Linguistic Beauty Pageants (What makes a language beautiful?)

 

There are few people in this world who think Swiss German is a beautiful language (it’s perhaps relevant to note that I am one of the few). It’s quite heavy on the phlegmy glottal sounds that you probably wouldn’t want your lover to whisper in your ear late at night. Compared to the precision of high German, or the musical tones of Italian, Swiss German is a big mess. Depending on which patch of the complex and detailed dialect patchwork you land on, you might pronounce your ‘ch’ like you have a large frog at the back of your throat, or you might just leave it off the end of the word all together in apparent oral apathy. But doesn’t that just add to its beauty? Swiss German is for me a beautiful language for its poetic flexibility, it’s enormous variety and its ability to just get on with things. It is beautiful because it has a mind of its own, and because the language itself is so often a point of discussion among its speakers because its so off the wall even the natives haven’t worked it out yet (which is good, because as soon as you work out a language it’s most likely evolved into a new form…).

 

Familiarity of a language probably accounts for whether you perceive the language to be beautiful or not. Before I took a beginners course in Arabic I thought it sounded hideous. As soon as you can distinguish sounds as words, or as meaningful components, you unlock a beauty in a language. You don’t even have to understand it, but to recognise that a particular sound is intended to communicate something you can vaguely appreciate, is to begin to see its beauty. 

 

I wonder too if your perception of a language is intrinsically linked to your experiences in that language?   Do I think French is beautiful because I had good times in France? Or because there’s often a glass of red wine around when French is being spoken…do I find Swiss German beautiful because I fell in love with the country? I for example don’t really find Spanish that beautiful, but I haven’t spent much time in Spain and am also not over familiar with the Spanish culture (but maybe that’s because I don’t speak the language).

 

Maybe it’s just the sounds themselves, completely removed from the meaning and the eloquence of expression in a language. Yesterday I was listening to a conversation that for about two sentences I thought was Italian until I realised I didn’t understand most of it, concluding it must be Romanian or perhaps some strange Tyrolean dialect. It was beautiful. It actually sounded quite aggressive, but somehow the sounds softened the occasional glottal phonemes and the blunt grunting sounds. It jumped up and down, and went from soft rounded sounds to harder tougher ‘proper’ consonant fricatives. 

 

This week, talking to a colleague in India, I was trying to establish why almost every word-final consonant was being stressed. Working with Swedes, who can be quite susceptible to a touch of gemination (when you double the consonant sound, like in ‘getting’ to make it sound more like ‘getTing’), but this is extreme. But it is somehow quite a beautiful sound, even though it sounds incredibly strange to have every consonanT totally stresseD aT the enD of each worD (it does something funny to the nasal sounds that precede the final consonant too). So maybe it’s the novelty that makes a language beautiful? 

 

Since it’s so tricky, so subjective to determine what it is that makes a particular language beautiful, perhaps it’s just easier to say that it is language itself that is beautiful. The complexity, the possibilities, the dialects, the effects that language offers every individual using whichever language they choose, is enormous, and that’s pretty beautiful in itself.