We associate languages and accents with new culture and upbringing. If you feel stuck meeting the same types of dates, a foreign voice adds newness. Two of my exes have strong, different accents. One is Northern while the other is Zambian. I rarely fancy guys who speak similar to me. In , The Independent reported on a study showing how race alters accent expectations. Linguists from the University of British Colombia asked a group of people in Cananda to listen to Canadian speakers.
The speakers have all grown up in the exact same place but vary in ethnic background. When listeners in the study knew a speaker was white, they found them easier to understand.
Yet the accents were all the same. We can associate accent to social class and education. Believing someone is not smart because of their speech, demonstrates prejudice whether intended or not. Big Seven Travel listed the supposed sexiest accents around the world in Birmingham is last while Essex is at the top.
When we think about sex appeal, we typically picture physical aesthetic and classic character traits like humour and ambition. Voices hold tremendous power and especially in attraction — not a thing to ignore. If our attraction to accents is based on stereotypes and assumptions, perhaps we have control to change our feelings. In terms of liking our own voices, maybe we need to listen to how we speak more and understand how we can improve.
I for instance, think I raise my voice to high at the end of sentences. Rarely do I meet people who think they sound good. What an interesting subject! I absolutely love all the different English accents, dialects and varieties. I generally find different native accents more attractive that foreign ones.
By that I mean, I like people who are able to switch between their native dialect and the standard variety of their mother tongue. I think it is definitely more acceptable to speak English with a foreign accent than some other languages, just because English is a more global language, so an accent might be the only way for a foreign speakers to show their ethnicity and culture.
When you speak some other language with an accent, people might be more judgmental or not, maybe it just depends on the people. The more attractive we find someone the greater the difference. You might wonder how these two opposite behaviours unfold on a date — surely a good date, and the sign we are attracted to someone, comes from a good conversation? Over the course of a date prosodic entrainment comes and goes.
At times of entertaining conversation we match our pitches, and at others, when we want to show our attraction we go in the opposite direction. Also, generally, women prioritise good conversation over attraction and vice versa, says Pisanski.
What is more, lowering or raising your pitch might be a sign of how attractive we find our date, but it also makes the other person more attracted to us. We can use our pitch to manipulate others. The one exception to this rule is that sometimes women's voice pitch goes down when they find a man attractive — particularly if it's a man who is popular with other women.
In a speed dating scenario, some women lowered their voice on their dates with the most popular men. Like our politicians, it might be that they were trying to appear more serious and less naive than their competitors, suggests Pisanski, who led the study.
This same speed dating experiment, conducted on a small sample of French adults, found that the men also preferred those women with deeper voices — something that Pisanski says might be indicative of changing tastes as men look for serious, ambitious, career-driven women. Women are starting to speak lower," says Pisanski. Barkat-Defradas agrees, though points out these trends have only been seen in French adults so far.
Maybe there is something to the "bedroom voice" after all. Perhaps, unlike the rest of the world, French men have a slightly different taste when it comes to accents. Or is there just something about the French — and the way they speak? It often ranks highly on unscientific accent preference polls. Barkat-Defradas suggests that French speakers pout more to form words, which might be seen as attractive.
The difficulty when looking at languages rather than specific qualities of speech is that languages also communicate national stereotypes.
For French natives, of course, these associations are much more accent-specific. But could putting on an accent help you to appear younger or more masculine? Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.
Sorry, France: in our latest global survey, accents from the UK swept the world off their feet. Japan specifically went weak at the knees for an English accent, while Irish respondents were most likely to dig a Scottish accent. The UK itself, meanwhile, named Irish accents the sexiest.
For American ladies, a British accent is hottest , according to a survey by travel dating website MissTravel. For decades in the Golden Age of Hollywood, actors spoke in an accent that blended the best of both accents of course this is a biased point of view : the Mid-Atlantic accent , popularized by Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, comprised aspects of Standard American and Standard British to evoke high class and breeding.
Instead, it offers the same explanation that sociolinguists suggest drives such judgments: social evaluation of the speaker and not the speech per se. Ok, so we know a lot of American females swoon over British blokes. The Americans thought the accent from Glasgow was the sexiest, but according to a separate linguistic study, British people think the Glaswegian accent is one of the worst in social attractiveness.
These examples go to show that accent hierarchies exist only because individuals create them to suit their own totally subjective preferences, based on their stereotypical understandings or lack thereof of the cultures associated with those accents.
Of course, this means that accent hierarchies do exist. When enough people in an in-group community agree on particular stereotypes of out-group communities—and on what counts as allowable and non-allowable, or attractive or non-attractive accents—it can lead to accent discrimination. At the end of the day, even though nothing in language is inherently un attractive, language is a social institution used by imperfect social beings who bring a lot of judgments to the table, and those judgments create myths about attractiveness.
As sociolinguist Dr.
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