Do you like/listen to music in languages you don't speak?

Conversely, here is a song in French that sounds like a positive song, but it’s actually about someone killing herself. :open_mouth:

Irish or Scots?

Was thinking about this today and had to give myself a headslap - I left out one of the most common non-english in my library - Acadian - thanks to groups like Beausoleil.

Definitely. I won’t count all the spanish music I have since I can understand a little spanish and for my favorite songs I’ve translated the lyrics. A lot of ambient new agey type music like Enigma has foreign lyrics. There’s a Sting song with some kind of middle eastern sounding language. There’s a track on the Children of Dune soundtrack in Fremen :slight_smile: One or two J-pop songs. The numa numa thing whatever that is. 99 luftbalons. etc…

If you don’t understand the language, the voice becomes just another instrument, which can work out really well.

About half my music collection is Russian (which I read/write a bit but can’t really speak). I also have a bunch of Ukrainian songs, mostly from the kickass band Okean Elzy. Apart from those, I’ve got a fair number of songs in other languages too. I like foreign music because most song lyrics are… bad. Sometimes they have good ideas behind them, but are written incredibly ham-handedly, or have totally unrelated words inserted to make a rhyme, or whatever. If you can know what a song is about (I ALWAYS have to find out, sooner or later) without directly understanding the words, or understanding them but not having the the awkwardness detection abilities of a native speaker, then you can pretend the lyrics are awesome. Hah :smiley:

One of my current favorite CDs is Pink Martini’s Sympathique. A few of the songs are in English, but many are in other languages; Spanish and Italian are two I recognize.

I’m also a big fan of Ladysmith Black Mombazo. They have many English songs, but much of their music is also in their native Zulu. Cool stuff.

And who doesn’t love Edith Piaf?

I listen to a lot of music in Danish because that’s my husband’s native language. Some of the pop stuff I like, but most of it, to be honest, is kind of crap (sorry, honey. :)).

I’ve got modern music in Scots Gaelic (Runrig and others), Irish Gaelic (Clannad and others), and lots of folk recordings in Scots, which some argue is a separate language instead of a dialect of English. I’ve also got opera and choral recordings in the usual opera languages (French, German, Italian, Russian) plus Latin and Welsh.

James MacMillan’s “Seven Last Words from the Cross” has a section in Aramaic. My CD pairs it with the Spanish “Cantos Sagrados”.