RESEARCH ARTICLE | PSYCHOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE SCIENCES

Do some languages sound more beautiful than others?

Andrey Anikina,b , Nikolay Aseyevc , and Niklas Erben Johanssond,1

Edited by Kenneth Wachter, University of California, Berkeley, CA; received October 29, 2022; accepted March 25, 2023

Italian is sexy, German is rough—but how about Páez or Tamil? Are there universal
phonesthetic judgments based purely on the sound of a language, or are preferences Significance
attributable to language-external factors such as familiarity and cultural stereotypes?
We collected 2,125 recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families, including 5 Despite the abiding popular
to 11 speakers of each language to control for personal vocal attractiveness, and asked interest, there is hardly any
820 native speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages to indicate how much empirical research on whether
they liked these languages. We found a strong preference for languages perceived as some languages sound more
familiar, even when they were misidentified, a variety of cultural-geographical biases, beautiful than others and
and a preference for breathy female voices. The scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic whether some phonetic features
speakers were weakly correlated, indicating some cross-cultural concordance in phon- are universally attractive. We
esthetic judgments, but overall there was little consensus between raters about which
carefully controlled for language
languages sounded more beautiful, and average scores per language remained within
familiarity and cultural biases in
±2% after accounting for confounds related to familiarity and voice quality of individ-
ual speakers. None of the tested phonetic features—the presence of specific phonemic the first large-scale, cross-cultural
classes, the overall size of phonetic repertoire, its typicality and similarity to the listener’s comparison of hundreds of
first language—were robust predictors of pleasantness ratings, apart from a possible languages and did not find any
slight preference for nontonal languages. While population-level phonesthetic prefer- widely shared preferences for
ences may exist, their contribution to perceptual judgments of short speech recordings specific languages or phonetic
appears to be minor compared to purely personal preferences, the speaker’s voice quality, features. While some types of
and perceived resemblance to other languages culturally branded as beautiful or ugly. human voices may be generally
attractive, the languages
language attitudes | phonesthetics | cross-cultural | voice
themselves were surprisingly
It has long been debated which languages are esthetically pleasing, and why. Phonesthetics— uniform in terms of their esthetic
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the perception of beauty in spoken language that is independent of meaning—is men- appeal to the average person in
tioned already in the Talmud: “Four languages are pleasing for use in the world: Greek our sample. This initial finding
for song, Latin for battle, Syriac (Aramaic) for dirges, Hebrew for speech” (1). Popular promotes an egalitarian view of
discussions have continued in more recent times, from Tolkien’s mellifluous Elvish and extant world languages,
the Black Speech of Mordor (2) to speculations about the perfect language for singing. demonstrates the feasibility of
In contrast, and until very recently (3, 4), academic research has been all but silent on the cross-cultural phonesthetic
topic of phonesthetics. Labeling some languages as intrinsically beautiful and others as
research, and raises important
ugly is politically incendiary, and there are difficult methodological challenges because
questions about the role of
the perception of beauty in a language depends on idiosyncratic factors such as previous
exposure. Nevertheless, a scientific investigation of phonesthetics is becoming more feasible esthetics in language evolution.
due to improved accessibility both of recordings from less familiar world languages and
of international samples of raters for perceptual studies, and it offers valuable theoretical
insights beyond mere claims that language X is more beautiful than Y. Speech is of para-
mount importance to human societies, and a proper understanding of its esthetic prop-
erties will be a crucial addition to the active research on the perceptual features behind
the esthetics of visual arts (5) and music (6, 7). Furthermore, an esthetic evaluation of
spectrotemporal features in speech, such as specific phonemes or prosodic patterns, may Author contributions: A.A., N.A., and N.E.J. designed
research; A.A., N.A., and N.E.J. performed research; A.A.
affect their typological prevalence, making phonesthetics a potentially relevant factor in contributed new reagents/analytic tools; A.A. analyzed
language evolution. We therefore took advantage of a newly available corpus of recordings data; and A.A., N.A., and N.E.J. wrote the paper.

from hundreds of world languages (https://live.bible.is) to test whether the phonetic The authors declare no competing interest.

