German can be a very soft flowing language. Even very effeminate and effete. I think people have just watched a few too many WWII movies.
The general rule. As you move further North, the limpwristier German becomes. Men sound just like the women. Down in Austria is where you have guttural Ahnold talk.
I'd say with most languages: People in the big city talk more excitably and effeminately.
Rich people enunciate better, pay attention to their diction, and draw from a wider range of vocabulary.
The poor slur their words and drawl whether American trailer trash, Japanese Yakuza goons, southern Spaniards, or southern Italians.
The pattern I notice most often: people tend to pick on the speech of the poor and extol the speech of the wealthy. (Even so, I have to admit BBC and other posh British English dialects sound awesome)
Answer certain questions about geographic location and socio-economic status and you know if a language is likely to sound cool to you.
I often prefer harsher sounding tongues over namby pamby flowy.
Honestly, Yakuza Japanese sounds cool to me. Not even recognizable as Japanese, honestly.
Almost musical with crazy melodic slurs and absurdly heavy rolled R's all over the place.
Hungarian is a wonderful expressive language...so aggressive and emotional. I've noticed the popularity of Finno-Ugric languages on this discussion board.
Vietnamese and Cantonese appeal to me because speech sounds almost like singing. I think it sounds awesome when you get the same phonetic sound with different tone back to back. Sounds like metal balls bouncing back and forth in one of those pachinko machines.
I think a lot of the best parts of North Indian and Arabic come together in Farsi. A cool sounding tongue.
Newcastle area British English sounds cool to me. I like how they got those drawn out vowel sounds. Geooooooordie.
Kiwi English sounds pretty cool too, yiss? It's Boba Fett English!
I used to know a Kikuyu from Kenya. His mother tongue was rhythmic, flowing, musical. Went by a much slower beat than our stereotypes of rapid fire West African tongues. Lots of drawn out 'ehhhhs' while he was talking, each hitting a different tone.
I like Argentine Spanish. A combo of the best of Spanish and Italian. One of those languages where you're going to have to wildly wave your hands about. Very expressive and passionate. It's way more satisfying to say calle as cashhhe instead of cayyye.
Dutch: Approaching the Dutch border I was taking a nap...until a guttural, musical voice announced. "Hengelooooo!!!"
Just the name of a border town, but it sounded like goooooooool! in Spanish. I loved the guttural 'r's in conjunction with drawn out vowel sounds. I'd just wait for a word to end with something sounding like "oooooorrrrt or "grrroooot".
Cote D'Azur French sounds real neat. They have this way of drawing out their soft 'r' sounds at the end of words. Not heard quite the same in any other language.
Czesky - One of my favorite language sounds is the Czech head resonance. If there's a man with a bass voice, his head'll ring like a bell when he hits one of these sounds.
Ugly languages:
Turkish can get very ugly. A stream of curses sounds like someone trying to talk underwater with all the 'b' and 'p' sounds back to back. "plub blub blup!..."
Upper class and refined versions though, are quite gorgeous.
Some Hindi dialects can get on my nerves. It's as if they only know how to speak with their nose and frontal palate.
I'm American, and I think most American English is horrendous. Strangely the high class versions sound worse: effeminate, nasally, pouty, angry, monotone, bland all at once. Notice that in games like Starcraft, they all talk like country boys not like middle class suburbanites or high class metrosexuals.
The way some chavs speak British English is truly awful. Sounds like they're missing all their teeth. Maybe the dialect was created from their lower class ancestors losing all their teeth early on and then raising kids.
Korean can sometimes be ugly. Choppy and forceful. Women speak it in a noticeably lower, gruffer voice, almost an octave lower than in most other languages. Actually, I'd say gender roles are pretty much reversed in Korean if you're in the Seoul area.
I can speak Spanish fairly well, but I can't understand Andalucians from Southern Spain. They leave out every other sound, can't tell what the hell they're saying. Even indios coming over the border from Northern Mexico are easier to understand.
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And thats how you make a grand entrance, ladies and gentlemen. Post nr 1, welcome to the forums GluontheFerengi!
