The results are in and they’re not what you’d expect. Linguists have cut through the noise to find
out what makes a language sing in the ear, or pose an assault on the senses. So what’s the final verdict? Well, they’re going to tell us. Is Italian the ideal and German just a bit
gross? KRANKENWAGEN! Is the sound of Hindi heavenly and Mandarin
a melodic mess? Find out NOW in another RobWords. By the way, this video’s sponsor is italki,
and that turned out to be really helpful, as you’ll find out. Google “what’s the world’s ugliest language”
and the same usual suspects come up, over and over. Ditto if you ask what’s the most beautiful
one. But read a little deeper and the reasons that
are given are hardly scientific. So that’s something this guy and a couple
of colleagues at Lund University in Sweden decided to change. What's up with languages? Why do we find that some languages just seem
to be more liked than others? Basically, what Niklas and his team wanted
to work out was whether there was anything about the sound of the languages people say
are beautiful or ugly that makes them beautiful or ugly. And it seems like there is. Tolkein wanted Elvish to sound lovely, and
it sounds like this. [Speaks in Elvish] Whereas Star Trek’s malevolent Klingons
sound like this. [Gangnam Style in Klingon] What was that? But are those sounds associated with beauty
or ugliness because of how they land in the ear, or is there another reason? Obviously there are some prejudices when it
comes to these sorts of things. At least people say that if a language has
a lot of sounds that are produced in the back of the mouth, like chh and stuff like that,
then you find that, oh that’s not going to sound very nice. There are these situations, like you would
say that German is ugly but Italian is beautiful or German is ugly and French is beautiful. But the interesting thing is that many of
those sounds that you focus on, like these throat sounds, for example, I mean, in French
you have it all the time with the r's, right? Like a rrr, and that's considered beautiful
anyways, and then you have the German one with a chh and that's considered not beautiful. So there's something more going on here. We try to put all these things to the side
and just see what we could get out. It’s very explorative, the study. So stay tuned to find out how they did that. But first, let’s look at those preconceptions. Why does Italian for example have this reputation
for being gorgeous? Well I’ve been seeking out my own answers
by speaking to Italian teacher Daya. And after showing off my cat, I got her view. One of the things that people say perhaps
drives people towards Italian as being a beautiful language is its association with certain artforms. Yes. Do you think that’s true? Is it because we’re used to hearing opera
in Italian, maybe? Italy has a really really rich history with
art, culture, cuisine, and it’s associated also with music because many words in musical
speech for example are in Italian. For example. Veloce, lento, alto, and most of my students
are like “oh, I already know that word”. And I’m like, yes, definitely, if you’re
studying music. So the point is, it’s what we associate
the language with that maybe influences how attractive we find it. I reckon that’s probably the case with German
too, which I’ll get into in a sec. By the way, I found Daya and another teacher
who you’ll meet later, called Bank, through italki, the sponsors of this video. italki is this excellent website and app where
you can tap into a global community of thousands of high quality native speaking teachers,
teaching over 150 different languages. Pick the language you want to learn, look
at the massive list of teachers available to you, and choose one that suits your schedule
and your budget. It took me absolutely no time to find Daya
and set up a quick trial lesson. Italian has really good phonetics, actually. Easy. However you’re writing it, that’s the
way you are reading it. Exceptions made for two or three letters together,
but it’s melodic and it’s really really fluid when you try to speak it. The great thing is there are no subscriptions,
no commitments, you just pay as you go and lessons start at only $5! Millions of people use italki to start their
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out more. RIght, so cultural factors are clearly a major
reason why some languages are considered particularly attractive. So the same must also be true for the other
end of the spectrum, right. Let me launch into a quick defence of German,
as a language. You’ve probably seen those videos where
people show how angry and aggressive German sounds compared with other languages . SCHMETTERLING! But any language is going to sound abonimable
if you spit it in someone’s face like they’ve just spilt your pint of Pilsener FLUFFY CUSHION!! Can you honestly say objectively that schmetterling
said normally is a worse-sounding word than butterfly? I think it’s kind of cute. It’s smushy and soft. And the ling at the end is adorable, like
a duckling. Aww. Or do you think perhaps… just bear with me here… perhaps that fact
that Germany was basically the super-villain of the 20th century might have had some impact