structure of some languages makes them universally appealing, and if so, what phonetic This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

features are responsible for this effect. Although PNAS asks authors to adhere to United Nations
naming conventions for maps (https://www.un.org/
To test whether phonesthetic preferences exist, it is essential both to understand what geospatial/mapsgeo), our policy is to publish maps as
makes this a theoretical possibility and to consider what other factors may be involved provided by the authors.
when a subject in a perceptual experiment reports liking or disliking the sound of a par- Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.
This article is distributed under Creative Commons
ticular language. Starting from the lowest level of auditory perception, speech is only one Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0
type of input to a neurological system that evolved to process sound in general. In fact, (CC BY-NC-ND).
the human auditory brain has changed very little compared to our primate ancestors (8): 1
To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email:
niklas.erben_johansson@ling.lu.se.
if anything, speech itself may be adapted for exploiting the sensitivity of the auditory
This article contains supporting information online at
system (9, 10). When we hear “How do you do?”, the initial stages of processing are the https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.​
same as for any environmental sound. As a result, the same primitive acoustic features 2218367120/-/DCSupplemental.
that we enjoy or dislike in environmental sounds should affect our esthetic perception of Published April 17, 2023.

PNAS 2023 Vol. 120 No. 17 e2218367120 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218367120 1 of 7

 speech. Unfortunately, Feynman’s pessimistic view that “in under-
standing why only certain sounds are pleasant to our ear.... [we
are] probably no further advanced now than in the time of
Pythagoras” (11) still rings true. There are notoriously unpleasant
sounds, such as fingernails on blackboard (12), and the aversive-
ness of industrial noises is an important practical concern, but the
fundamental reasons for why these sounds are so disturbing
remain mysterious. While it is doubtful that any phones (elemen-
tary sounds used in human speech, different from phonemes in
that they do not need to distinguish between words) are strongly
aversive as acoustic primitives, some classes may well be more
pleasing than others. For instance, there are claims that consonants
l and m and high vowels are overrepresented in the words that
native English speakers consider beautiful (13), while German
speakers perceive short vowels, voiceless consonants, and hissing
sibilants as affectively negative (14). Word meaning is a hopeless
confound when speakers evaluate the “melody” of words in their
own language, but the hypothesis that speech sounds lie on a
phonesthetic continuum is testable. If so, the presence of specific
phones, such as clicks or retroflexes, could make an unfamiliar
language more or less pleasant to hear.
As individual phones are strung together, the spectrotemporal
complexity of the resulting speech signal may have some esthet-
ically optimal level at which the signal is neither too predictable
nor too complex, based on the widely accepted general principle
that preferred sensory input should sufficiently activate the cor-
responding brain areas without being exceedingly difficult to
process (6, 7, 15). Just as music performed with some minor
irregularities by a human performer is more pleasant than the
same piece played impeccably by a machine (7), algorithmically
perfect, rule-based speech is not appealing (15), but neither is
hard-to-follow speech that is poorly enunciated or masked by
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noise (16). The implication to phonesthetics is that the overall
phonetic complexity of a language could have an inverted-U-shaped
relation to its esthetic appeal: for example, the number of vowels
and consonants in a language should be high enough to encode
semantic information but not so high as to overtax the processing
capacity of the auditory system. Alternatively, the limit on the
number of phonemes may be set by vocal production rather than
perception, or listeners might even fail to notice whether an unfa-
miliar language is phonetically rich or simple because categorical
perception of phonemes is a trained skill (17). The voice itself
also has an important esthetic dimension. Voices are more appeal-
ing if they sound healthy and sex-typical (18), presumably
because we have evolved to look for signs of fitness in the voice,
creating some universal standards of auditory beauty analogous
to the appeal of population-typical, symmetrical faces, and
unblemished skin (19–21). Such voice-specific preferences do
not translate into any concrete predictions about which phonetic
features should be esthetically appealing, but they constitute
important confounds in phonesthetic research, necessitating the
inclusion of multiple speakers per language or within-speaker
comparisons (2), ideally with fully fluent bilingual speakers, who
can provide recordings of multiple languages with identical voice
quality (4).
Moving from auditory perception to meaning, words and utter-
