Why are some accents more attractive than others?

Good point.

Take Spanish and Portuguese for example. Spanish is smooth and pleasing to the ear. I find Portuguese to be guttural, full of stops, and not particularly easy to listen to.

I have gotten used to German, but I agree with you about Arabic and Hebrew.

I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with how the syllables flow and the balance of vowels to consonants. Too many “ch” or “ck” sounds can be harsh as well.

Italian, Spanish (from Spain), and Argentine are attractive to me. I like Scottish as well because I find it interesting.

I would say the “attractiveness” of accents is about as subjective as the attractiveness of anything else.

fluidity

Why are certain hair colors or skin complexions more attractive than others?

For me, it’s a matter of mellifluousness. And maybe it is a Western musical ear, yet some languages seem staccato while others grate. I listen to my daughter practice her Mandarin and find it harsh, like a screeching.

But I was surprised watching the movie “Once” how beautiful the Czech words “Miluju tebe” sounded.

It’s different than you are used to but not so far removed that it does not sound like any language you can be remotely familiar with. Years ago my folks hosted a bunch of exchange students from several different English speaking countries. It amazed me how gaga the girls went over what we would consider a “redneck” accent. I found the off English accents attractive myself. My bland, mid-western accent apparently was not attractive or exotic to them though.

I like different variations of English, French, and Russian accents. I don’t particularly find Arabic, Indian or Asian dialects attractive. I do find the soft-spokenness of Asian languages attractive though.

To me the romance languages sound far more musical when spoken than those with all the awkward consonants that force speech to border on spitting.

In Spanish, a lot of emphasis is put on making the syllables have an equal amount of length. In Italian, words seem to flow even smoother because all of the words end in vowels, causing a nice cadence. In languages like German and Russian, the syllables are uneven and there are much less vowels.

I’ve often wondered that myself. I love Irish, Scottish, British, Australian, Welsh, South African, and New Zealand accents. Some will send me swooning into a tizzy. I’m an American, not sure if that matters. I sort of think of American accents as neutral, unless they are deeply Southern, or from the New York, New Jersey or Boston area. I tend to cringe at New York/New Jersey accents, find the Boston accent rather charming and I like some of the Southern sounding accents (Bill Clinton, Mike Nesmith, Bill Engvall) but if they’re too thick and twangy (Larry the Cable Guy or any of the dudes on Duck Dynasty, or the Honey Boo Boo crowd) I tend to cringe at that.

With foreign language accents, I don’t mind German, it sounds more like English to me. Japanese, especially spoken by women, which sounds softer to me, sounds very cute. Some of the Chinese languages, such as Shanghai-nese, sounds very gutteral and harsh to me. I think some of the nordic languages sound very cute, such as Danish and Swedish.

French, Spanish and Portugese, just sound foreign, but rather neutral.

Here are some examples of my favorite accents:

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

Example 5

Example 6 (NSFW)

Example 7

Example 8

Example 9

Example 10

Wait, is the OP asking about English? English speaking people with German and Russia accents? Or, Russians speaking Russian?

English is a Germanic language. German sounds harsher, but English is pretty choppy too. Some languages, like Spanish, have vowels at the end of many many words, and so the words run together more and the language has a different rhythym than languages that end and begin with consonants.

In a language a person is fluent in, accent can sound less educated or more sophisticated. It’s very interesting how it almost seems automatic or almost innate. My husband speaks English as a second language, but is fully bilingual, and he thinks deep southern accents with long drawls tend to sound less intelligent, with some exceptions. It’s based on nothing but hearing the accent. He also thinks a UK accent sounds better then a typical American accent.

I don’t know where they are from (California?) but we call it a “coca-cola’ accent and I love it. I love Russian accents too.

Err, because personal opinions & stuff.

I think it has to do with the settlers of a region where the listener was raised, the listener’s personal heritage, current events and affinity/familiarity.

It can take generations (if ever) for accents to disappear, so if you grow up with your family or many of your neighbors having a similar accent, that’s pleasing to you.

People raised during WW II and their decedents are likely to have a poor opinion of the German accent. We tend to use any means to vilify an enemy.

I doubt I ever heard Oriental speech before TV. Oriental accent was very rare when I was growing up, so I have no affinity for it. While some of it sounds lovely, ”It’s Greek to me”.
:)

Scottish accents are damn sexy! Ewan McGregor is handsome enough, but his accent makes me swoon.

Also for some reason, Senegalese French accents are really sexy. I don’t know what makes it different from a French accent from France, but there’s just a special something.

I don’t think their accents in English really stand out, but spoken Turkish and Italian are such pretty languages.

After watching Downton Abbey, I also really like Yorkshire accents. Not that they’re sexy, really… more like charming, and easy on the ears.

A large proportion of people find the American accent very unattractive. When they hear it they think obnoxious person.

You find other accents unattractive because you do not have a lot of exposure to multiculturalism. If you live in a very multicultural city your whole life e.g like London. You wouldn’t care.

I think it has to do with your level of exposure to different cultures .

