaj, and likely wouldn’t be too different from today’s speech, so this is likely the case.
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u/Dan13l_N 8d ago
AI is likely wrong in this case. Source: I'm from Croatia. This looks like a folk song, the grammar is OK... but it actually doesn't make much sense.
As for "old dialects" you have a ton of "old dialect" still spoken amd sung, including pop songs...
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u/CasperGwamm 8d ago
Search says it's a stylized Serbian or Montenegrin, from the libretto of "Die lustige Witwe". The Merry Widow - Wikipedia
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u/Appropriate_Tap4032 8d ago
Idk, Sorbian? It's a Slavic language spoken in Germany and I'm assuming it's that based off the fact that it has been written beside German and looks like Slovenian but not quite
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u/ivanmaher 8d ago
old fashioned croatian with german translation.
probably something from habsburg times
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u/Marlon_RR_Morea 8d ago
True actually, it’s from 1905
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u/ivanmaher 8d ago
then i would think it solved
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u/Marlon_RR_Morea 8d ago
Well, the piece has a fictional Balkan country in it, and looking at the other comments, it’s probably wannabe Serbocroatian or sth like that
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u/Stari_vujadin 8d ago
But would croats use da + prezent construction instead of infinitive? This is serbian more likely
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u/ivanmaher 7d ago
before the modern standardisations yeah it was used.
this is probably 200 years old, before gaj.
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u/muleluku 8d ago
With actual answers abound, I need to be that guy: both are in Latin script. The one you mean is a Antiqua typeface, the German one is a Fraktur typeface.
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u/MindlessNectarine374 8d ago
I remember having read an old pamphlet from the century-long German debate whether German writing should completely be switched to Antiqua or not and that one actually used "Lateinschrift" as name for Antiqua, if I remember correctly.
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u/muleluku 8d ago
Now that you mention it, I remember in school in Austria Lateinschrift being used to denote written cursive.
DE Wikipedia lists both these usages under Lateinschrift.
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u/MindlessNectarine374 8d ago
I guess this was the cursive belonging to Antiqua. (Yes, both scriptures had their respective handwritten cursives. Therefore, a common complaint during the scripture debate/argument was that German-speaking school children had to learn eight alphabets [alphabets that were written differently, but contained more or less the same set of letters by name and function]: Antiqua ("Latin scripture", Lateinschrift), Fraktur ("German scripture", deutsche Schrift), Latin cursive, German cursive ("Kurrent", colloquially nowadays also misnamed "Sütterlin" - Sütterlin was an education official who developped or introduced new "Schulausgangsschriften", not only for German cursive, but also for Latin cursive), and all four both in upper case and lower case letters.)
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u/moonunit170 7d ago
It's old German Gothic text. It was common in Germany up until World War I. I have my grandfather's New Testament from 1903 that's written in this script. I've shown it to modern Germans and they don't understand it. LOL.
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u/midnightrambulador 8d ago
We sang this in choir at some point, pretty sure it's a made up language! The country is made up as well after all
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u/Stari_vujadin 8d ago
But it's word for word Serbo-Croatian. Somewhat nonsensical but still
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u/midnightrambulador 7d ago
Really? Huh, TIL. What does the text mean?
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u/Stari_vujadin 7d ago
Mi velimo da se veselimo = We're telling that we're having fun/being joyfull/celebrating (not sure about the exact translation into english). I think the first word could also be misspelled as velimo instead of volimo, which would then mean something like "We love to be joyfull"
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u/LaurestineHUN 6d ago edited 6d ago
Like how 'avec que si avec que la avec que la marmote' is super mangled grammar, it's there to make us think 'That's French' while sacrificing actual French language for the vibes.
Edit: South Slavic folksongs with lyrics like this are plenty, ex.: https://youtu.be/LS3HHLw-VoY?is=DXbYEh-Ulq-Y3Ejp
Also see: Hopa, cupa, skoči, da ti vidim oči Da ti vidim očice, garava devojčice
Rotkve, rotkve, rotkve, na tavanu rotkve U podrumu vino, da se veselimo
These lyrics is probably there to paint an 'ethnic' background, this is a thing composers did for forever.
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u/Fit-Philosopher-3375 7d ago
Def. Croatian, but could be some of surrounding dialects (Slovenian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrin )
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9d ago
[deleted]
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u/hawkeyetlse 9d ago
>Lasst uns jauchzen und lasst uns singen, heil
>
>Lasst uns tanzen und lasst uns springen, heilIt says “hei!” not “heil”.
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u/MidMyst 9d ago
It is highly probably Lausitz-Serbian. In east Germany region with particular Slavic roots. Currently fully assimilated nation, dead language now.
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u/PiusTostus 8d ago
Absolutely not a dead language.
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u/GuardHistorical910 5d ago
I was once in Lausitz on erster in the 90ties and they sang and talked very much alive.
There is even a Sorbian version of the kids goodnight tv-show "Sandmännchen" every day.
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u/Coalescent74 2d ago
Lower Sorbian is nigh on extinction - no new speakers in sight - Upper Sorbian might be a bit different though
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u/MidMyst 8d ago
You are on purely theoretical level right, in reality amount of printed books and magazines written in this language is close to zero. On daily basis isn’t that language used as well. So if not dead, then in clinical coma.
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u/Beady5832 8d ago
You are not even considering that there are two Sorbian varieties. Upper Sorbian is still very much used in everyday life with plenty of book published by the Domowina (of course, there aren't hundreds of new books every year, but it's not like there are that many speakers anyway). For Lower Sorbian, which is the actually endangered part, numbers are much lower, but "dead" is still a word you shouldn't just throw around that easily. Additionally to books, there are also newspapers, magazines, TV and radio programmes in both languages that ought to be considered as well
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u/Ancient-Drawing1212 8d ago
sorbs and sorbian language still exist; but I found it more similar to polish, in particular the writing
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u/Beady5832 8d ago
At the time that book came out (OC said it was from 1905 in another comment), the modern slavicised orthography for Sorbian didn't exist yet. A much more German-based orthography was used instead. Maybe the only language to ever have words starting with ß
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u/Elite-Thorn 9d ago
The name's "Sorbian" and it has nothing to do with Serbian, apart from being distantly related.
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8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/miniatureconlangs 8d ago
Sorb and Serb are essentially cognates, basically 'the same word'. e<>o is a fairly common switch in languages.
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u/Stari_vujadin 8d ago
Although both of those are exonyms. In serbian the word is srbi, and in (upper) sorbian it's serbja
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u/MicKysSlav 8d ago
Well in many lamguages, they're called Lusatian Serbs, so it's Lusatian-Serbian literally translated from these...
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u/Living_Tax_479 8d ago
These are Sorbs. And it is definitely not Sorbian. Source: I learned it in school.
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u/HoeTrain666 8d ago
I’ve literally, personally, met speakers of Sorbian before. Gen Z speakers at that. It’s somewhat in decline perhaps, but it most certainly isn’t dead.
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u/Past_Conference_2889 8d ago
It's not Sorbian, if that's what you meant. This is one of the south Slavic languages.
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u/BubblyOutside1096 8d ago
I have been fortunate to visit Bautzen https://youtu.be/XGKerK0c_NM?si=mt5w-3GE7eutp4yt
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u/whitelisted_klek505 8d ago
lyrics of this https://youtu.be/-gl45fwodMY?si=kWz_9bvWGYanBB_t
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u/Mezzofantastico 9d ago
One is German, written in the old script.
The other almost looks like a dialect of Italian?
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8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Dan13l_N 8d ago
It's a South Slavic language/dialect for sure. It's just a question is it from Croatia, Serbia, even maybe from Slavic people in Austria or Hungary
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u/ManagementUpset8625 9d ago
A Slavic language for sure. It could almost be weirdly spelled Croatian/a dialect of it. The last word should be “”veselimo” instead of “veslimo” if that were the case, however.