on how we view the country’s language? The fact that it’s the language of countless
bad-guys? Although, to be fair, Mark Twain was describing
as “awful” almost 150 years ago. But he was talking about what a pain it is
to learn. So how can you get an idea of how attractive
a language really is without these cultural elements clouding the picture? It was a bit of a hassle in the beginning. Niklas and his team set themselves a tough
task. They wanted to find a way to ask lots of people
from lots of different cultures what they thought about lots of different languages. We were looking around for, I think, years
almost, and trying different approaches, but then we stumbled upon this film, which was
dubbed into hundreds of languages for what I assume is missionary reasons. They were tales from the bible told in tongues
from all over the world. [Jesus dubbed into Tok Pisin language] The team played over 2000 recordings from
more than 200 languages to over 800 people from three groups. So one was English first language speakers,
the other one was Chinese first language speaker , Mandarin and Cantonese and some other varieties
and then also what we call Semitic speakers so that would be Arabic and Hebrew in this
case. And these three different rater groups are
quite at least more representative of the world than just having English speakers as
raters at least. And what Niklas and the team did was ask them
to rate each language out of a hundred for how much they liked the sound of them. So… let’s get to it. What did they find? So let's talk about the results and down to
the bottom line of it. Are some languages objectively more attractive
than others? Yes and no. I mean, the raters used the scale from one
to 100 and in the final results the estimates were about 35 for the least pleasant language
to 42 in the most pleasant language. So the range there is pretty small. We did find some patterns when it comes to
this. There were more agreement when it came to
the disliked languages than the liked languages for some reason. Oh, that's interesting. So there are languages that are potentially
intrinsically unattractive? There are two points to this. The first point is that two languages that
were in the bottom was Chechen and Avar and these are Caucasian languages and they are
quite famous for including a lot of hard to pronounce consonants. Let’s hear how they sound… [speech in Chechen] [speech in Avar] What do you think? Let me know your thoughts on that and indeed
any of this in the comments below. The team also found another interesting pattern
among the languages rated the lowest. Tonal languages, on average, scored lower
than non-tonal languages. So tonal languages are languages like Mandarin
Chinese, where every syllable has to be said with a certain inflection in your voice. Ma, ma, ma, ma. Otherwise, what you’re saying won’t make
sense. And it seems those tones maybe don’t make
for a particularly mellifluous language. And that wasn’t just the view of speakers
of non-tonal languages, like English. This effect was strongest for the Chinese
group. That's interesting. All of the Chinese languages that we use were
tonal languages. So, if you have a language, in this case Chinese
are mostly Mandarin speakers and they actually have tones themselves in their mother tongue,
then they don't like other tonal languages. And that’s interesting. One of those other tonal languages is Thai. A language I don’t know very well, but my
new pal Bank does. So, ah, to say “hello” in Thai we say
S̄wạs̄dī. Sawass-dee S̄wạs̄dī. He’s a Thai teacher and did his best - completely
in vain - to try to teach me the five tones of Thai. Gaa, gaa. Gaa, gaa. And presumable, gaa means something different
to gaa… gaa… gaa. I’m sounding like Lady Gaga. [sings Bad Romance by Lady Gaga] So embarrassing Most of my students, they say oh it’s just
like singing a song. You have to go up and down, low, middle, down
and up. Something like that. So you might have to think of it as like a
song when you speak it… but that doesn’t appear to make it music to the ears. Maybe the reason why you find it less melodic,
if that's the reason, for example, is because there are so many differences happening on
every syllable, basically. So, this is just a theory, but it could have
to do with the same thing as if you have a lot of different consonants in a cluster and
then a vowel and lots of different consonants as well, then you get a very chopped up kind
of melody, or not melody, but a chopped up way of how it sounds like. Okay, enough of this negativity. What did Niklas and his team learn about the
languages we really like? Well what they found was the biggest factor
in whether or not a language was considered beautiful was not actually what it sounded
like, but whether or not the listener recognised it. The people taking part on average rated a
language over 12 points higher out of a hundred if they thought they already knew what it
was. Even though, actually, they were wrong about
what the language was half the time! For example, the three highest rated languages
for the Chinese speaking group were… Mandarin, English, the language the study
