Worst sounding language threads

Sorry to our lowlander buddies, and I actually find it kind of sweet, but Dutch. Sometimes it sounds like a weird provincial German dialect, and sometimes it sounds like an unusually nasal Upper Midwestern American speaking English just out of earshot and thus impossible to make out. Except for the phlegmy g fricative, their phonology sounds like working-class Cleveland.

And in writing it looks like English and German had an illiterate baby. The next generation, of course, is Afrikaans, Dutch’s own illiterate bastard child raised in the sticks. I find Afrikaans phonology less grating, though.

I can’t look down on it from on high, though; a friend of mine, of mixed Swiss German and Francophone Alsatian descent (French mom, Baseldeutsch-speaking dad, grew up in Basel, now lives in France, her kids are native Francophones) learned Dutch to a high degree of fluency—her daughter defensibly concluded that thanks to Swiss German and Dutch, she was a speaker of “the two worst languages.”

je suis hate minorities

Singlish

Singlish varies a lot by register and socioeconomic class, though (and also by varying degrees of negative transfer from speakers’ other language(s)). I think posh Singaporeans speaking Singlish at a register in which it is most hybridized with standard English often sound lovely. At the pidgin-speaks Hokkien at home-works in a hawker center end of the spectrum, I agree that it can grate, lah.

portugese
arabic
hindu/indian/jeetspeak

vocaroo.com/1g9oqpJRlYap

After conquering multiple """ugly""" languages in my life I came to the conclusion that it's just a matter of familiarity. For the longest time I couldn't listen to Korean/Japanese/Chinese because they literally made my ears bleed. But after watching some media for a while you get to know the sounds/intonations etc. If you get over the initial irrational bump you can appreciate the other way of speaking and grow as a person.

Arabic
Hebrew
Mandarin
SEA tonal languages (Thai, Cambodian, etc.)
Sounds hot on women but for men, homosexual/like the speaker has a cold or is wearing a clip on the nose

SEA tonal languages (Thai, Cambodian, etc.)

Cambodian isn’t tonal. Over the millennia of its evolution from its distant Mon cousins (it shares a remote genetic relationship with Vietnamese, which is obviously tonal, but you sure wouldn’t know it to listen to them; it’s probably also something the Cambodians prefer not to think about, since the Viets are probably the only people they hate more than the Thais), it probably lost tones and developed its crazy assortment of new vowels and consonant clusters. Thngai, chmu, mdong…

I get that most people don’t like the sound of a lot of Asian languages, but I like them. I think Khmer sounds especially cool.

Albanian

american accent english
Hindi
african speak

Thanks for the effortpost, as a non-speaker I can't really distinguish them (Thai, Viet, Khmer) from sound alone. Indo-Malay and Tagalog actually sound normal to me, but the others are like yap yap yap... idk.

Dutch

Yiddish (uncool version of german)
Czech (I love Czechs but you sound like Tolkien orcs)
Vietnamese

american english

vietnamese
absolutely horrible and ear ringing

Many millions of people agree with you. I’m the outlier.

And if one hears Cambodians talking, it’s easy to assume that it’s a tonal language, because they use stress and intonation that just sounds alien to European ears, and kind of similar to the rhythms of other Asian languages. On the syllable level, though, pitch isn’t relevant.

And you need know none of this. Please carry on disliking whatever you want.

dutch
portugese
arabic
hebrew
chinese
indian
albanian
vietnamese
african languages

The more I listened to Japanese, the more I started to dislike it It's incredibly boring and samey. Those nips need more phonemes

Based Swiss amateur linguist anon making a silly Anon Babble thread actually interesting. I'm curious, how do you view Romanian? Are the Slavic influences particularly noticeable?

african languages

All African languages? Equally?

You’re the latest poster of a bunch to just say “African,” which reminds me yet again that I am a weird linguistics dweeb whose first response to this is:

“But, but… there are hundreds of languages spoken in Africa! Some of them sound nothing like one another!”

Where a normal person obviously can’t tell one African language from another, and doesn’t give a shit, because he doesn’t like whatever he’s hearing, or just doesn’t like Africans.

But I also couldn’t distinguish among most African languages by ear, of course. But I like a few African musicians and singers from different parts of the continent, so I might recognize someone speaking a language I’ve heard someone singing in. I think some African languages sound nicer than others, and I can’t think of one that I find harsh enough or offensive enough to stand out compared to the languages I dislike… they’re mostly fairly mild-sounding to me.

