8th December, 2023

I Asked 100 Strangers on The Internet “What Is the World’s Most Beautiful Language?” And This Is What They Said

As a professional language instructor, people’s attitudes and perceptions in regard to languages are extremely important to me. For this reason, I went on the website chatroulette.com and asked 100 strangers a few questions. I am well aware that this is not a scholarly study that provides a true reflection of the world’s population; after all, this is just using one website full of people who speak English and are willing to answer a stranger’s questions on live video—not to mention that a sample size of 100 is way too small. Nevertheless, this survey was a lot of fun to carry out and it did help me draw a few conclusions. I hope that it provides something valuable to you as well.

1.      The Survey

The questions were:

-         Where are you from?

This question is easy for many to answer, but it does have different meanings for different people. I tried to make sure that the person answered with the best definition that matched their identity.

-         Where do you live?

This question is as relevant as the first since the place where you live does have an influence on your opinions.

-         What is your native language?

I often needed to clarify what this means, so I added “the language that you learned from your parents” to make sure I was getting the answer that I wanted.

-         Which languages have you learned—even if it’s just a little bit?

My intention was to find out which languages each person had a reasonable amount of familiarity with. I wanted to see if their opinions were based on familiarity.

-         What is the most beautiful language that you can think of?

Here I was really after the first language that popped in their mind. Many people were taken by surprise and did not know what to answer. I also wanted them to define “beautiful language” in their own terms. For some it was the sound, others the writing and others told me about the “beautiful” things they could do with their favorite language. At any rate, I feel that this question is a simple indicator of languages that people have good, positive feelings about.

-         What is the ugliest language in the world?

Just like the last question, the intention here was to find out which language people have negative feelings about. The results for this question were just as interesting.

The survey interview process was done entirely by me in late November and early December 2023. I did my best to get a wide variety of participants from countries all over the world. In the end, people from 46 different countries in every continent (except Antarctica!) participated

2.     Conclusions

A.      Most beautiful language: Spanish

20 people said Spanish is the most beautiful! I guess my gut feeling here is pride. Speaking seriously now, my impression is that Spanish-speaking culture is simply in vogue currently. People love the music and the dancing that they see all over social media. The general public loves Hispanic celebrities: Shakira, Jennifer López, Messi and many more. The food is quite popular as well, from tacos, to ceviche, to tortilla de patata, people simply can’t have enough. Spanish is also a language that people have a high degree of familiarity with—57 people said to have learned it at some point in their lives.

B.    2nd Most Beautiful Language: English

16 people said English was the most beautiful and I was not expecting that at all! At the same time, it does makes sense since English is such a powerful and dominant language. And, the world is flooded by English-language media! This fits into a topic I talked about in one my videos (Is English an easy language?), where I posit that English isn’t really an “easy” language, but instead it is perceived as easy because people practice it more, sometimes even without realizing it. I also got the impression that many participants wanted to migrate to English-speaking countries, so that probably makes them enjoy the language even more.

C.      Ugliest Language: German

23 participants chose German as the ugliest. I am not surprised at all; we’ve all seen those memes where German seems to have words that are different than the other languages and so on. I have a couple of hypotheses for why people have such negative feelings about German. For one, German is often heard in WW2 movies, so I imagine people associate it with some of the most negative moments in history. I also think the fact that most Germans speak English quite well means that many people are not willing to learn their language, and thus think of it as an undecipherable and overcomplicated mess that is just too “hard”.

D.      Many People Believe There Are No Ugly Languages

22 people simply didn’t find any language ugly. This is great! I love that so many people don’t really have seem to have any negative feelings towards other languages. I must say, though, that a lot of participants did say they “hated” certain accents within their native language. Let’s work on that, shall we?

E.     Most Popular Among Spanish Speakers: Spanish

1/3 of Spanish Speakers said Spanish was the most beautiful. So not only are outsiders loving our language, but there seem to be very positive feelings about it within out own community. To be an “aguafiestas”, though, the average number of languages that Hispanics were familiar with was 2.9, so there seems to be a tendency to not know too much besides English, Spanish and perhaps a bit of another language. Podríamos mejorar ese número.

G.     Ugliest Language for Many Arabic Speakers: French

37.5 % of my Arabic speakers said French was the ugliest. I’m a French teacher, so yeah, I love French. I was quite surprised it didn’t take first place as most beautiful! (Only 7 people considered French the most beautiful) Surprising as well was the fact that these Arabic speakers just seem to hate it. It could have to do with tensions between French people and Arabic speakers in and out of France. It could also have to do with there being a perceived imposition of the language in countries like Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

H.      Brazilians Don’t Like Chinese

Half of my Brazilian participants answered “Chinese” for ugliest. This seems to be a popular sentiment in many places, though. My hypothesis is that China is still the first image that pops in people’s minds when they think of something “foreign”. If you’re Hispanic you may have heard your mom say “¿Es que yo le estoy hablando en chino a usted o qué?”. Yes, Mandarin is hard, but I think it’s way harder in people’s minds than in reality.

I.      Latin Americans Don’t have a High Familiarity with Many World Languages

The countries where people claimed to have learned at least 6 languages or more were: Lebanon, Algeria, Hong Kong, Denmark, Netherlands, UK, USA, Sweden, Philippines,

Germany, Greece, India, and Qatar. Unfortunately, none of these are in Latin America. It seems that most multilingual people live either in Europe or in Arabic-speaking countries. Special mention to Filipinos and Indians who have good knowledge of English, their country’s national language and their local language plus at least another one on top of that.

3.      General Impressions

The big winner of the night is Spanish, but the variety of languages that people loved was quite large. 24 different languages were mentioned as most beautiful. A couple people said “Farsi”, one said Icelandic, there was Cebuano, Korean, Polish. I’m glad people are appreciating the beauty of these languages. I’m also happy that the “beautiful” column seems to contradict the “ugly” column quite a bit, especially with Arabic, which is such a loved and hated language at the same time. The evidence seems to point to this whole topic not being a subjective thing. Perceptions seem to come from our own prejudice and it’s something to keep in mind as language professionals.

4.    The Data

Just in case you want to dive into it yourself, here is a table with the entire data collected.