The Most Attractive Accents (In General Opinion)
Irish Accent The Irish accent has a song-like quality and bounciness that a lot of people find deeply attractive and warm. You can almost feel the sea breeze on the back of your neck when you hear an Irish speaker talk. Example: Check out Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson arguing in thick Irish accents in The Banshees of Inisherin.
British Accent British accents are associated with sophistication, royalty, and high class. It translates to a very striking, romantic-sounding accent. Example: Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush showcase two lovely British accents in this scene from The King’s Speech.
French Accent Associated with love, sex, romance, and leisure, the French accent just oozes seduction for most people. It has the same bounce and swank of Irish accents, but with a much more “drawly’” quality people like. Example: Lily-Rose Depp gives a great tutorial on the French accent in this video from Vanity Fair.
American Southern Accent The American Southern “drawl” is iconic, complicated, and elegant. It has a softness to its cadence that people are generally attracted to; like a nice cold glass of sweet tea on a hot Summer day. Example: Check out Matthew McConaughey’s natural accent in this scene from The Lincoln Lawyer.
Spanish Accent There are a lot of accents from Spanish-speaking countries, but Spain has the claim to fame here. Spain’s Spanish accent has a smoothness and depth that other accents seem to lack. Example: Penélope Cruz has a classical Spanish accent. You can hear her speak in both English and Spanish in this lovely scene about language from Vicky Cristiana Barcelona.
Italian Accent Italian accents are often thought of as equally “sexy” as French accents, but Italian is often said to sound much more “fiery.” The range of sounds for Italian accents just seems deeper to a lot of people, making it a highly attractive accent. Example: Alessandra Mastronardi nails a classical Italian accent in Master of None.
Scottish Accent The Scottish accent has a kind of angular quality about it that often puts it below Irish and British accents on the attraction scale, but it’s definitely still a 10/10 accent. Example: Gerard Butler is Scottish. He has a great example of the Scottish voice, which you can see in this video about slang from Vanity Fair.
Brazilian Portuguese Accent The Brazilian Portuguese accent doesn’t get as much shine as a lot of other accents out there, but it’s absolutely beautiful. It has a warmth and rhythm to it that you don’t find elsewhere. Speakers with this accent also tend to space out their syllables evenly, which is especially interesting and unique. Example: The singer Anitta has a great Brazilian Portuguese accent. You can hear it in this slang video from Vanity Fair.
Kiwi Accent The New Zealand Kiwi accent is often mistaken for Irish, Australian, and South African accents. It’s a dialect with a lot more “front of the mouth” sounds, which gives it a distinct, quiet softness that those other languages don’t have. Example: The former Prime Minister of New Zealand gave a really fun interview with Stephen Colbert, where you can hear her talk about her accent in detail.
Kenyan Accent African languages tend to get overlooked in the attraction department, but the Kenyan accent regularly ranks pretty highly on accent attractiveness lists. It has a delicate energy and hyper-clarity that people are quite fond of. Example: Check out Lupita Nyong’o’s Kenyan accent in her acceptance speech for 12 Years a Slave at the 2014 Oscars.
What makes an accent attractive?
Familiarity It’s not a mistake that the most popularly spoken languages in the world are often viewed as the most attractive. You’ll have a much easier time finding someone who thinks English, Mandarin, or Tamil are sexy languages than you would, say, Hungarian, Finnish, or Berber. People just naturally like things they’re familiar with!
Gender and age of speaker The younger and more “traditionally” female a voice is, the more attractive people tend to claim their accent is. That’s followed by young men, older women, and finally older men. In other words, who is speaking is going to have a major impact on how attractive you find their language or accent.
Media representation Depending on where you grew up, you’ve been exposed to all kinds of different movies, music, and shows where different accents are depicted differently. American viewers may remember the racist caricatures of South Asian characters Abu in The Simpsons and Babu Bhatt in Seinfeld, for example. This can reinforce the “unattractiveness” of certain accents and languages. The reverse also happens. American films are very popular in Japan, for example. So, a lot of Japanese people tend to rate the American accent very highly in terms of attractiveness.
Do different cultures find different accents attractive?
Kind of, but there are some minor agreements among cultures! When it comes to accents, it is absolutely true that what a native Chinese speaker and a native English speaker find attractive is going to be different. However, studies have found that there is a minor correlation among all cultures here, which is very interesting. Spanish, English, and Italian seem to be the most “universally attractive” accents among speakers of all languages. Studies have shown that speakers who don’t speak these languages tend to still find them pleasant and attractive.
Is there a widely accepted “most attractive” accent?
Italian, French, and Spanish seem to be the crowd favorites. Looking at most studies and lists, the Italian and Spanish accents/dialects seem to have the widest appeal. These languages have a natural musicality and softness to them that a lot of people seem naturally drawn to. It’s also no mistake that they’re all Romance languages—the Romance languages score relatively high across the board.
What is considered the “least attractive” accent?
German and Cantonese tend to make the “worst worldwide accent” lists. German and Cantonese tend to frontload vowels, which gives both languages a kind of sharp and jagged quality that most non-speakers interpret as aggressive or angry. It doesn’t help that China and Germany are often depicted (unfairly) as “humorless” cultures and countries. That probably raises the associations with the languages being less elegant.
In the USA specifically, Pittsburgh is said to have the ugliest accent. Pittsburgh is a very unique city, regionally and culturally. It’s a Rust Belt, blue-collar city, but it’s not on a Great Lake like Cleveland, Buffalo, or Chicago, so it has had much less cultural exchange historically. It’s also not very close to any other major city. As a result, it has developed a kind of accent you only find in this isolated “island” of dialects. Statistically, Americans who don’t live in Pittsburgh tend not to be very fond of it. You can hear an example of a classic Pittsburgh accent here. It really makes you want to go out and “grab some chipped hams with yinz friends and watch the Stillers game,” ya know?
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