Nice sounding natlangs

[Grunnen]

What happened to my nay for Italian :p. Not that it matters.

Well, I must've overlooked that! (Sorry)

Haha, I guess now you won't get it published I must say I like the graph though.

[Skomakar'n]

If I can only pick three of each...

Good:
Icelandic
Hungarian
French

Bad:
Central Swedish
American English
Spanish

Bittersweet:
Finnish
Faroese
British and Australian English

[*Ceresz]

Central Swedish

Why am I not surprised ?

Bittersweet:
Finnish

Ah, that's a good way to put it. I don't really dislike it, but I don't love it either... It just sounds so silly, but at the same time it's quite awesome.

Like
Icelandic
Saami (Northern)
Japanese

Dislike
Danish
Dutch
Portuguese (Brazilian)

Even though I'm not a huge fan of Danish, it's still interesting on a phonological level. Also, I have a hard time disliking most languages (I like Portuguese from time to time). Usually it depends on the context/scenario. Dubbed "anything" usually sounds horrible, unless it's a Disney movie or something. That probably has more to do with the acting than the actual languages though.

[Wattmann]

Pro:
Swedish
Icelandic
North Saami
Georgian (amazing how six-consonant clusters give rise to a language so fluid and sugary)

Con:
French (tres mal)
Low Saxon
Rhotic English

[Ouagadougou]

This was difficult; some languages sound good sometimes, and hideous other times.

Like:
Latin
Chichewa
Nahuatl

Dislike:
Hebrew
Vietnamese (except on Thursdays)
Romanian

[Bristel]

Like:
Modern Greek
Japanese
Catalan
isiZulu

Dislike:
Russian
Mandarin Chinese

[Mr. Z]

This was difficult; some languages sound good sometimes, and hideous other times.

Like:
Latin
Chichewa
Nahuatl

Dislike:
Hebrew
Vietnamese (except on Thursdays)
Romanian

Good choices with Latin and Nahuatl, but Hebrew is awesome, Romanian is cool and Vietnamese has nice features too.

Like:
Modern Greek
Japanese
Catalan
isiZulu

Dislike:
Russian
Mandarin Chinese

Like them all. All of those are great languages.

[GrinningManiac]

Liked
Russian
Hindi
Maori

Disliked
Japanese
Vietnamese
Danish

[----]

Poor Vietnamese; so unloved.

[Left]

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[----]

I've found that the nasally accent in Vietnamese is largely on a person to person basis, it might be a regional thing. I've watched Vietnamese shows before where the people had pretty indistinct accents that weren't at all grating or nasal.

[Left]

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[GrinningManiac]

It's less the nasal for me and more the fact that it sounds like each syllable is being exploded forth with the bang of a cannon.

Also, and this may have biased my decision subconsciously, good GOD the orthography.

[Ser]

Liked
Standard Arabic
Mandarin
French

Disliked
Ermm...

[Skomakar'n]

Russian sounds pretty good when it's spoken fluidly and things blend together, but as for individual words all that palatalisation sounds nasty, I think. :[

[din]

For the Dutch haters: I'm with you on the Randstad accents (the four largest Dutch cities and their immediate surroundings, basically), which is probably what you think of when you think of Dutch. But please, give it another chance! Standard Flemish, for instance, is so soft and gentle, it's impossible to hate (surely..?)

Random sample: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Z27xFuBok


As for my preferences:

Pretty:
1) Italian
2) Farsi

Pretty cool:
1) Estonian
2) Icelandic
3) Albanian

Ugly:
1) Vietnamese
2) Tamil (it just sounds like the sort of 'speaking in tongues' you'd expect to hear at some Pentecostal chruches)
3) Czech & Slovak

[finlay]

I want to change one of my downvotes to Italian...

[jmcd]

I do agree that that Flemish is better than other Dutch dialects.Then again, I didn't actually put Dutch in downvotes myself anyway.

[Rui]

For the Dutch haters: I'm with you on the Randstad accents (the four largest Dutch cities and their immediate surroundings, basically), which is probably what you think of when you think of Dutch. But please, give it another chance! Standard Flemish, for instance, is so soft and gentle, it's impossible to hate (surely..?)

