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thelinguist.uberflip.com JUNE/JULY The Linguist 25 FEATURES the same way we do with music. A song enjoyed in the company of our first love will stir up emotions decades later. A classical tune played at a funeral may bring tears to our eyes even in the blandest Muzak version. If French and Spanish sound pleasant to many of us, in spite of their imperfections, this is partly because they are spoken in popular holiday destinations. They piggyback on fond memories of sun and siesta, culture and cuisine. Our dislike of Russian, a somewhat remote language to begin with, was strengthened by decades of Cold War. As the world changes, so does our appreciation of languages. Around 1900, most people in Central Europe would have found German easy on the ear, whereas English was considered very foreign and (therefore) harsh. For the Scandinavians, Czechoslovakians, Dutch and others, German was the language of culture, trade and science. After two world wars, the tables were turned: whereas German was tainted with associations of occupation, war and genocide, English had 'occupied' culture, trade and science (except in Czechoslovakia). As a result, the Scandinavians and the Dutch now considered English to be beautiful and easy, while German had become 'ugly and difficult'. Strong feelings are also rife about dialects and accents within our own language. 'High status is accorded to people with higher education and income', Gooskens says, 'and as a result we feel that theirs is the best and most beautiful way to talk. People from poor neighbourhoods speak differently, in ways that we come to think of as ugly or even stupid. Rural accents have a middle position of sorts: not particularly beautiful but very authentic, and while the speakers may not appear too bright, we believe them to be friendly. In Britain, that would apply to the Welsh English accents, for instance.' Ugly duckling But isn't all this rather frivolous? Surely, the acoustic allure of a language doesn't matter. The Russians are unlikely to lose much sleep over the low opinion others may have about the way their language sounds. With minority languages, however, things are different. Take Frisian, a minority language in Holland spoken natively by some 350,000 people 15 miles west of Gooskens' university. 'Research has shown that speakers of Frisian, all of whom are bilingual with Dutch, find both languages equally pleasant to hear,' she says. 'Dutch people outside the region prefer Dutch, but still like the sound of Frisian. The picture is very different, though, among Dutch-only speakers in the Frisian region: they find the local language ugly, which reflects a distinctly negative attitude towards it. This means that Frisian kids are likely to hear disparaging remarks about Frisian in the schoolyard. This will not help their motivation to pay attention during Frisian lessons, nor to use the language a great deal.' Interestingly, Frisian is the nearest relative of English in Europe, with cognates including kaai ('key'), wiet ('wet'), ús ('us') and ear ('ear'). Some languages have all the luck. Italian is among the privileged elite, with its many vowels, good alternation of vowels and consonants, and absence of throat-clearing, hissing, lisping, spluttering and other less than appealing sounds. And as if that weren't enough, we often hear it when we're at our happiest: lazing on a sunny beach, enjoying a Mediterranean meal or listening to an opera. Even the Italian words we have borrowed mostly enhance these associations, from 'risotto' to 'cappuccino', from 'piano' to 'virtuoso' (and never mind 'graffiti' and 'mafia'). Small wonder Italian is so universally admired as la bella lingua. The ugly duckling among European languages, on the other hand, is Danish (which happens to be Gooskens' mother tongue and to which we owe the expression 'ugly duckling'). Danish sounds 'muddy', as the Danish phonetician Ruben Schachtenhaufen has put it. Many consonants have eroded to semivowels or 'glides' ('y' or 'w') – no longer solid consonants but not sonorous vowels either – while many vowels have become a short muffled 'ah' or 'uh', as has 'r'. Syllables tend to run into each other to the point of making words, and sometimes whole sentences, sound ill-defined and gooey. And there's more. Danish is spoken fast and monotonously. It has an odd creak in many of its vowels. It has consonant clusters such as ngstskr (as in angstskrig, 'cry of fear') and lsksp (falskspiller, 'cheater'). The language might be called 'objectively ugly'. To find out whether this is borne out, linguists asked Chinese respondents with no previous exposure to Scandinavian languages to listen to recorded speech in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. Sure enough, they judged Danish to be the ugliest of the three. As if that weren't bad enough, Denmark as a country doesn't evoke warm feelings among its neighbours: the Swedes and Norwegians consider it insignificant in size and its landscapes underwhelming. Other Europeans rarely visit in the first place. Danish cuisine and culture, with the exception of films and TV, don't draw international crowds either. The only ones to feel an irrational passion for the language must be the Danes themselves. But do they? 'Now that I live in Holland, I feel my heart leap when I hear Danish in the street', Gooskens says. 'But frankly, back in Denmark, most people don't think much of their own language in aesthetic terms.' French, with its many nasal vowels (un bon vin blanc) has an undeniable cold- in-the-head quality LA BELLA LINGUA Italian may trigger positive associations, such as a beach holiday in Sardinia (left) NEGATIVE ATTITUDES West Frisian on a bilingual sign in Hindeloopen. Many local Dutch speakers consider it to be an ugly language, which may threaten its survival WOLFHARDT, PICTURE OF BILINGUAL SIGNS IN FRIESLAND / NETHERLANDS, HINDELOOPEN, FRYSLÂN', 10/5/08 VIA WIKIPEDIACC BY-SA 3.0