Is Swedish more beautiful than Danish? Matched guise investigations with unknown languages

Nanna H Hilton,Charlotte Gooskens,Chaoju Tang,Anja Schüppert

doi:10.1017/s0332586521000068

Nanna H Hilton, Charlotte Gooskens + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1017/s0332586521000068

Copy DOI

Abstract

AbstractAre some languages universally seen as beautiful? And if so, what are the linguistic traits that make some languages sound more pleasing than others? This paper addresses these two questions. We do so with results from two listener experiments that use speech samples from a bilingual Danish–Swedish speaker in a matched guise test, where the listeners are ‘previously unexposed’ students from central China. Our results indicate that listeners from Central China with no previous exposure find Swedish more pleasing sounding than Danish. This finding provides evidence that there could be features of language that sound more beautiful to listeners cross-culturally. In a follow-up experiment we remove the intonation contours of the speech to see whether this prosodic trait plays a role for evaluations. The results show that the difference in evaluations between Swedish and Danish disappears when both speech samples are monotonised. We discuss the importance of our findings for language attitudes research.

Highlights

Language attitude research shows that people have strong and consistent aesthetic associations with different languages
We examine the language attitudes towards a Swedish and Danish bilingual speaker in a matched-guise test held with Chinese listeners who have had no previous exposure to Scandinavian languages
Data reduction with PCA To test whether the bilingual speaker is rated significantly more positively when she speaks Swedish than when she speaks Danish, we reduced the data by conducting a principal component analysis (PCA) on the overall ratings on the six personality traits ‘normality’, ‘beauty’, ‘smartness’, ‘modernity’, ‘kindness’ and ‘richness’, and on the judgment of the beauty of the language

Summary

Introduction

Language attitude research shows that people have strong and consistent aesthetic associations with different languages. In theoretical approaches to language and social psychology it is assumed that the vocal cues in speech activate stereotypical information for the listener, and that the social traits associated with the stereotype are attributed to the speaker (e.g. Dovidio & Gluszek 2012:93). It is generally agreed, that attitudes toward languages other than our own reflect previous experience with the variety, or knowledge about the variety imposed upon the listener (see Edwards 1999 for an overview). It seems agreed upon that the development of evaluative responses towards language cannot occur in a social vacuum, and that evaluations are created and become dynamic in a social context (e.g. Giles & Ryan 1982)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion