Which unrelated language you find the most similar to your own?

[u/DerpAnarchist]

I find Amami to sound very similar to Korean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf3Y6CqR71c

Ethnologue says it's spoken by around 10.000 speakers and is currently considered a endangered language.

As to why as a non-speaker i could find a few things about its phonology. Most importantly, its vowel inventory includes /ɘ/ and /ɨ/, analogue to Korean counterparts, rather the base 5 pure vowels, more typical in other East Asian languages. It doesn't have the quickly up-down swinging intonation, starkly contrasting and unharmonic vowel habituation of Japanese, while it also consisting of short monomoraic sounds. It features voiceless glottalized consonants, which appear similar to the areally uncommon Korean tenses, making it sound oddly like Korean. It likewise has a "soothing" sound quality that reminds of elderlys speech.

https://youtu.be/Z-l9TaKWd-0?si=KB-mnSmUqsj-3-zi

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u/DerpAnarchist's post title:

"Which unrelated language you find the most similar to your own?"

u/DerpAnarchist's post body:

Amami is the closest sounding language i can think of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf3Y6CqR71c

According to ethnologue it's spoken by around 10.000 speakers and is considered a endangered language.

It doesn't have that up-down swinging vowel intonations of Japanese and consists of short monomoraic sounds and has a similar phonetic inventory making it oddly sound a lot like Korean. It likewise has a "soothing" sound quality that reminds of elderlys speech.

https://youtu.be/Z-l9TaKWd-0?si=KB-mnSmUqsj-3-zi

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[u/found_goose]

Some of the Australian aboriginal languages have an uncanny phonological similarity to Tamil. Spoken Dhivehi sounds a lot like Tamil and more so than Sinhalese, even though both languages descend from Proto-Indo-Aryan.

Edit: A disclaimer - while these languages sound similar, I can't understand a word in either.

[u/Queendrakumar]

I mean, I think very few will disagree that Korean and Japanese are the closest to one another in morphology, syntax and semantics despite the two language being unrelated to one another. The phonetics and phonotactics are quite different between the two and it's always pretty difficult to narrow down which dialect of Korean resembles which one of the Japonic languages or dialects. Gyeongsang dialect for instance has very noticeable high-low intonation and tonality (example) and noticeably different-sounding from flatter Seoul dialect. Other Japonics that are proposed to be similar include Miyako and Tsushima Dialect

[u/DerpAnarchist → u/Queendrakumar]

Hence why it was Amami, and not Japanese. Latter doesn't sound very similar imho. My family are from Gyeongsando and it's just Koreans from the rest of the country being stereotypical/ignorant when they compare it to Japanese, doesn't sound anyhow alike.

[u/Cal_Aesthetics_Club]

I’ve noticed some phonetic similarities between Telugu and Japanese

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[u/[deleted]]

Bengali (Eastern Indo-Aryan languages), Nepali (Northeen Indo-Aryan languages) have some uncanny similarities - I know they're both Indo-Aryan languages, but due to them being leaves of some very different branches, I find the similarities a bit uncanny.

[u/Wonderful-Bend1505]

Korean and Japanese