Well, not so much sexy, but I found that some foreigners find my slow southern drawl easier to follow. I’ve been told others talk too fast/clipped.
Heidi Klum is pretty hot but her German accent leaves much to be desired.
It make her sound like Babawa Wowtas.
We asked a Japanese exchange student once what English sounded like to them – Japanese tends to sound cute to Americans, especially when the girls speak, but evidently English sounds suave or cool to them. This, I cannot fathom; I am American and even I think we sound loud and nasal. I have asked what my American accent sounds like in French, but apparently I have managed to learn some mishmash of textbook, Canadian and south-of-France, so I’m unlikely to get rocks chucked at my head if I go over there. My Spanish is very Tejano, the Japanese exchange students are too surprised/horrified that I speak their language to tell me what I sound like, I’m probably starting to lift Berliner German from the television series we’re watching in class, and my Italian is so bad my tutor starts laughing and has to ask me to repeat myself three times whenever I try to say anything.
Of course, the Italian tutor has recently proven to speak everything but English with a pronounced Italian accent, so I have no idea what he thinks he’s laughing about. 
French, as it turns out, is perfectly understandable, but rather odd-sounding, when you aggressively roll all your r’s.
OH, A GEE-YA! Oh, A Gee!! Naw noon ee poo da. Na moo Na moo ee poo da! naw wan han da!!
Don’t try to resist. . .
I’ve gotten laid with German Poetry in America.
I almost got laid with American poetry in Germany, but I was jung and dumm. Missed my window of opportunity
I’ve been told by at least one instructor that I speak Chinese with a distinct French accent.
Which is really weird, because I’m from Texas. He thinks its because I learned Spanish in high school. In any case, Spanish is, oddly enough, the third most commonly spoken language during our Chinese classes, with us American students having a propensity to break into it at random, sometimes substituting a Spanish word where a Chinese word doesn’t pop up quickly enough, and sometimes just straight up talking in Spanish out of nowhere.
When I was in high school, I was complimented on my accent while speaking Spanish. A year or two out of college and into the Air Force, I am told I speak Spanish with a Texan accent far out of proportion to the Texan accent I have while speaking English.
It seems that I just talk funny.
What’s kind of funny, is comparing the accents our Chinese instructors have when speaking English or Chinese. I can pretty readily tell a Beijing accent apart from a Southern accent from a Taiwanese accent, but I couldn’t tell you how, except that Beijingren tend to “slur” various words into ending with an “-ur” sound (the only time Chinese admits to having any equivilant to “r”), and that Taiwanese speakers seem to have a lisp.
In English, one of our instructors (a southerner) talks with something resembling a British accent, which she is a bit embarrassed about (she fails to understand that British accents are the coolest way you can speak English in the US), and another instructor, a Beijing native, mentioned that he studied English under an instructor who studied English under an instructor who studied English under an instructor who learned it from a native English speaker, so you had that 6th gen dub thing going on with his accent (still perfectly understandable). And we have the one obligatory extremely old instructor with the slightly high-pitched throaty accent, and the only instructor who can speak any Spanish.
You haven’t lived until you’ve heard an old Chinese guy speaking Spanish.
For what it’s worth, our Chinese instructors tell us we all talk too quietly, but I think that’s a confidence thing more than anything. They feel we’ll learn better if we just man up and SHUO ZHONGWEN. (Not their exact words 
)
When I lived in the Netherlands I ran in to a fair number of Dutch who thought I was British (I’m American). I was always surprised that they couldn’t tell the difference in the accents. But that was just some people–not all of them. (This was when I was speaking English–not Dutch-- [as my Dutch was so bad the Dutch insisted on showing off their fine, fine English])
For my part, I can often tell whether a Netherlander is from certain parts of the south (Brabant and environs) or from the north-west (North and South Holland). Mostly by how hard their ‘G’ is. AND YET… I **still **confuse an English (from England) accent with an Australian accent sometimes!!! They are completely different!!! I don’t understand!!!
Oh man, I stepped off on the hella wrong foot with this cute South African girl. I mentioned that I liked her English accent (not knowing where she was from), and discovered that English and South African accents are ENTIRELY different.
A Latino once told me that American sounds “mellow” to him. He compared the phonemes from both languages for the word “camera”. With that example, I understood exactly what he meant.
I had the same experience when learning German as a third language. English is my native language and I’m fluent in French as a second language. If I was having trouble finding a word in German, I’d often use the French word.
I found this puzzling, but I later read an article about how the brain processes language, which helped explain this point (not online, so no cite.) According to this article, the brain actually has two language centres - a native language centre, for languages learned up to about 5 or 6 years, and another centre, for languages learned later in life. The point of the article was that this division explained why young children can easily learn new languages, but it gets harder in later life. But the “aha” point for me was that meant that when I was trying to learn German, I was also using the same part of the brain’s memory processes that stored my French vocabulary, so that when I had trouble finding a German word, the French would be the default, not the English vocabulary, stored in another part of the memory centres.
