Linguists agree that all languages are valuable, expressive, and complex. They attribute negative attitudes toward certain languages to prejudice and politics, which might explain why the question of which languages are perceived as beautiful or ugly has been largely unexplored.
That changed when three scholars—Andrey Anikin, Nikolay Aseyev, and Niklas Erben Johansson—published a study of 228 languages last year. They utilized an online film about the life of Jesus, which is available in hundreds of languages and features multiple speakers per language due to its combination of exposition and dialogue. The researchers recruited 820 participants from three language groups—Chinese, English, and Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, and Maltese speakers)—to rate the attractiveness of different language clips.
Their findings revealed that nearly all 228 languages were rated remarkably similarly when certain factors were controlled. On a scale from 1 to 100, all languages scored between 37 and 43, with most clustering between 39 and 42. Surprisingly, Tok Pisin, an English creole spoken in Papua New Guinea, received the highest ratings, while Chechen received the lowest. Despite this, the differences in ratings were so minimal, and the variation among individual raters so significant, that crowning Tok Pisin as the world's most beautiful language would be unfounded.
Several factors influenced the ratings, though these seemed unrelated to the intrinsic qualities of the languages. Familiarity with a language boosted its attractiveness score by 12% on average. Regional biases were also evident. Chinese raters, for example, favored languages they believed to be from the Americas or Europe and rated those they thought were from sub-Saharan Africa lower. However, these biases disappeared when raters were unfamiliar with the languages.
Other extrinsic factors included a strong preference for female voices and a weaker preference for deeper and breathier voices. The researchers could not identify any inherent phonetic features, such as nasal vowels or fricative consonants, that were consistently rated as beautiful. A slight dislike for tonal languages, which use pitch to distinguish words, was the only statistically significant finding. Even Chinese participants slightly disliked tonal languages, despite Chinese being a tonal language.
Dr. Johansson pointed out some unanswered questions. The team lacked information about which sounds tend to appear together, a feature that was beyond their ability to measure. Prosody, or the rhythm of a language, was also not analyzed. Additionally, with only five speakers per language, the presence of particularly attractive or unattractive voices could easily skew the ratings.
The use of scripted audio materials meant that raters heard the same part of the film in each language, ensuring consistent meaning. However, spontaneous, natural speech might have produced different impressions. It suggests that people might like or dislike not the sound inventory of a language, but the way its speakers use it. If so, the attractiveness of a language could be more closely tied to its speakers’ culture than to the language itself.
While negative results in experiments often go unnoticed, this study is both interesting and reassuring, as it challenges people's instincts and underscores the fundamental phonetic and aesthetic unity of world languages.