ances are recognized and processed semantically. The first stage of
matching input to template is potentially a major source of esthetic
experience because of the so-called mere exposure effect: we like
what has become familiar from repeated exposure (22–24).
Intrinsically noxious stimuli generally do not become likable with
exposure (23), but we may learn to appreciate questionable sounds
such as harsh metal music (25). In the case of speech, listeners
may recognize the language as a whole, particular words, or
2 of 7 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218367120
perhaps even specific phones or phone combinations such as dis-
tinct consonant clusters. In fact, a vague sense of familiarity may
be enough to affect preferences as explicit recognition is not a
prerequisite of a mere exposure effect (23). We therefore predicted
that languages should be judged more beautiful if they phonolog-
ically overlap with the listener’s first language and contain typo-
logically common phones (1) due to sounding both more familiar
and more prototypical, just as averaged faces and voices are often
judged to be more beautiful (21, 26).
Finally, we must consider sociocultural factors that affect the
desirability or “prestige” of languages. Just as dialects of the same
language are often preferred or disliked (27–29), languages asso-
ciated with a particular geographical region, country, or social
category (e.g., migrants or ethnic minorities) may be perceived as
socially more or less desirable, potentially complicating the effect
of familiarity. For instance, among the 16 European languages
rated by European listeners in ref. 3, the seldom-recognized
Icelandic was rated as more likable than the always-recognized
German, although both languages are quite close phonetically. A
language does not need to be identified correctly for this effect to
occur: actual or perceived resemblance to a marked cultural cate-
gory may suffice.
Considering all these confounds, the optimal design for stud-
ying phonesthetics would be to record multiple speakers from a
large number of phonetically diverse and completely unrecogniz-
able languages, to be rated by listeners from several linguistic-cultural
groups. In our best attempt to approach this design, we obtained
recordings of 228 languages from 43 language families (Fig. 1),
including between 5 and 11 speakers per language to control for
personal vocal attractiveness. These recordings were then rated on
pleasantness by speakers of English, Chinese, or Semitic languages.
To provide a measure of familiarity, listeners were also asked to
indicate if they recognized the language and, if so, in which part
of the world it was spoken (SI Appendix, Fig. S1). The study
addressed three main questions: 1) How strong are phonesthetic
effects—that is, how pronounced are the differences between
world languages in their intrinsic esthetic appeal? 2) Do speakers
of different languages rank other languages similarly, demonstrat-
ing some cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic preferences?
3) What phonetic characteristics make a language more or less
pleasant?
Results
Extralinguistic Confounds. The average pleasantness score was
12.2% higher (i.e., 12.2 points on a scale of 0 to 100, 95% CI [11.1,
13.3]) in the 14% of trials in which participants explicitly indicated
that they recognized a language. In line with this strong and
culture-specific (SI Appendix, Fig. S2) familiarity effect, the most
beautiful languages according to Chinese speakers were Mandarin,
English, and Japanese, whereas speakers of Semitic languages
preferred Spanish, English, Italian, and Arabic (SI Appendix,
Fig. S3). Any attempt to estimate intrinsic phonesthetic appeal of
different languages therefore requires that such obvious confounds
be identified and controlled for. Interestingly, languages were
misidentified more than half the time (50.3%), but the boost
in pleasantness was very similar regardless of whether a language
was recognized correctly (12.7% [11.6, 13.9]) or incorrectly
(11.6% [10.5, 12.8]). In other words, perceived rather than actual
familiarity with a language made it more attractive.
Listeners may not always report familiarity: for example, in
~26% of trials, participants failed to report that English sounded
familiar, although they performed the experiment in English. A
language may also feel vaguely familiar, but not enough to place
pnas.org
 Fig. 1. Included languages (N = 228) colored by language family (N = 43). See SI Appendix, Table S1 for the full list.
it on a map. To account for unreported or semirecognition, we
defined “residual familiarity” of each language as the proportion
of trials in which it was recognized by a particular group of listen-
ers (English, Chinese, or Semitic) and then statistically controlled
for it after excluding trials with explicit recognition. Indeed, resid-
ual familiarity remained an important predictor of pleasantness
ratings (+16.3% [13.1, 19.4] over the observed range of residual
familiarity).
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There were only negligible differences between world regions
when the language was not recognized (SI Appendix, Fig. S4A),
suggesting that languages spoken in different parts of the world
do not sound intrinsically beautiful or unpleasant, regardless of
