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Most Beautiful Widely Spoken Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4777 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes  Speaks: Russian | Message 1 of 46 09 March 2012 at 6:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I was curious to know, of the world's major languages, which of them, if any, do you consider beautiful? I consider Finnish and Estonian to be the world's most beautiful, but neither of them are widely spoken. I have made a list of 12 major languages, spoken by about 80% of the planet.
Mandarin English Spanish Hindi Arabic Russian French Indonesian Portuguese Japanese Korean German Trying to be objective, the only one I would consider truly beautiful is Japanese, at least when spoken by a woman. A Japanese woman is like a lotus blossom when she speaks. Spanish is considered beautiful I suppose, but I have no emotional connection to it. I am partial to Russian and think it's beautiful because it sounds so sad, like it has a broken heart. Arabic and Brazilian music are amazing. I don't know enough about Hindi or Indonesian to comment, but some female Hindi singers sound like Minnie Mouse on helium. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 46 09 March 2012 at 7:19am | IP Logged | ||
Umm, we're talking about the beauty of languages. It feels a bit oxymoronic to try to draw on objectivity here. And with regard to the list, none of those languages is beautiful to me. However my eyes lit up a bit when you mentioned Estonian and Finnish at the start. Now we're getting somewhere... For the record I think that Hungarian is the most beautiful, but meh, they're all Finno-Ugric languages so in the big picture it's the same difference ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5129 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 3 of 46 09 March 2012 at 7:25am | IP Logged | ||
I'll just add (and I'm sure that I'm not alone in thinking this) that what may start out as a harsh sounding language to us tends to become more beautiful the deeper we study it. But yeah, there's no way to be objective here. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 09 March 2012 at 7:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 46 09 March 2012 at 12:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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From your list I consider Portuguese and German the most beautiful. Normally also Indonesian, though sometimes it sounds idk "strained". Listen to most texts on GLOSS for example. Or better don't, listen to some Indonesian music (my favourite playlist) and just some audios that are not for learners. It actually is quite similar to Finnish and Japanese in its lack of consonant clusters, it has PLENTY of words that are similar to Finnish though the meaning is completely different. I wonder if you'll find it almost as beautiful as Finnish.
Also in all three languages, the loan words are often recognizable but different/cute. From those I don't study, I don't like the sound of French, and I haven't heard Korean and Hindi enough. neutral about others. In writing, Hindi is the most beautiful from these in my opinion. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5333 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 46 09 March 2012 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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As my purely subjective answer, I would give Russian and Portuguese. I love listening to Russian, and Portuguese has a lovely sound.
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| MarcusOdim Groupie Brazil Joined 4846 days ago 91 posts - 142 votes | Message 7 of 46 09 March 2012 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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English
It's amazing for all musical genres, it's flexible, rich, educated and imponent, diverse....... None of the others is all cool as English is 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ellsworth Senior Member United States Joined 4956 days ago 345 posts - 528 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish | Message 8 of 46 09 March 2012 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Um really? English is extremely widely spoken and has a large(yet for the most part
static) vocabulary. However flexible? You can't change a words part of speech for 90% of words without sounding like a child. Also, for music? Just try listening to an Opera in English compared with one in Italian or German. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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