Posted on 09/20/2026 1:39:08 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
LINGUISTS TEND to say that all languages are valuable, expressive and complex. They usually attribute negative attitudes to prejudice and politics. That is probably why no one has carefully studied the touchy question of which ones are seen as beautiful or ugly. That is until three scholars—Andrey Anikin, Nikolay Aseyev and Niklas Erben Johansson—published their study of 228 languages last year*. They hit upon the idea of using an online film about the life of Jesus, which its promoters have recorded in hundreds of languages.
Crucially, most recordings had at least five different speakers, as the film has both exposition and dialogue. The team recruited 820 people from three different language groups—Chinese, English and Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew and Maltese speakers)—to listen to clips and rate the languages’ attractiveness.
What they found was that nearly all the 228 languages were rated strikingly similarly—when certain factors were controlled for (of which more below). On a scale of 1 to 100, all fell between 37 and 43, and most in a bulge between 39 and 42 (see chart 1). The highest-rated? Despite the supposed allure (at least among Anglophones) of French and Italian, it was Tok Pisin, an English creole spoken in Papua New Guinea. The lowest? Chechen.
The three language groups broadly coincided in their preferences. But the differences between the best and worst-rated languages were so slight—and the variation among individual raters so great—that no one should be tempted to crown Tok Pisin the world’s prettiest language with any authority.
A few factors did make the raters say they quite liked the languages they heard. But those seem unrelated to intrinsic qualities. First, being familiar with a language—or even thinking they were familiar with it—made raters give a language a 12% prettiness boost on average. And there seemed to be some regional prejudices.
If a rater said that a language was familiar, he or she was asked to say what region it came from. Chinese raters, for example, clearly preferred languages they thought to be from the Americas or Europe, and rated those they thought from sub-Saharan Africa lower. (When raters said they were unfamiliar with the languages, such preferences disappeared.)
The other extrinsic factors that influenced ratings were a strong preference for female voices and a weaker preference for deeper and breathier ones (see chart 2).
But try as they might, the investigators could not find an inherent phonetic feature—such as the presence of nasal vowels (as in French bon vin blanc) or fricative consonants (like the sh and zh sounds common in Polish)—that was consistently rated as beautiful. Only a slight dislike for tonal languages was statistically significant. Tonal languages are those that use pitch to distinguish otherwise homophonous words. Even Chinese subjects slightly disliked such languages, though Chinese itself is tonal.
Dr Johansson highlights some unanswered questions. His team had no information about which sounds tend to appear together (English strings along consonants—as in “strings”—in a way that many other languages do not.) Such a feature was beyond their ability to measure. So was prosody—roughly, the rhythm of a language. And with just five speakers per language, the presence of a couple of attractive or unattractive individual speakers could easily move a language’s rating this way or that.
Finally, the audio materials were scripted. This was a good thing in one way, because the raters heard the same part of the film (with the same meanings) in each language. But spontaneous, natural speech could make quite a different impression. Perhaps people like and dislike not the sound inventory of a language, but the way its speakers tend to speak it. If that is so, the attractiveness of a language might be better attributed to its speakers’ culture—not to the language itself.
Negative results in experiments usually do not make waves, but this one is both interesting—since it goes so strongly against people’s instincts—and cheering. The world is divided enough. As the researchers conclude, “We have emphasised the fundamental phonetic and aesthetic unity of world languages.”■
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My oldest homeschooler studied Elvish and spoke it and wrote it back in the day. She also copied all the costumes and jewelry and also dressed her sibs.
I sure hope this study didn’t cost much.
dont know about actual languages, but accents, I’d say its a toss-up between a Russian and Australia’s
Not at all.
Look it up.
and German to my horse
“Blucher!”
Funny story. Wife and I were walking around Epcot in Disneyqorld some years ago; went to the France part (or whatever it was called. We needed directions to the Italian restaurant we wanted to eat at when we ran into one of the workers, a young(er) French lady who was interning there. I spoke to her briefly in French. Wife just stared at me until I told her it was just a common greeting (which it was)
On no, terrible! Sounds like Russian!