the listeners’ own first language. English speakers displayed little
or no preference for specific perceived regions and rated any
familiar-sounding language as more pleasant (SI Appendix,
Fig. S4B). In contrast, Chinese speakers preferred the languages
that they thought were spoken in North Asia and North America
and had a bias against the (supposedly) African languages, whereas
speakers of Semitic languages preferred North and South America.
In sum, genuine psycholinguistic preferences may be masked both
by a general familiarity effect and by culture-specific biases. Such
biases cannot be accounted for by residual familiarity because they
can be either positive or negative, and therefore, we replicated the
analyses below after simply excluding all languages with substantial
familiarity. A cutoff of 20% was chosen based on the distribution
of reported familiarity rates, which are clearly inflated due to lis-
teners trying to guess blindly (SI Appendix, Fig. S2), resulting in
the exclusion of 13% of languages rated by English-speaking lis-
teners, 7% for Chinese raters, and 26% for Semitic raters.
Finally, some speakers’ voices may be intrinsically appealing,
whatever the language. There was a statistically uncertain general
preference for female voices (+2.1% [−0.7, 4.2]), but no appreci-
able main effect of listener’s sex (−0.1% [−2.4, 2.1] for female vs
male listeners) or clear interaction between the speaker’s and lis-
tener’s sex. We also found a mild positive effect of background
music (+1.0% [0.2, 1.8]) but not of audio quality (−0.2% [−0.9,
0.5]). In addition, we extracted 19 acoustic characteristics and
estimated their effect on pleasantness ratings (SI Appendix, Fig. S5
and Table S3). The most consistent effect was preference for
low-pitched and breathy voices within each sex, as well as for
PNAS 2023 Vol. 120 No. 17 e2218367120
lower-pitch variability and spectral novelty. An important caveat
is that some of these features may be affected by nonlinguistic
content in the recordings, while others may be capturing
language-specific phonetic peculiarities: For example, tonal lan-
guages would tend to have higher pitch variability. Therefore, we
replicated the analyses in the following sections both with
(Figs. 2 and 3) and without (SI Appendix, Figs. S6 and S8) statis-
tically controlling for five of the most important acoustic features
and either after excluding languages with familiarity over 20%
(Figs. 2 and 3) or after controlling for residual familiarity
(SI Appendix, Figs. S7 and S9). Trials with explicit recognition of
a language were always excluded.
Comparing Language Scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic
Speakers. Conditional language scores, calculated from mixed
models after accounting for familiarity and acoustic controls, were
weakly, but reliably correlated between English, Chinese, and
Semitic raters (Pearson’s r = 0.21 to 0.23; Fig. 2A), suggesting some
cross-cultural concordance in preferring specific languages. These
correlations were slightly higher when calculated for language
families instead of individual languages (Fig. 2B), but overall, the
majority of languages and families had fairly similar conditional
scores that lay within ±2 to 3% on the rating scale of 0 to 100%,
which is a modest difference compared to, for example, the 12%
boost due to familiarity. Interestingly, the concordance between
groups of listeners increased when we omitted acoustic predictors
(SI Appendix, Fig. S6), suggesting that cross-cultural convergence
in pleasantness scores can partly be a consequence of preferences
for a specific voice quality and manner of speaking, rather than
language-specific phonetics.
Although we excluded all languages recognized in over 20% of
trials, likely effects of some unaccounted-for familiarity remained,
which is easier to see in conditional scores aggregated across English,
Chinese, and Semitic raters (Fig. 2 C and D). The high placement
of the English-based creole Tok Pisin and the Indo-European family
is particularly striking. Likewise, languages from the Uto-Aztecan
family may have scored so high because they sounded vaguely
familiar due to strong Spanish influences. The effect of familiarity
was not always positive: for example, Thai and Yongbei Zhuang
from the Tai–Kadai family were rated low by Mandarin speakers,
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Fig. 2. Pleasantness scores by speakers of English, Chinese, and Semitic languages are weakly correlated. (A and B) Conditional scores of 228 languages (A) and
43 language families (B) after excluding all languages with familiarity >20% per group and controlling for five robust acoustic predictors of the ratings: cepstral
peak prominence, entropy, spectral novelty, pitch, and pitch variability (SI Appendix, Fig. S9 and Table S5). Pearson’s correlations with 95% CI and blue regression
lines are calculated pointwise from posterior distributions of centered conditional language scores from two separate mixed models, not merely from the most
credible point estimates (solid points = medians of posterior distributions). (C and D) Conditional scores averaged across all three groups of listeners highlight
some outliers among languages (C) and families (D). The x-coordinate is only added to reduce clutter. All scores are on a scale of 0 to 100.