Unfortunately most americans don’t have that exposure so they tend to be intolerant of other accents, especially if they never heard them on tv because most americans exposure to the outside world is through television.

I think there are multiple facets to consider. The speaker’s primary language. Their secondary language. And how the marriage of the two are heard through the personal and cultural prejudices of the listener.

@chinchin31 Interesting point. I take most accents in stride. I find language interesting to analyze, but having 20 different accents in a room doesn’t phase me. I rarely have trouble understanding people because of their accent, and I don’t really think about accents much in terms of judging something about the person. There are some that sound better to me than others, but it isn’t something I really dwell on. I grew up in the suburbs of DC and NYC, and so I had huge exposure my whole life to accents and people who speak English as a second language. When I moved away for college it was to a place where most of the students very rarely interacted with people who had foreign accents and they made a lot of conplaints about foreign professors and not being able to understand them. I never had a problem, and people being from a different country was “normal” to me. In fact, it was odd to me living in a place that had such a large majority of people who were more than four generations American.

I live in Manhattan. I hear it all.

Hearing a French child say “un chien! un chien! when seeing a puppy makes me smile inside.

However witnessing a middle eastern man shout into his ancient cellphone grates on my nerves terribly.

Jewish accents aren’t good for my head because they have this inexplicable plaintive quality to them. I guess some were born to complain and worry.

I’ve learned that it isn’t just the accent itself, it’s also the personality that utters it.

@SecondHandStoke: Please be specific about defining a Jewish accent. Is that similiar to a Catholic or Christian accent?

^ I used the word “inexplicable.”

@SecondHandStoke My reaction is the same as @gailcalled. When you say Jewish accent do you mean the Eastern European accent? Like what Billy Crystal mimics? Or, an Israeli accent? Jews live all over the world.

Also, how can you compare a small child talking about a puppy to an annoyed adult man screaming into his phone? Do you think an annoyed Frenchman with a temper is going to sound as cute as a little French boy?

No such thing as an Israeli accent either. The accent reflects one’s mother tongue.

Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian,

My uncles spoke English with a Bronx accent; there is also a recognizable Brooklyn accent. That didn’t peg them as Jewish (which they were) but from the Bronx. These are considered regional, just as people from Baltimore, Philly, Cleveland and the various southern states can be tagged also.

Billy Crystal and Mel Brooks, among others, are gently satirizing the concept and not being accurate.

Three of my four grandparents were immigrants and spoke English fluently but with slightly different accents…Russian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian/Polish. I gave English lessons to a woman from Belarus for a while, and her accent was slightly different from my grandparents’.

Familar = good. Unfamiliar = makes us feel stupid, so we don’t like it. Thus, if you don’t like
a big raft of speech patterns, it’s because you’re ignorant. You should travel more, and think
harder, and stop being such a fucking idiot.

I dislike hearing the Asian accents. They’re so high pitched and they often yell. There is a Chinese restaurant in town. It has a buffet. The food was good, but we started avoiding going there because the workers would sit on the far side of the resturaunt, folding napkins around silverware. They’d be talking and chattering…and yelling and screeching at each other like they were clear across the room, rather than across the table from them! Since I didn’t know what they were saying I didn’t know if they were angry, but I didn’t think so.

I stated also that I live in Manhattan.

Do I have to spell everything out?

Many people have told me that my Agnostic accent sucks.

@gailcalled My mistake, I should have said English spoken by someone born and raised in Israel. I realize many people in Israel speak several languages, although I would assume Hebrew is the common language taught in school, along with assuming English as well. Then they might also speak other languages at home. Polish, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, French, Ladino, etc. But, the generation born and raised in Israel would likely speak English with an accent that most is what I associate with Hebrew speaking people.

@chinchin31 “A large proportion of people find the American accent very unattractive. When they hear it they think obnoxious person.”

Which American accent? America’s a vast land with a range of accents. Someone from Eastern Tennessee probably isn’t going to sound like someone from Acadiana, who isn’t going to sound like someone from the Upper Midwest, who won’t sound like someone from Southern California, who’s not likely to sound like someone from Long Island.

But they’ll still more similar to each other than, say, a British accent. Britain has a wide variety of accents, too, but they sound very similar to me.

Perhaps some just have a better ear for accents. The differences between various American accents and between various British accents are day and night to me.

@Dutchess_III: Mandarin and Cantonese are tonal languages. What you call yelling and screeching, native speakers call tone and pitch changes.

http://mandarin.about.com/od/pronunciation/a/tones.htm

The four tones in Mandarin are:

high level – first tone
rising – second tone
falling rising – third tone
falling – fourth tone

Cantonese, with its 6 pitches, is even more subtle, elegant and complicated.
http://cantonese.ca/tones.php

Tone Pitch Contour Example
1 High Level
2 Low-Mid to High Rising
3 Mid Level
4 Low-Mid to Low Falling
5 Low to Low-Mid Rising
\ 6 Low-Mid Level

@SecondHandStoke Perhaps you’re thinking of Yiddish.