was conducted in, and Japanese. For the Semitic language speakers, the top
three were Spanish, English and Italian - three widely known and recognised languages. Arabic was fourth, incidentally. And for the English speakers, guess what came
top. Why, English, of course! Second was our friend Italian. And third was Jamaican Patois… also known
as… Jamaican Creole English. So the researchers tried to account for that
familiarity bias by discounting languages that too many of the participants recognised. But even then, it was hard to escape. There were some Creole languages or Pidgin
languages that were rated quite high and these are usually based on English or French. For example a surprise frontrunner was a language
called Tok Pisin, which is spoken in Papua New Guinea. It’s a Creole, which is a language usually
formed when traders or colonialists arrive in a country - in this case, from England
- and their language mixes with the local way of speaking. In fact the name Tok Pisin ultimately means
“talk business”. And here’s how it sounds. [Speech in Tok Pisin] So you might not have heard it before, but
English has undoubtedly left its mark there. Then you of course have a very high familiarity
bias even though you try to control for it because many of the words you will recognize,
and maybe the raters couldn't recognize the exact language, “oh this sounds like a strange
type of English or something, so I don’t recognise it.” The familiarity bias also comes into play
when we look at how German did. So the short answer is: not great. BUT our theory that cultural factors are at
play seems to bear out. German was so widely recognised that they
couldn’t get a fair, non-biased score for it. However, they did find that other rarely-recognised
languages did better than German despite having a lot of the characteristics that people say
they hate about German. Languages like its Germanic cousin, Icelandic. [Newsreader speaking Icelandic] So maybe we can stop picking on German for
a bit? Dankeschön. As well as redeeming Deutsch… at least,
a little bit… The experiment produced some additional side
effects. What Niklas and his team had also incidentally
done was create a test for which types of voices we like the sound of, irrespective
of language. When they looked across the clips that did
well they found certain patterns. We did find, for example, that female voices
were more liked than male voices, breathy voices were more liked than non breathy voices,
and when there were some residual music in the background that was also liked. But it could be other factors that has to
do with the voice that we couldn't really grasp. And if all the voice actors had that in one
of the languages, for example, then maybe it's actually the voice that lowered the ratings
rather than language. Ah, so actually, these additional factors
might also be interfering with the scores the languages were given, as well as that
familiarity effect we were talking about. But for fun, let’s just try something out… So if you wanted to maximize the score that
a clip got, what characteristics would we give it? So we'd use a language that the listener is
familiar to. We'd use a female voice, ideally a breathy
one. Any other characteristics that you could put? Some music in the background. Music in the background. Yeah, music in the background. And you would also probably I think that you
should also think about that, even though it's the familiarity effect, it's very strong. You have to think about what that means, because
familiarity could be, I've heard about this language, or I think, I've heard about this
language. But the languages you usually heard about
are usually the ones which are famous or culturally influential. Right. Like English. So among the familiar languages, you should
pick one which has a lot of say around the world, basically, and has a lot of exposure
in movies and lot of exposure. So we're back to English, right. Hold on, so arguably the person in the world
with the most perfect voice… is Marge. [Marge Simpson:] Oh Homie, take your shirt
off again. So, you see, there are all kinds of factors
that we need to take into account when we try to arbitrarily claim one language is beautiful
and another is not. It’s okay to think French or Italian are
gorgeous and German as disgusting, but when we do, we have to realise that we’re not
being objective. There’s obviously loads more work to be
done to add to the findings of Niklas and his team. Biases that still need to be accounted for. But nevertheless, I think the insights are
fascinating. This is the biggest study that has been done
in this manner. So it's all steps towards more understanding. There is never any final goal to anything. It's just understanding more and more and
using that to understand the world more and more, basically. Thanks to Niklas for talking us through things. If you’ve enjoyed this, I think you’ll
like my one about misheard phrases, or eggcorns. I think it’s a fun one. Otherwise, maybe give this one a go. And please so subscribe, I have so much more
to tell you about. If you do sign up to italki I can recommend
Daya and Bank. They’re are both lovely people. And you’re lovely for watching. Thanks.