who usually recognized both of these languages, in an alternative
model with all languages included (SI Appendix, Fig. S7). Some of
other families with low scores were represented by only one (e.g.,
Ticuna–Yuri in the Amazon) or two (e.g., Kru in West Africa)
languages, so unpleasant voices of individual speakers or other
extralinguistic factors could have affected the scores. Generally,
however, it seems harder to explain why some languages and fam-
ilies were considered unattractive, and familiarity cannot be the
only reason. Avar and Chechen from the Nakh-Daghestanian fam-
ily in northern Caucasus were hardly ever recognized, yet they
received unusually low scores, and so did Karakalpak (spoken in
Uzbekistan) from the otherwise above-average Turkic family.
The Effect of Phonetic Features. The case for universal phone­
sthetic preferences can become much stronger if we can not only
demonstrate that listeners around the world agree about which
languages sound more or less beautiful but also pinpoint the
phonetic or prosodic features responsible. However, none of the
tested phonetic features predicted pleasantness scores in all three
groups of listeners (English, Chinese, or Semitic; Fig. 3). This is
unlikely to be a consequence of simultaneously considering too
many predictors in multiple regression as voice-specific acoustic
controls preserved clear effects. The few detected group-specific
effects were small and hard to interpret. Thus, surprisingly, speakers
of tonal languages in the Chinese group rated other tonal languages
as 1.5% [0.6, 2.4] less pleasant than nontonal languages. These
findings were replicated without controlling for acoustic measures
of voice quality to ensure that the effects of phonetic features
were not masked by acoustic predictors, except that the negative
effect of tonality became more robust for all groups of listeners
(SI Appendix, Fig. S8). Notably, the diversity of phonemic repertoire
was not associated with pleasantness ratings: The overall number
of vowels in a language was a vanishingly weak negative predictor
of pleasantness scores (Chinese group −0.4% [−0.8, 0.0], English
−0.4% [−0.9, 0.1], Semitic +0.2% [−0.2, 0.6]), and no pronounced
effect was found for the number of consonants in any group.
Phonemic typicality of a language was a marginal positive predictor
only in the Semitic group (+0.6% [−0.1, 1.3]), nor did we find any
effect of phonemic similarity between the listener’s first language
and the rated language (−0.1% [−0.4, 0.2] overall). Considering the
theoretical possibility of U-shaped relationships, we also estimated
the effect of quantitative predictors (e.g., the number of vowels or
the typicality index) with generalized additive models, but did not
find marked nonlinear effects (SI Appendix, Fig. S10).