@Darth_Algar I think a lot of people outside the of the US associate a southern accent with an American accent. At least when I was in the UK and when I watch the British make fun of Americans, they almost always use a southern accent. However, obviously, they watch our movies and know we don’t all sound like that.

My husband, who like I said is bilingual, but his first language is Spanish and he was raised in a Spanish speaking country, has a really hard time hearing the difference between UK, Scottish, and Irish accents, or from hearing the differences even within England that I can hear. To him it all sounds very much alike compared to the American accents he is accustomed to.

@JLeslie

Yeah, I can imagine that someone who isn’t a native speaker of a language will have a more difficult time distinguishing different accents. I can’t make out various accents of the Spanish language very well. However for a native speaker of the language there is, as far as I’m concerned, no excuse.

Edit: As far as your first paragraph, people in the UK and American accents, maybe they find the stereotypical southern accent easier to imitate.

Hugh Laurie from House…I was shocked to learn that he’s actually British.

@Darth_Algar That might be it, they find it easier to imitate. I also think possibly they think the southern accent is one of the accents in the US they think sounds funnier, as in something to laugh at. No offense to southern friends, just saying it might be a possibility. Certainly there are parts of the north that have accents and dialects that are also easily teased.

I think a lot of Americans have a lot of trouble hearing the difference between English, Australian, and Scottish accents, it just all sounds foreign. I know southerners who will group all northerners together as one accent. We in the northeast wouldn’t do that. We separate Northeast from Midwest and even in the northeast might separate northeast from New England and of course there are little accents within those, but I’ll ignore that for now.

After living in the south I hear a big difference between TN and NC (two places I have lived) but when I lived in NY that all just would have sounded southern.

I grew up along what some might consider the north-south border (the Ohio River, IL side) and believe me, it is astounding how much more southern the accents can get in the span of a few miles.

@Darth_Algar Oh, I know. As we drive up through Arkansas into Missouri, about 45 minutes into Missouri all of a sudden you are not in the south anymore, but in the midwest. Not just accent, but businesses have German names, more redheads, LOL, it changes fast. Kentucky border also has a change in accent within short distances.

Oh yeah. Crossing over from Illinois into Kentucky and down into Tennessee (a trek I’ve made more times than I can count)......

I went out on a couple of dates in college with an exchange student from Saudi Arabia. (That’s a story all unto itself. Talk about culture clash! And his attitudes toward women..? OMG!)
Anyway, he told me he can speak with an American accent, and he demonstrated for me. I don’t remember what he said, but I remember thinking, “Dang! he sounds just like John Wayne!”

@Dutchess_III

Wow!

Your agnostic accent must be similar but not identical to my atheist accent!

I had no idea that agnostic was an ethnicity.

@syz I quite like a Russian accent (Jamie Lee Curtis agrees). Also Arabic and Yiddish – though I’m with you on German.

I like many of the Romantic language accents, though not Italian, weirdly (Jamie Lee Curtis disagrees).

@Kardamom Some of those accent collections were terrible! Points for the Rickman-off, though. :)

I was responding to your comment, ”Jewish accents aren’t good for my head… ” @SecondHandStoke. There is no such thing as a “Jewish accent,” just like there is no such thing as a Christian accent or an agnostic accent.

So, I ask you again, were you thinking of Yiddish when you posted that comment?

@SecondHandStoke My FIL was born and raised Jewish, first language Hebrew, second language Arabic, and speaks English with a “Mexican” accent. His primary language is and since he started school, has been Spanish his entire life, except when talking with his parents.

His first language was Hebrew?

It is so important to get Jamie Lee Curtis’ take on it! :)

I like the Jamie Lee Curtis comment. I thought it was funny. I think she made those comments after A Fish Called Wanda.

@Dutchess_III Yes, Hebrew. His parents didn’t speak Spanish very well, so the language at home was Hebrew. They also used Arabic at times, but less often. Kind of like how some American Jews use Yiddish sometimes. However, my FIL was born and raised in Mexico, so he was taught at school in Spanish, and he used Spanish when speaking to people not in his family. His wife and kids are first language Spanish, and Spanish is the language spoken at home.

I have American friends born here whose second language is English, but English also is their most spoken language. It’s not uncommon if both parents speak the same language. Sometimes even if just the mother speaks a foreign language the child grows up speaking the foreign language first or equal to English. My nephew spoke Spanish first and then around age 3 he started adding in English. By 5 he was bilingual. I know two women who spoke Italian first, born here, you would never guess they even speak Italian. They also spoke Italian first at home, and then when they started nursery school started incorporating English.

It’s the way to go. The kids get the English just living in America, if you want them to speak the parents language well, it’s better to use and demand that language at home. My SIL insisted her children speak Spanish at home even when her kids went through a stage of wanting to use English. I completely agree with how she approached it. She also refused ESL help in school for her kids, which I agree with also.

Wow. I’d like to hear your husband talking!

@Dutchess_III My husband or my FIL? They just sound Mexican.

How can they sound Mexican when Hebrew was their first language, clear into adulthood?