Genius of Love - new information

The song Genius of Love, by the Tom Tom Club (side project of Talking Heads members Tina Weymouth and Chris Franz)  was released in 1981 but back then you couldn't just Google up information about a song and not only discover that you were singing the wrong lyrics all along (turns out it's not "don't hang up, banjo brain") but also foreign languages were no such thing. In the original recording of "Genius of Love" there is snippet of a woman speaking in what sounds like a Scandinavian language. You can hear it beginning at minute 3:00 in the video below.

Well, it's not Scandinavian according to Chris Franz on the metafilter site:


Today I recieved this response from Chris Frantz:

Thanks for your message. The guess of Icelandic is close because Tina and her sisters lived in Iceland for several years in the mid-sixties when their father was stationed there with NATO.

But, no cigar because, in fact, that is not a sample. That is Tina's sister Lani speaking in a "made up" language that she invented to amuse herself when she was younger. She recorded the voice in one or two takes and we loved it because it was so weird.

Hope this answer helps.

Warm regards,

Chris Frantz