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 Fig. 3. Phonetic features do not have a consistent effect on pleasantness ratings. All shown predictors are tested simultaneously in one multilevel multiple
regression model per listener group after excluding all languages with familiarity over 20% per group and controlling for acoustic predictors. Each point shows
the predicted effect of changing one phonetic feature, while holding all other predictors constant, on the pleasantness score of a single recording. Medians of
posterior distribution and 95% CIs from four mixed models. To focus on the most robust effects, we grayed out the points with <95% of posterior probability
to one side of zero. N (trials/languages) = 16,792/198 for English, 15,928/210 for Chinese, 12,457/164 for Semitic, and 46,928/199 for all groups combined. The
phonetic features are explained in SI Appendix, Table S3.

Discussion as well as a general negative skew in the distribution of average

If there is something intrinsically beautiful about the sound of
certain languages, even listeners who are unfamiliar with these
languages should reliably rate them as more pleasant. However,
once we have accounted for familiarity and preferences for specific
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scores of unfamiliar languages. Unless this is an artifact caused by
unpleasant voices of individual speakers, it suggests that phones-
thetic research might obtain better traction by focusing on the
negative pole—that is, on the inherently unpleasant acoustic and
phonetic features that languages normally avoid.

voice types, the scores of all unfamiliar languages varied within
just a few percentage points. The 228 world languages that we
tested, with all their phonetic and prosodic diversity, thus sounded
comparably attractive to the average listener in our sample as long
as they were not familiar. Of course, individual listeners may have
their personal preferences, and we found both positive and nega-
tive cultural biases as well as a general preference for languages
perceived as familiar, confirming the crucial role of sociolinguistic
factors (3, 27–29) and the mere exposure effect (22–24). Beyond
that, however, there was little agreement between listeners about
what languages or phonetic features they found attractive. The
listeners clearly attended to the task and did not answer at random
as familiarity and several acoustic features had consistent and
strong effects on pleasantness ratings. Thus, if genuine phones-
thetic differences between languages exist, they appear to be rela-
tively small at the population level.
The second question addressed by the study was the degree to
which phonesthetic preferences are consistent across cultures.
Conditional scores of languages and families by English, Chinese,
and Semitic groups of listeners, calculated after accounting for
familiarity- and speaker-dependent preferences, aligned better
than expected by chance, suggesting some cross-cultural agreement
on which languages are intrinsically more beautiful. However, the
correlation between the scores by English, Chinese, and Semitic
raters was low and sensitive to outliers—a handful of languages
or families with particularly high or low scores—which means
that the apparent cross-cultural concordance in phonesthetic judg-
ments might be caused by indirect familiarity effects such as
lexical-phonetic resemblance to widely recognized languages with
strong cultural connotations. An intriguing finding was the greater
cross-cultural agreement about which languages were particularly
unattractive compared to which ones were uncommonly beautiful,
Third, we attempted to determine what phonetic characteristics,
if any, make some languages beautiful and others unpleasant. In
particular, we tested the contribution of several discrete phonetic
features, overall phonetic complexity (number of vowels and con-
sonants), phonetic typicality, and the overlap with the listener’s
mother tongue. None of these features noticeably affected pleas-
antness scores, with the possible exception of a slight preference
for nontonal languages. In a few cases, there were not enough
languages with a particular feature to estimate its effect reliably
(e.g., only two languages had clicks), but the effects of most pho-
netic features were estimated quite precisely and were very close
to zero, so we can be confident that they did not strongly affect
listeners’ preferences. Phonetic overlap with the listener’s mother
tongue was not associated with pleasantness, and speakers of tonal
languages expressed no general preference for tonality. This is sur-
prising, considering the strong familiarity effects, and suggests
that listeners may recognize words or supra-segmental prosodic
patterns rather than individual phonemes or lexical tones. Of
particular significance to our theoretical predictions, neither the
overall phonetic complexity of a language nor the typicality of its
phonetic repertoire predicted pleasantness ratings. The number
of phonemes may be an inadequate measure of complexity, and
the recordings may not have been sufficiently long to be phonet-
ically representative of each language, so it is possible that phonetic
complexity is indeed a relevant factor, but the present study was
not powerful enough to detect its effect. Another interesting pos-
sibility is that the complexity of all languages may be kept within
the optimal zone defined by the need to encode and extract infor-
mation efficiently. It has been suggested that all languages have
similar information carrying capacity per second, compensating
for differences in phonological complexity by the corresponding
variation in grammatical complexity or the rate of syllable

