Estonian Education Minister Tonis Lukas has announced a "Language Beauty Contest" that will take place to celebrate the 90th birthday of Estonia in February. The goal is to find the worlds "prettiest language" by examining the most beautiful sentences from different languages. According to story, there once was a world championship of languages. Estonia lost, taking second place to Italian, which won with the phrase, "soida tasa ule silla," meaning "go slowly over the bridge."
Estonia is different than most European languages, and is a member of the Finno-Ugric group of languages. Only about 1.1 million people worldwide speak Estonian, the majority of which live in Estonia, Finland, and Russia. Historically, the Estonian language holds a special significance to its people, as preserving the language played a significant role in opposition to foreign rule by Russia in the 19th century.
Although Education Minister Lukas claims that "we're pleased to turn to other nations with a friendly call to check how our language sounds to others now," I question how it is possible to judge the beauty of a language. We've all heard the saying "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It seems that some humans have agreed that certain languages, such as French and Italian, have a certain grace that make them beautiful, as opposed to languages such as German (sorry Phillip :(!) and Chinese. But what really makes a language beautiful?
Does a person's native language influence their perception of what constitutes beauty in a language? Are those who learn romance languages as their native languages more likely to be biased towards preferring romance languages? Or is there some inherent property in humans that causes preferences for certain sounds. I believe that Professor Boroditsky mentioned that humans tend to have a preference for rhythm in sounds (such as in music). Studies have shown that rhythm can help people to learn languages more easily. Do languages that seem to flow more appeal to humans? Standards of physical beauty differ from culture to culture and throughout time. Fads of what is beautiful come and go, and the standards of beauty are always changing. Does the same thing happen to language?
Unfortunately, there have not been a great deal of experiments studying whether people perceive languages as beautiful or not (at least any that can be easily googled for the sake of the blog), and I assume that it would be a very difficult issue to create a legitimate scientific experiment on. Scientists have noted in some experiments that newborns and older babies in monolingual families tend to prefer their native language over unfamiliar languages. I am curious to know how most adults feel when they have been exposed to several languages.
On some random websites I found comments about opinions of which languages are beautiful. The majority of the comments I read favored their own language. They seemed to favor their native language not so much because of how it sounded, but because of its uniqueness and the personality that it carried. I feel that this makes sense because our native language possesses a very personal and special meaning for us. It is more than just pleasant sounding; it is symbolic or our histories and our identities. In addition to advocates of native languages, there were also many responses admiring the beauty of the romance languages.
So I think we should have a language "beauty contest" for our introductory seminar. What language do you guys think is the most beautiful (of the languages that you are familiar with) and why? Also, I would love to hear ideas about possible theories of why we prefer certain languages.
Links:
1. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5i2MtyJZSeEWNwHls0ZevOINjaWHQ
2. http://www.physik.uni-bielefeld.de/complexity/ramus.pdf
3. http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet? prog=normal&id=JASMAN000115000005002505000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes (The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America -- May 2004 -- Volume 115, Issue 5, p. 2505)
4. http://help.berberber.com/forum79/14072-most-beautiful-language-world.html
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5 comments:
I think that the perception of the beauty of language has some universal character. Germans for example also think of Italian and French as very pleasant while generally viewing Eastern European languages and Russian as too harsh. So with the exception of German itself (which of course sounds great to Germans) there definitely is a correlation with the language perception of speakers of other languages. Interestingly enough, we don't like things in other languages that are often attributed to German as well.
I loved this blog! I was just reading about Italian and how it's considered the most beautiful language due to the cadences in rhythm...I think that there CAN be a certain objectivity in judging the "beauty" of languages based on the flow and rhythm--the same way some music (Bach/Beethoven) is praised almost universally.
Great blog post! I wonder, if we were able to scientifically determine that some specific languages really are universally (or at least widely) perceived to be "more beautiful), what might the consequences of this be? that is, what might the effects of speaking a "pretty" language versus an "ugly" language be on thought and perception? do you think you might be able to correlate linguistic beauty with other cultural values?
I think it would be really interesting to judge how people perceive those who speak different languages. For example, if subjects were to watch a woman speaking a romantic language (such as French), and to see the same woman speaking German, would they perceive the woman as more beautiful in one situation because of the language she was speaking? And would this perception differ based on the native languages of the subjects examining her?
Also, if a culture valued delicacy in women, rather than strength or power, would that change their perception of what languages were beautiful?
This is an excellent post--your discussion of language calls to mind all sorts of interesting questions about aesthetics in general.
One thing I noticed in your post is that you said that Chinese and German are known to have a "less graceful" sound than other languages(which is generally accepted) and also cited the musical nature of some languages as the source of their beauty. However, I have heard that Chinese is one of the most lyrical languages in terms of intonation, etc. Does this mean anything about your rhythm argument?
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