Name: Why Some Languages Make You More Attractive (And Others Don't)
Uploaded: 2026-03-03T08:36:14.000Z
Duration: 8 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We know that speaking multiple languages is great for our brain and memory.

Adverbs of degree

But what if languages also affect how attractive we come off to friends, dates and even life partners?

As I've traveled, listened to and learned different languages around the world, I've noticed that there's just something inexplicably attractive about languages and the people they draw us to.

So, out of curiosity, I wanted to dig into some of the research for this video to better understand why we're attracted to certain languages.

Which languages are most appealing, and what this means for you as a language learner?

Language Attraction Psychology Lets start with a simple question.

What language does this sound like to you?

If you guessed Italian and American English, you'd be right.

But the thing is, none of those were actual words.

And this is part of what Phonaesthetics explores.

This field helps us understand three reasons why we find certain languages attractive, and

the fourth that's interesting for anyone who likes music.

But let's look at the first one, the cultural effect.

Say I gave you two columns, one with words like sun, beach, heat, colorful, and

a second with cold, organized, clean, hard.

Now, what if I asked you to organize these six languages into one column each?

You can pause the video and try it for yourself, but

If you organize the six languages somewhat like this, then you wouldn't be the only one.

Vanita Chand of the University of Essex says that the attractiveness of a language often depends on how we think about the place places that speak that language.

And for Spanish, this often tends to be pretty warm.

Dimitrinka Nikleva, a professor at the University of Granada in Spain, says that images of Spain and Latin America typically include themes like sun, beach, joy, celebration and fun.

And there's a popular belief that Spanish speaking countries have vibrant cultures associated with rhythm, dance and passionate, welcoming people.

These aspects all promote a positive side of Spanish speaking cultures, and

in turn they shape the perception of the language itself.

Even simplistic stereotypes from movies and TV shows of Spanish speaking characters as suave and charming also contribute to how the culture and language are perceived.

Cultural perceptions of France's ties to art have also painted a positive view of the French language in the US for example.

But on the flip side, historical tensions between the US and Russia have shaped why the Russian language may lack some appeal in certain parts of the country.

So cultural stereotypes really affect our attraction to languages, but

they don't fully explain why Certain languages draw us in and others don't until we consider the second effect.

Chapter 2 the closeness effect Imagine you're a Spanish speaker out traveling.

You need help, and the only two people around are a Portuguese speaker and a German speaker.

You'd likely pick the Portuguese person, and this is partly due to the closeness effect.

This explains why languages that sound like our mother tongue or come from the same language family often sound more appealing and draw us in because of their familiarity.

According to ethnologue, Portuguese and Spanish have a lexical similarity of about 89% because they come from the same Latin root.

This means that if you speak Spanish, you might understand close to 90% of the words in Portuguese and vice versa.

And if you look at the phrase where do you recommend I eat?

It looks and sounds very similar across the two dondemer recomiendas comer on jivo.

But if we try the same for English and Spanish, the story is different.

English and Spanish are not as similar, so you'll find that Spanish and Portuguese speakers tend to like each other's languages in many cases.

But then we hit a wall with when we actually survey most Spanish and Portuguese speakers, they usually prefer to learn English as their target language.

The Exposure Effect there's an old adage that familiarity breeds contentment, and

This is the theory that we usually find a language more attractive and less stressful to listen to if we've already heard it before, even if we don't speak the language ourselves.

And English is a great example as a fairly ubiquitous language.

Many people around the world find English attractive because it's common and globally known in the news, on tv, on the Internet, in the clothes we wear.

English is the most popular language in 90 plus countries, but there are some even more intriguing examples.

In North American countries, many kids grow up being exposed to part of Japanese culture through anime and manga like Naruto and Dragon Ball Z.

And as these art forms have become more popular, so too has interest in the Japanese language in these regions.

And in Peru, Chile and Argentina, we see a surge of interest in wanting to lear Korean.

And this seems to mimic the rising popularity of K pop groups like BTS and Blackpink.

The musical case of Korean is particularly interesting because it hints at the fourth key psychological trigger, the singing effect.

Howard Gills, a professor of communication at the University of California, put forth the inherent value hypothesis that explains some Languages might just be naturally more beautiful than others because of their sounds.

And the singing effect takes this further to say that languages that are better for singing will be naturally more beautiful.

For example, you might often hear that operas are better in Italian because Italian is a musical language.

Well, think about the emotions you get listening to this clip.

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

And compare those to the emotions you get from this clip.

And has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin, vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of vill felt more pleasant and relaxing, likely the first one.

And Shakespeare would say that this is due to assonance, which is a poetic technique that creates a calm feeling by using many vowel sounds in a sentence.

And Italian has its fair share of vowels.

Just look at the word aguole, which is made up almost entirely of vowels.

The bias for vowels can make Italian better for singing because it helps singers go through phrases without interrupting their airflow for consonants.

And that singing quality carries through when speaking Italian.

And it can make the language almost like a song to trigger the parts of our brain that love music.

On the flip side, some languages don't sound as melodic.

Languages that have strong consonant usage, like Russian, Polish, and

German, they might not benefit much from the singing effect.

It means powerful and has 14 letters, but only three of them are vowels.

Another side is tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai, or Chinese.

These can have a different tone for each word in a sentence.

It can mean something like horse, hemp, scold, or mother, and

These different tones can make these languages overall more difficult for singing.

So together, these four effects start to explain some of the psychology of why we like certain languages.

Which languages attract us and which ones don't?

The Language Attraction Survey Babbel, a language learning app with millions of users, tried to get to the bottom of the language attraction question.

They sent a survey to roughly 15,000 Westerners, asking them what languages they found most attractive and guess which languages took the top spots.

As expected, French, Italian, Spanish, and English.

And then the list began to diverge after that.

Answers change quite a bit depending on who you ask.

The National Academy of Sciences shared a 2023 study where 228 people listened to 2,000 Polish plus recordings in over 200 languages.

And they did this to discover what language sounded most beautiful, but

answers changed a lot depending on what language the listener spoke.

Chinese speakers preferred Mandarin and then English, English speakers preferred English and then Italian and so on.

When they averaged out all the scores, languages didn't differ by more than 2%.