Can any of our language mavens confirm or refute this theory? I read this article several years ago, and it seemed a bit tentative in its conclusions, so I don’t know if further research has been done on this issue.
I’m sorry I don’t have a cite, but I remember learning this in one of my psychology classes in college. I also remember my class murmuring in assent with anecdotes supporting this theory.
I know that on the occasions that someone has spoken to me in Spanish (which I know a little of and learned as an adult) when I wasn’t expecting it, I respond in Italian (which I’ve known since early childhood). My Italian aunt visiting me in the States was wandering around a museum when an American man put his arm around her (thinking she was his wife) and she (not knowing English) responded in French (the only other language she knows). I know the plural of anecdote blah blah blah…but our experiences illustrate the theory well, I think.
:dubious:
I don’t know enough about cognitive linguistics to tell you exactly how it works, but this really sounds iffy to me. Firstly, any time a newspaper or magazine article describes a simple causative relationship between some physical part of the brain and a more abstract concept (second-language acquisition, sex differences, friendship, etc.), odds are good that it’s flat-out wrong: either the author misinterpreted a study or his/her source made it up entirely (or misinterpreted the study themselves).
I can tell you this: the two main language centers of the brain are Wernicke’s area, responsible largely for understanding the meaning of language, and Broca’s area, responsible largely for processing language and producing speech. (I’m oversimplifying here–this is how these newspaper and magazine flubs happen, so don’t go quoting me in your next science article.)
Hence, Wernicke’s aphasia, the speech disorder generally characterized by damage to Wernicke’s area, leaves its victim’s ability to produce speech with correct grammar, syntax, intonation, etc., intact, while disturbing his/her comprehension and making the actual language content incorrect.
While Broca’s aphasia, the speech disorder generally characterized by damage to Broca’s area, renders its victim unable to use grammar, syntax, etc. to create sentences. Their comprehension is generally fine (though some can stumble over syntactically complex sentences); they understand what you say to them and they know exactly what they want to say, but they can’t say it because they can no longer construct grammatical sentences. Words with grammatical functions (is, are, the, and) are often lopped off and their speech is almost entirely “content” words; for example, a Broca’s aphasiac might say “Walk dog” and mean “I will take the dog for a walk”, “You take the dog for a walk”, or “The dog walked out of the yard”.
Psychology 101 will generally leave you with the impression that these are “the two language centers in the brain”, which is technically correct but, again, an oversimplification. As this list of different types of aphasia demonstrates, damage to other areas of the brain can cause language problems, which implies that the load of language usage and comprehension is not shouldered entirely by those two regions. For example, transcortical motor aphasia results in damage to a certain part of the frontal lobe.
In short, “this part of the brain is for first languages* and this part of the brain is for second languages**” is based on a (decades-)long-outdated understanding of cognitive science at best, or was pulled directly out of someone’s ass at worst.
- “First languages” means any language learned natively and/or that is mastered by the age of 5 or so.
** “Second languages” refers to all other languages learned or attempted, regardless of how many languages the native speaker already knows.
ETA: That said, it’s certainly reasonable that “foreign languages” are categorized differently than “native language(s)”. This would support the story about speaking French in German class or whatever it was, since English is closer to German than French is. But color me very skeptical that it comes down to two areas of the brain in any way. BTW, Spanish, French and Italian are all pretty similar in a lot of ways, so it makes sense that they would substitute for each other in a pinch sometimes.
Ricardo Montalban, appearing on The Tonight Show back in Johnny Carson’s time, once said that to Spanish-speaking people, Americans speaking English sound like Dogs Barking. He then gave an example of Spanish-imagined “English” gibberish, and I’d have to agree with him.
I suspect that isn’t sexy.
Those who are defending the German accent in English as sexy, are you talking about men or women? Because Alex_Dubinsky is, I believe, a straight male (as am I). And to me, women speaking with a German accent aren’t terribly fetching. But I can see how the German accent (guttural, forceful) might make a man sound rough and tough.
A German accent on a woman can be extremely sexy. Think “99 Luftbalons”. 
And have you take me away from my family ( who are all BORING ) so I can do a NEENER NEENER to all The Popular People in High School that I am now living in Paris/France/Rome/ANYwherebuthere. Because the people where you live are not so farked up and so much COOLER.
Yeah. The fantasy within the fantasy.
Especially if she’s holding a whip.
I have been told that I am quite sexy when I speak German. Got me a kiss for it, to boot.
Maastricht
Gotta hand it to the Dutch. Only place I’ve ever been where everyone seems to speak at least one foreign language. The secretary at the last company I worked for could have passed for being from Missouri with no problems at all and she’d never been within an ocean of the US.
Regards
Testy
My experience is that women in foreign countries do not find American accents sexy. A lot of them find it funny, but that wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.
Fortunately, the whole bit about bright and shiny new genes being attractive seems to work fine.
Testy