Top 5 best-sounding world and semi-world languages

[Leoreth]

You must be joking. English is the make-up-your-own-grammar language. Its excuse for "grammar" is a kludge and a dirty hack, and even those kludges and dirty hacks are ignored for the sake of brevity and style. If it's simple by Indo-Aryan standards, then those other languages must have grammar that would make Nikola Tesla's head spin. Either that or I'm too accustomed to Whedonesque language and Valley Girl accents (one of the effects of growing up in California...)

Never mistake dialects for the actual language, especially those of social origins.

Apart from that, how many other languages do you speak? English lacks almost everything that makes most others hard: noun genders, complicated syntax, multiple cases, conjugated verbs ... and I'm currently only thinking of other European languages. Some irregular verbs don't make a language hard.

That's what makes it awesome! It's the "sit down, shut up, and pay attention to me or I will send you to the gas chambers" language.

I must admit, even I almost wet myself when I first heard the English version of Scrubs' Elliot speaking German (the German dub replaced it with Danish for some inexplicable reason, which didn't make any sense at all).

"Iss dein Schnitzel, sonst kriegst du keinen Nachtisch!"

English isn't a Romantic language, it's a Germanic language.

I know that, my sentence got a little confused. What I was trying to convey was: English, or Romantic languages like French.

Its inclination towards slang is one of the things I love about it. But then, that's also one of the things I love about English as well.

Oh, i agree on English accents! Sussex area is my favorite currently (as far as I've been able to track that down because recognizing this isn't always easy).

 

[Godwynn]

English: The language of the Americans
German: Goethe's works are amazing
Spanish as spoken in Spain is sexier than its Latin American version
Arabic

Romanic languages like English

This, sir, makes us enemies forever.

 

[Tee Kay]

French is best, English a close second, Arabic and Russian also somewhere near the top. Mandarin is fugly.

 

[Danielion]

Um, I think that Latin might be one of the Romance languages... do you really like "ouvre" more than "Senatus Populusque Romanus"?

Latin is not a Romance language in my opinion, but an Italic language. I only call a language Romance when it stems from Latin. Latin is just Latin.

I treat Romance languages differently from Latin. While it is true that in order to truly eruditely speak a Romance language (and that includes French), a knowledge of Latin helps. No living Romance language, however, comes close to Latin in terms of elegance.

Why is French my favourite? Because it's so idiomatic, yet even that language hasn't ignored its Latin roots. I also like how it's influenced by Germanic. It's hard to explain, but I like (standard) French (from France, not from Belgium, too much 'working class French').

 

[Winner]

Indeed! Japanese can be called a 'world language' due to its cultural soft power, which is immense.

How so?

 

[Verbose]

3. German. Good for shouting. Good for getting things done. A nice language for curiously questioning things, studying things, learning about the world. A strong industrious peasant language, as all languages should strive to achieve! I also like the way they make new words by just squishing old words together.

Funnily enough, that's also one of the specific charms of Japanese.

 

[Gurubashi]

Time for another update of the standings! At 55 votes, here is the top 3:

1. English - 32 votes. It is now 9 votes ahead of its closest competitor, which is
2. French - 23 votes.
3. Russian - 21 votes.

Funny, I thought there'd be more of a difference between French and whatever the third place language was. But so far Russian and German have both garnered heavy support.

 

[Danielion]

How so?

Well, I don't know. It's popular in South Korea at least and the country produces lots of culture and seems to be relatively fended off from the Anglosphere. Yes, Anglo culture also influences Japan heavily, but most Japanese can't speak English at all and are ignorant about Anglo mainstream culture.

 

[Winner]

Ah, I thought you meant Japanese language wielded a lot of soft power worldwide.

Because I'd say its influence where I live is pretty much zero.

 

[Millman]

While I'm still allowed to post here. The outlandish one has returned.

*Runs in*

Everyone has their opinion.

*Runs out*

 

[Verbose]

Time for another update of the standings! At 55 votes, here is the top 3:

1. English - 32 votes. It is now 9 votes ahead of its closest competitor, which is
2. French - 23 votes.
3. Russian - 21 votes.

Funny, I thought there'd be more of a difference between French and whatever the third place language was. But so far Russian and German have both garnered heavy support.

This is primarily an English language site. I'm slightly surprised it's in second.

 

[Gurubashi]

This is primarily an English language site. I'm slightly surprised it's in second.

What do you mean? French is second.

 

[Verbose]

What do you mean? French is second.

Yes. That is surprising on a primarily English language site imo.

 

[Danielion]

The English I like most is what I'd call 'Standard Oxford English'. It is heard less and less frequently as the UK is becoming more and more tolerant toward different accents in its broadcasting.

 

[Tee Kay]

Ah, I thought you meant Japanese language wielded a lot of soft power worldwide.

Because I'd say its influence where I live is pretty much zero.

I could say that of Spanish where I live.

 

[Artifis]

I'd vote for Japanese, but there's no option for it
Voted for Spanish, Italian and Russian

I agree with the choice about Japanese.

My choices are English, French and Mandarin Chinese. English and French should be pretty self-explanatory. Mandarin Chinese does have something to it, especially when you listen to Chinese poems done well.

Let's say that this hasn't been narrowed down to "semi-world languages" (what an ambiguous term if I've ever seen one), there IS one language I would've loved to see: Gaelic.

 

[kochman]

In my order of preference...
Italian
Portuguese
English
Spanish
French

Thank the Romans!!!

 

[Danielion]

Thanks to becoming illiterates after my Germanic ancestors destroyed the Western Empire.

 

[kochman]

Thanks to becoming illiterates after my Germanic ancestors destroyed the Western Empire.

Not that the average "Roman" was literate before the barbarians with whom I also share bloodlines with came through and cleaned house...

 

[Danielion]

Not that the average "Roman" was literate before the barbarians with whom I also share bloodlines with came through and cleaned house...

Yeah. But I'd assume their percentage of literates was fairly high for such early a period. I of course can only guess. Still, it was not unheard of for just a soldier to know how to read and write in the Roman Empire of yore. I'd also assume that people spoke Latin fairly well and that that only would stop after the fall of the Empire, not before. They spoke Vulgar Latin of course, but they wouldn't 'deviate' too far in their language until later (Classical Latin was actually more a 'cleaned up Latin' than Vulgar Latin was 'deviant').

Someone might correct me if I'm wrong and say where I'm wrong.