Random sample: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Z27xFuBok

Agreed on it sounding better than standard Dutch, but still doesn't come anywhere near my "nice sounding languages" list, unfortunately.

[din]

Boo.

You're missing out

[Magb]

For the Dutch haters: I'm with you on the Randstad accents (the four largest Dutch cities and their immediate surroundings, basically), which is probably what you think of when you think of Dutch. But please, give it another chance! Standard Flemish, for instance, is so soft and gentle, it's impossible to hate (surely..?)

Random sample: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Z27xFuBok

I didn't think I knew any Flemish, but I think I understood almost every word of that. Definitely the last part.

[Haplogy]

I really like Russian, Xhosa, isiZulu, and Arabic. Also, Latin and ancient Greek if pronounced the way I view as correct.

The only language I don't really like is Spanish. Apart from that, I don't actually dislike any particular language, although a Gooisch accent in Dutch kind of makes me cringe.

[Vuvuzela]

What are the natlangs you think sound best

1) Inuktitut
2) !Kung
3) Hawai'ian

and the ones that don't sound as good?

1) Cantonese
2) Dutch
3) Pirahã[/quote]

[Imralu]

Caveat: For me, it depends on who's speaking it and how it's being spoken. Any language can sound shit or fantastic. My list may change tomorrow.

My top three:
(1) Turkish (vowel harmony, lots of /S/, and a lot of Turks sound like they're smiling)
(2) Finnish (funny timing and rhythm, perfectly shrink-wrapped unvoiced, unaspirated short and long consonants, vowel harmony).
(3) German (it gets a bad rap, but that's pretty much down to Hitler ... I've always liked it but I can't really say why exactly.)

My bottom three:
(1) French (Truth be told, I only hate it from some people, but I'm giving it a kick in the guts because of the stereotype that "French is beautiful, German is harsh". If you've heard your French neighbours screaming at each other all day, you know that French can not only be harsh, but the silly, bubbly light-heartedness of it in normal speech morphs into this evil, twisted, disgustingness. Angry French is dripping in despair and decay. And seriously, four is [katχ]
(2) Hindi (It sounds like bubbles, like when you fart in the bath.)
(3) Dutch (It's the harshest sounding language I can think of, just for the sheer volume of /x/ and its allophones, the way they bubble and phlegm out of the throat in all positions of the word ... and then there are no redeeming features. Normally harshness can be balanced out by the seriousness and gravity of a language (like German or Russian), but no, Dutch sounds just plain goofy, and harsh.)


This is my vote for the three best discriptions of languages.

Russian. There's something about the way Russian is intoned that just sounds bizarre, it's like they are all telling bad news to slow children.

1. French (especially whatever African dialect it is that half of one of my classes spoke when I was in community college... sounded like they were flossing their nostrils with live centipedes)

German(sounds like a person chewing an aluminium foil)

Australian English (least hated of these three; I hate American English more but I have to appreciate it for its weirdness and Australian English just had plain strange pronunciations)

What, exactly, is the difference between weirdness and strange(ness)?

As for the throatiness thing: Modern Hebrew isn't throaty. It's just as throaty as German.(right?)

Standard German only has /x/ at the end of syllables, and it's not a terribly common sound. Hebrew has it at the beginnings of syllables as well, and, I know it varies from speaker to speaker, but it seems to be pronounced, on average, more smoothly in German and with more lumpiness and rasping in Hebrew. Some of my German friends pronounce it only slightly more strongly than /h/. Then again, Hebrew kind of flows smoothly through its words, whereas German kind of bumps jerkily over the top of them (like most Germanic languages) ... I guess that'd be the syllable timing ... and I don't like the initial glottal stops of Newsreader German.

As far as throatiness goes, no language has got anything on Dutch. /xe:n xraxt/

English(too much vowels)

French is far more ripe with vowels than English.
It even has phonemic stress: /ˈu/ <Aout> vs. /u/ <ou>[/quote]
French only has 16 vowels. My dialect of English has 20-22.

[The Count]

Good:
Russian
Italian
Gaelic (Scottish flavor)

Bad:
Arabic
Hebrew
French

I leave Swedish out of the matter. Too biased...