I lived in Hawaii for a few years. It’s beautiful; I notice no connection between that and Tagalog. I have perfect pitch and am good at identifying dialects.
My wife and I completed the Duolingo Welsh course about 8 years ago. We try to attend the Malad Valley Welsh Festival each year. This year is was a short visit (yesterday) due to blustery weather. The only spoken Welsh I heard was from performers singing "Yma O Hyd". I couldn't find any Welsh speakers. Lots of Welsh ancestry in the attendees.
I find Welsh very natural. Very phonetic. It's a VSO pattern language (verb-subject-object). Singular/plural and first/second/third person all have a unique verb form. Most verbs a regular. A few like "to be" are irregular as is common with most languages.
I study German daily. Like English, it is an SVO pattern language and adjectives precede nouns. When I practice speaking, I try to achieve a natural flow in a sentence with correct inflection. It's a perpetual work in progress.
In the evening, I'm studying Mandarin Chinese. It's a tonal language with an SVO order like English. It employs particles to form a question (like Japanese) and to indicate a "past tense" without need for laborious changes of verb for each possible "tense". The grammar is easier. The tones are a challenge. In addition to getting the tones correct, there is also a "phrasing" with short clusters of words. The "Falou" app is strict with both phrasing and tones to get credit for being correctly spoken. The "Super Chinese" app provides detailed feedback on tonal correctness and only allows moving forward with a correct performance over 60% of the material. I have Praktika as well for Mandarin. The AI tutor in Praktika is pretty good, but the microphone handling for the Android app is pretty flakey. Praktika brings more variation, but doesn't make me work as hard as it could. The "Mandarin Blueprint" course material is first rate, but comes at a higher price point than I can justify given my teetering health. I would never derive the full value before heading for a dirt knap.
Swedish is sing-song. French is beautiful. I read Latin.
From Latin mel, mellis (“honey”) + loquens (“speaking”), present participle of loqui (“to speak”).
(archaic) Speaking sweetly or harmoniously.
***
Reminds me of that 'Scrabble' scene in Sneakers. Too many secrets, yet any fool could do it:
>>>How is this possible?
Cryptography systems are based on mathematical problems... so complex they cannot be solved without a key.
Janek figured out a way to solve those problems without the key, and he hard-wired it into that chip.
Turn it off.
>>>
So it's a code-breaker.
No, it's *the* code-breaker. No more secrets.
***
word: מילה milah
bee: דבורה dvorah
speech: דבורה dibur
things, objects; words: דברים dvarim
stuff (n.): דברים dvarim...
...which appears upside-down at the beginning of the 'Scrabble' scene clip here.
I originally wanted to use that link, but can you believe it, it cuts off right before
"Honey, you and Melissa get your things."
Crazy, misses all of the connections! 🙂
>The Filipina women I worked with click-clacked in Tagalog. It might be the most off-putting language I’ve heard.
It can be a pretty violent language. Even worse when it switches to a dialect...
In my first week of 4 years of HS Latin I learned this:
Latin is a dead language
as dead as it could be.
First it killed the Romans
and now it’s killing me.
😂
American Sign Language is just fine with me.
John Adams told his son John Quincy Adams that Greek was the most perfect of all human languages, but he was probably thinking of its intellectual qualities rather than how beautiful it sounded.
LOL!
But managed languages have garbage collection.
Folk singer Tom Rush used to repeat the joke in a Southern accent:
"Why do schoolkids have to learn all those foreign languages when English was good enough for Jesus?"
Here's the rest of it:
Latin is a dead language,
or so the freshmen say —
yet every doctor, lawyer, priest, and botanist
uses it every day.
If this is death,
it’s doing quite well —
haunting half the dictionary,
running science like a cartel.
So if Latin’s killing you,
take comfort in the fact:
you’re being murdered by a language
with impeccable tact.
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