ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Tuned to language: the influence of musicality on phonaesthetic judgments.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- The phoenix of phonaesthetics: the rise of an old-new research paradigm on the beauty of language sound.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Does Orkish Sound Evil? Perception of Fantasy Languages and Their Phonetic and Phonological Characteristics.Language and speech · 2024Article
- Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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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