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Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?

Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages...

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Autores principales: Anikin, Andrey, Aseyev, Nikolay, Erben Johansson, Niklas
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: National Academy of Sciences 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10151606/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37068255
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218367120
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author Anikin, Andrey
Aseyev, Nikolay
Erben Johansson, Niklas
author_facet Anikin, Andrey
Aseyev, Nikolay
Erben Johansson, Niklas
author_sort Anikin, Andrey
collection PubMed
description Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within ±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features—the presence of specific phonemic classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener’s first language—were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic preferences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker’s voice quality, and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly.
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spelling pubmed-101516062023-10-17 Do some languages sound more beautiful than others? Anikin, Andrey Aseyev, Nikolay Erben Johansson, Niklas Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Social Sciences Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes? We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked 820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within ±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features—the presence of specific phonemic classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener’s first language—were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic preferences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker’s voice quality, and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly. National Academy of Sciences 2023-04-17 2023-04-25 /pmc/articles/PMC10151606/ /pubmed/37068255 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218367120 Text en Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Social Sciences
Anikin, Andrey
Aseyev, Nikolay
Erben Johansson, Niklas
Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?
title Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?
title_full Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?
title_fullStr Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?
title_full_unstemmed Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?
title_short Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?
title_sort do some languages sound more beautiful than others?
topic Social Sciences
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10151606/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37068255
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218367120
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