But, again, I’m a linguistics dweeb, so I don’t expect anyone to share my opinions.

ummm
take meds

I'm curious, how do you view Romanian? Are the Slavic influences particularly noticeable?

I guess so? It mostly sounds Romance to me, but there’s a slightly harsh or severe quality (not sure if it’s in the intonation or the consonants, or maybe both; don’t think it’s the vowels) that I don’t hear in Italian, for example. I would attribute that to being mostly surrounded by Slavs (it’s definitely not from the Magyars—they’re much mushier and mumblier). There are some hard-sounding aspects to spoken Romansh, as well, compared with other Romance languages, which sound distinctly like Germanic influences to my ear. But I’m only assuming that the weird aspects of Romanian pronunciation are Slavic—I wouldn’t mistake it for a Slavic language.

I actually looked at Romanian in some detail a million years ago while studying linguistics, and the Slavic influences on the vocabulary are very obvious. But the sounds, only speculatively.

31 replies in

Danish not mentioned even once

Sounds like someone is talking while puking in his mouth also they skip half the letters in a word because fuck you lol

Hebrew sounds awful

Yeah, they sound like they’re talking through a mouthful of half-chewed potatoes. I’m surprised no other Scandinavian mentioned it—they mock it all the time.

But I have no right to mock the Danes—I’ve got Danish friends who think our local dialect of Swiss German could be mistaken for Danish from a distance. I disagree, but some of our vowel sounds are a bit Scandinavian.

French
Viet
Arabic
Greek
It sounds stupid but not offensive

Where are you from? Sounds kink

Top#1 is definitely Chinese

Everything ITT can only compete for the #2 spot, because #1 is obviously Ukrainian.

tonal languages

Where are you from? Sounds kink

I’m in Basel, Switzerland, although I’m not native to the area, nor to its unusual dialect. My roots are a couple of cantons away from here, where they talk very differently, and I was mostly raised abroad. So my own Swiss German is a pretty weird hybrid. But I like the local lingo even if nobody else does, and I understand it fluently.

ugliest guttural roach tongue languages:
turkish
arabic
dutch

TAGALOG AND HINDI... ONLY CORRWCT ANSWERS

german

I’m surprised it took this many replies for it to come up!

I agree, obviously. Still better than Dutch, but no Germanic language deserves to win any beauty contests.

ctrl+f dutch

7 results

roughly what i expected

what do you think about portuguese

meh, there is dutch and dutch. it's like saying english sounds like shit because of the scouser accent
youtube.com/watch?v=v657_N5Y9zM
i don't expect anyone to understand what's she's saying, but does this sound bad to you? if so, why?

Any tonal language. pick one.

Vietnamese
Thai
Khmer

All unbelievable how bad they sound. Even when they learn English they have the worst ESL accents.

Maybe it's just from the years of living in Birmingham, but I find hindi to be a uniquely annoying accent to listen to.

taka-tika-taka-taka-tiku-takaka-tituttukaka

Just an incredibly irritating way of speaking and language to listen to

i actually knew someone who still spoke vietnamese on the phone with his parents and it gave me ear cancer, but at least i know how to pronounce nguyen
another one from the netherlands who was fluent in our local dialect and one of us, but on the phone with his parents immediately switched to how they speak dutch in the netherlands. i found it somewhat amusing and interesting, like how someone from norf FC suddenly starts speaking cockney

I really like it, although I know a lot of people who don’t. I actually especially like the Carioca accent, which I assume is another unpopular opinion. Continental Portuguese just sounds mumbly to me, and I like all the ʃ tʃ dʒ sounds that get emphasized or inserted in Rio and are absent elsewhere.

i also didnt like it but after i started reading and actually structuring good sentences i realized how good this language is. you can yourself make the language sound good or bad depending on what words you use, what you say first and which tenses you use(there are 6 tenses and 3 moods thus more than 60 conjugations possible.) you can also change your rhythm and tones to make it sound better. im yet to see a language as versatile as portuguese

It’s not the least pleasant Dutch I’ve ever heard, but I just don’t think there’s any way to make your open vowels (most especially aa, and most especially of all when it’s nasalized) sound melodious. There’s something about the way literally every Dutch speaker I’ve ever heard pronounce naar or haar that nearly makes me wince.

My beef is exclusively with your vowels—I mostly like Dutch consonants just fine.

And don’t forget that I speak a language that people usually think is at least as bad—even proud Swiss Germans usually only love their local variant, and enthusiastically shit on other dialects. The only reason it doesn’t get more hate is because fewer people have ever actually heard it.

Vietnamese by far. Sorry Vietnamese bros.