A vote here for Farsi. Very melodic with no harshness or gutturals. And Finnish, of course. When I started learning Finnish I heard the comment thast it sounded like Japanese spoken by an Italian.
Brazilian, though. Right? European Portuguese is horrible, and completely different. It loses all the lovely softness. And they spit!
I love Romanian: also quite soft, with the surprising twists of Slavic, and all the poetry of a Romance language.
Yesterday I was on a boat with some Welsh ladies and heard some Welsh again for the first time in a while. Welsh is just gorgeous. It’s the friendliest sounding language, I think. Quaint and kind, it sounds like woolly jerseys and a warm cuppa.
I don’t hear it as “beautiful” so much as erotic.
It as syllable stretching pronunciations I associate with bemused flirting and a guttural quality to it that makes even mundane statements like,"Sie stehen auf meinem Fuß " sound like a bawdy proposition…
I knew a lady from Ethiopia, her language was not sexy but had a beautiful happy rhythm to it. I always loved to her her speak.
To me, the most beautiful language in the world is undoubtedly Ladino - a Jewish dialect that is to Spanish what Yiddish is to German.
I’d say French, myself, though I love the sound of Italian as well. For JRR Tolkein, it was Finnish: he modeled his Elvish languages on it.
French as spoken by the Congolese wins it for me. Not quite so much loogeying, and more smoothly melodic and…rounder, somehow.
Beauty can perhaps most reliably be gauged by what it enables you to get away with. Thus, I submit as evidence of Italian supremacy the Maserati Quattroporte - in no other language would we let someone call a $100k+ automobile “four door.” We wouldn’t let Mercedes-Benz do that, nor Bentley. Cadillac buyers would send them back to the drawing board. We’re still slating the French for having the temerity to name something “The Car.” It’s the equivalent of a beautiful woman wearing a plain brown shopping bag to a formal affair and everyone shrugging their shoulders and saying “Yeah, but on her it works.”
Any of the “Romance Languages,” especially Italian or French. If I had to pick one, I’d say Italian, because most of the syllables are a consonant followed by a vowel, so it perfectly lends itself to singing. Compare an opera by Verdi with one by Wagner.
I followed the link quite prepared for hilarity, but… 
No, I’m really not seeing it. The grammar of Brazilian Portuguese is like really stupid Spanish, I’ll grant that. Like illiterate Spanish people forgot half the letters and half the verb tenses of their language when they moved. But the way he Russell Peter “does” Portuguese there really doesn’t make sense to me. There’s plenty there to make fun of, but he doesn’t seem to get it right.
That’s lovely! I’d never heard of that before, thank you! Man I love the Dope, I’m always learning such weird and wonderful new things.
Spoken German does show up in the other thread, but I will say that, while it is a right royal bitch for a non-German speaker to get right, when you nail it, singing in German is singing the language of God.
That is what makes Italian so tiresome though. Hearing it spoken in Italy is kind of cool for a few minutes until you you start to feel like you are trapped in an opera and can’t get out. You don’t need such dramatization to convey every little thing but that is what you get in Italian whether it is a dropped spoon or a family member’s death. They all sound the same to me as a non-Italian speaker. I still like French much better although English spoken with a soft female Irish accent is my favorite of all.
I work with native Portuguese speakers all day long. They are from the Azores to Lisbon. I like them fine but I don’t think it is pretty when they start speaking their native tongue. It sounds like a Russian is attempting to speak Spanish and failing at it.
Overrated: French. I know “the language of love.” It’s one of a few languages that has a common phoneme that I’d wager is expressed in IPA as {phlegm}. Zhe khwhwhaaa que c’est vhrhrhaaii.
Underrated: German. Definitely not the most phonically pleasing. But I admire the poeticism. Some German sees an animal the first time, reminds him of a little bear. It washes it’s food - Aha! Waschbär!
Re: Welsh: according to the Onion, “When spoke, it sounds like a beautiful song, but when written, it looks like the alphabet just vomited.”
I like Catalan sometimes. Listening to it always gives me pause: it sounds like Spanish, but weird somehow. French? No… it sounds like the better parts from both.
The vowel-iness of Finnish and Estonian seems nice, at least in small doses.
I’ll chime in with Telugu, once called Italian of the East.
Random clip: Life Is Beautiful Telugu Movie Climax Scene - YouTube
Ha! So true! Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Yes, I really can say it. (And I know it’s a sort of made up place name for a real place, but it really does look like the alphabet vomited.)
I also agree that German is underrated. I think when you don’t know it it sounds harsh, but it’s poetic and so intricate in its precision. It’s a really very beautiful.
I think it’s the same if the sounds of Portuguese are unfamiliar to you. It’s actually soft and expressive, the language of Bossa Nova. The Carioca accent of Rio stretches all the sounds, making it sound lazy like a hot day.
Oh I dunno. I couldn’t say anything in the other thread. I love all languages, I don’t think any language sounds ugly. I’d probably like Vogon poetry.
I come from an Italian neighborhood, so I grew up hearing it, and have always love the way it sounds.
Portuguese, hands down.
I like the Finno-Ugric languages as well. I’m not sure I’ve really heard Estonian, but I’ve lived in Hungary and Finnish to me sounds like the rhythms and sounds of Hungary with none of the vocabulary. (Seriously, I remember photographing a Nokia conference in Budapest and hearing a language I thought was Hungarian and then as I listened closely, realizing I didn’t understand a single word of it. I would sometimes get that same feeling when I heard background Dutch–like bits and pieces of it almost sound like it should be English, but mostly unintelligible to me [though Dutch has more direct similarity in English in vocabulary than Finnish and Hungarian do.])
Also, even though Polish is technically my first language and I might therefore be biased to it, I’ve always liked the sound of Polish. It’s a mess orthographically to look at, but sounds like a very whispery language to my ears, with all the ch, sh, and zh-type sounds, mixed in with some occasional French-like nasal vowels, in addition to the “normal” ones. Other Slavic langauge speakers sometimes tell me it sounds like a Slavic langauge being spoken by children, as there is a letter “ł” that often corresponds to a plain “l” in other Slavic languages, but makes a sound like “w” in English. So the effect, from what I gather, is that something like “rascally rabbit” sounds like “wascally wabbit” to non-Polish Slavic language speakers. Or so my Russian-speaking friend always told me.