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 production (30). However, the amount of variation should not
be exaggerated: There are no natural languages with only two or
three phonemes, which would use the communication channel
inefficiently, or with 10,000, which would be impossible to pro-
duce and discriminate reliably. Instead, the languages in our sam-
ple had between 14 and 51 phonemes, counting as in (31). Thus,
continuous cultural selection may ensure that the size of phonetic
repertoire remains reasonably consistent, making all languages
comparable in terms of both information-carrying capacity and
esthetic appeal.
While the attractiveness of voices, rather than languages, was not
the main focus of this study but rather a confound, it was interesting
to observe that all acoustic effects were very similar in English,
Chinese, and Semitic groups of listeners, confirming that preferences
for specific voice types are not culture-specific (18). This has impor-
tant implications for future studies of phonesthetics: While the
attractiveness of individual voices must be accounted for, the relevant
acoustic confounds probably do not have to be estimated separately
for each tested group of listeners. An important caveat is that acoustic
measures may be affected not only by a speaker’s voice quality but
also by recording conditions (e.g., background noises and the dis-
tance to the microphone) as well as language-specific phonetics (e.g.,
the number of fricatives) and prosody (e.g., lexical tones), so these
effects need to be interpreted with caution. Likewise, cinematic por-
trayals of gender stereotypes may impact the observed slight prefer-
ence for female voices. However, we replicated the analyses with and
without controlling for acoustic predictors, and the main conclusions
remained unchanged with regard to both cross-cultural concordance
and the effect of phonetic features.
While this is the largest cross-cultural study on phonesthetic
preferences to date, it has a number of important limitations. It
will be important to obtain longer and more controlled speech
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stimuli for future phonesthetic research, enabling more nuanced
acoustic and phonetic analyses of the recordings. For instance, we
used standard phonetic inventories that described each language
in general, but with more standardized recordings, it could be
possible to phonetically transcribe the actual rated passages. Other
potentially relevant phonetic measures can then be obtained,
including specific consonant clusters (1), prosodic features such
as speech rate and dynamic range of loudness, more robust meas-
ures of voice quality, and improved estimates of phonetic typicality.
Other types of speech recordings can also be tested, including
unstaged conversations representative of the language heard in
everyday life. Likewise, while we did include three linguistically
and culturally distinct groups of listeners, they were all recruited
and tested on a British online testing platform. Thus, raters in all
three groups were literate and exposed to European languages. In
future, it will be important to extend phonesthetic experiments to
monolingual, non-WEIRD (32) samples more representative of
humanity as a whole. Another approach to explore in future studies
would be to look for evidence of sound symbolism in words like
“beautiful” and “ugly”. If particular phonetic features are univer-
sally overrepresented in these words, this could indicate a phon-
esthetic preference for these features. No such effect has been found
so far (31), although there is emerging language-specific evidence
that certain phonemes are associated with affective meanings
(13, 14). Thus, the likely connection between sound symbolism
and phonesthetics ought to be fertile ground for future studies.
Despite these limitations, the present study has made two
important contributions. First, we now know that the expected
phonesthetic effects are very strongly affected by real or even
imagined familiarity, which means that large numbers of diverse
languages must be tested. An interesting alternative is to use arti-
ficial languages, such as versions of Elvish (2) or meaningless
6 of 7 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218367120
synthetic speech. Second, by setting an upper boundary on
population-level esthetic preferences, we have emphasized the
fundamental phonetic and esthetic unity of world languages.
Materials and Methods
Stimuli. Recordings were obtained from the soundtrack of a religious film pub-
licly available in hundreds of languages (https://live.bible.is/jesus-film). This is
part of the bible.is project, which is increasingly used for linguistic research due
to its unique breadth in terms of the number of included languages and families
(e.g., refs. 33 and 34). We included all languages in which the film was available
provided that there were several male and female voice actors and the soundtrack
was of sufficient quality, using clean dubbing rather than a voice-over with two
languages audible. We identified 11 scenes with relatively noise- and music-free
monologues by ten actors and the narrator (normally four female and seven
male voices). Importantly, these were the same scenes from the same film for all
languages; thus, the context, type of speech (neutral narration, two friends con-
versing, a speaker addressing a crowd, etc.), expressed emotion, and for the most
part, the nonlinguistic noises were identical across the compared language. The
scene number was then taken into account when analyzing the data, providing a
better-controlled comparison of the sampled languages. The audio was prepared
in Audacity (https://www.audacityteam.org/) by trimming long pauses and remov-
ing occasional low-frequency noise; all recordings were then normalized for rms
amplitude. A.A. and N.E.J. rated audio quality and the presence of background
music, removing ~5% of poor-quality recordings. The final sample consisted of
2,125 recordings from 228 languages (Fig. 1 and SI Appendix, Table S1). Each lan-
guage was represented by 5 to 11 recordings, and thus up to 11 unique speakers
per language. The recordings were 5 to 19 s in duration (mean ± SD = 10.7 ±
3.2 s), so the total duration of audio per language was 55 to 127 s (100 ± 13 s).
Participants. We recruited 820 raters (514 women, 298 men, 8 other/unspec-
ified; mean age = 35, range 18 to 77) on the online platform Prolific (https://
prolific.co/). With this sample size, each of 2,125 unique recordings was rated
on average 29 times, range [12, 68]. Three target groups were tested separately:
native speakers of English (predominantly British English, filtered on Prolific as
“first language = English + geographical location = UK”), Chinese (“first lan-
guage = Chinese/Mandarin/Hakka/Cantonese”), or Semitic languages (“first
language = Arabic/Hebrew/Maltese”). These three groups were chosen as they
are culturally influential, with different writing systems and profound phonetic dif-
ferences, yet are well represented in the available pool of participants. We asked
each participant to report their first or best language and other languages that
they speak fluently. The English group consisted only of those participants who
explicitly reported English as their first/best language (SI Appendix, Table S4). We
considered anyone who reported being fluent in Chinese or Cantonese as belong-
ing to the Chinese group, including 72 individuals who reported to be fluent in
a Sinitic language, but listed English as their first language. Likewise, anyone
who reported fluency in a Semitic language was placed into the Semitic group.
Procedure. The main perceptual experiment was written in javascript and per-
formed online. The study was exempt from ethical approval in accordance with the
Swedish Ethical Review Act (2003:460). Participants were first informed about the
nature and goals of the study, provided informed consent by agreeing to terms
and conditions, and filled in a questionnaire on linguistic background and general
demographics. In each trial, a participant heard a spoken phrase and was asked:
“How much do you like the sound of this language?” Responses were given on
a horizontal Visual Analog Scale (VAS) marked from Not at all to Very much. If a
participant checked the box “I think I recognize this language”, they were asked
to identify in which region the language was spoken (SI Appendix, Fig. S10).
The recording could be replayed, and there was no time limit for responding.
Participants completed 50 trials each, where each trial contained one randomly
chosen recording from a randomly chosen language. To validate the perceptual
rating scale, we also performed three additional experiments using a subset of 50
recordings from 50 relatively unfamiliar languages (average familiarity <10%),
selected at random in inverse proportion to the typicality of their pleasantness
ratings so as to include recordings with both high and low average ratings. Three
alternative wordings were used: 1) How much do you like the sound of this lan-
guage? Not at all... Very much (as in the main study); 2) How beautiful do you find
pnas.org
 this language? Ugly... Beautiful; 3) How beautiful do you find this language—the
language itself, not the voice? Ugly... Beautiful. We recruited 20 native speakers of
British English on Prolific for each validation experiment, so each sound was rated
20 times on each version of the response scale. The average ratings per recording
in these three experiments and the original study correlated with Pearson’s r
between 0.84 and 0.92, with an overall Intraclass Correlation Coefficient of 0.73,
95% CI [0.63, 0.82] over the aggregated ratings (SI Appendix, Fig. S11). Thus,
listeners understood the question as intended, namely as referring to the intrinsic
beauty of a language, regardless of the precise formulation.
Acoustic and Phonetic Features. Each recording was analyzed acoustically with
R package soundgen (35) to extract voice pitch and its variability, breathiness,
and other commonly used measures of voice quality (SI Appendix, Table S5).
Information about tonality, the number of vowels and consonants, the presence
of specific phonemes such as clicks, and so on was obtained from standard ref-
erences, such as Phoible (36), and a range of phonological descriptions derived
from language grammars. We also estimated the phonetic typicality of each
language and its similarity to each listener’s first language from full phonetic
inventories, which were available for 226 out of 228 languages. Full details are
available in the SI Appendix, Supplementary text and Tables S2 and S3.
Data Analysis. Unaggregated responses were analyzed using Bayesian multi-
level models fit with the R package brms (37). The outcome variable was a single
rating of a recording on a continuous scale (0 to 1), which was modeled with
zero-one-inflated beta distribution (38). Each model predicted the rating in an
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Author affiliations: aDivision of Cognitive Science, Department of Philosophy, Lund
University, Lund 22362, Sweden; bÉquipe de Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle Bioacoustics
Research Laboratory (ENES) Bioacoustics Research Laboratory, Center for Research in
Neuroscience in Lyon (CRNL), University of Saint Étienne, Saint-Etienne 42100, France;
c
Institute of Higher Nervous Activity Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Moscow 117485, Russia; and dDivision of Linguistics and Cognitive Semiotics, Center for
Languages and Literature, Lund University, Lund 22362, Sweden
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