Might be at least one exception to that:
Well, still no, but Marisa sure is good in that role!
I wouldn’t say so. We are most familiar with European accents in English, so those are the ones mostly commented on. If there is any bias, it’s toward Romance languages, with a preponderance for French and Italian (and mentions of Portuguese and Spanish/Mexican.) For non-European/non-white languages there have been positive mentions of Tagalog, Japanese, and Xhosa. No one has yet posted that they find German, Swedish, Polish, Dutch or other Germanic or Slavic languages sexy. (I will say that Natasha Fatale’s accent is pretty sultry, though.;))
You think it’s racist to be more attracted to European-accented English than to Chinese-accented English?
I don’t. I’m pretty self-aware, and have plenty of biases, but I don’t have strong biases around Chinese-looking people. But I find Chinese-accented English more different than European-accented English, and as a result have less emotional reaction to it. It’s just different. German-English sounds warm to me, Russian-English sounds terse, French-English sounds wrong, Scottish-English sounds appealing, and Chinese-English… just sounds like Chinese-English. And if it’s strongly … accented isn’t even the right word, since it’s mostly differences in word order and not phonemes that I notice … influenced by Chinese, I can struggle to understand it.
#1 Irish, #2 Scottish.
Can’t think of any that I particularly dislike.
When I was 17 and worked in a lab, there was a woman named Marianne with a light french accent. She was gorgeous and I along with every young male there had a crush on her and ever since I would swoon over that accent.
It may be true that preferences like these can derive from racism; but such personal preferences in what we find sexually attractive or aesthetically pleasing still certainly exist without racism, and we surely don’t routinely conflate such personal preferences with bigotry. If these preferences are necessarily racist, then you’d equally have to say that a preference for a partner who is tall/short, has a certain type of face or build, has light/dark hair, etc. - even personality type - are also forms or bigotry, since these are all to some degree innate characteristics.
I had a student from Brazil, and mentioned during class that I’d taken French in school because I thought it was the prettiest language. But after hearing her PorrrtooGEH’seh, I’d changed my mind.
She went into a long (and beautifully accented) tale of leaving São Paulo and jetting around the world, deciding where she would live.
Which ended with "And you know what accent I think is the most captivating, the most melodious in all the world? Wees-Con’-seen…"
The entire class did a spit-take. But Simone went on to tell of her travels, and her imitations of gutteral Germans and Chinese, overly dramatic Italians and Greeks, and convinced us she was being serious.
Wrong, but serious.
My sense is that accents that I find attractive in women are quite different from those that I find attractive in men.
For women, top of my list would be someone speaking English with a Castilian Spanish accent (e.g. Penelope Cruz).
The least attractive would be Cantonese (when speaking Cantonese, not the accent when speaking English); whereas I find Mandarin far more pleasing. I think the aesthetic reaction to tonal languages is probably strongly influenced by whether your native language is tonal.
Indian? Then you won’t like a Welsh accent either. People trying to imitate the one often sound like the other.
In my experience, Irish accents can either be very charming or incredibly grating. And that is without considering Northern Ireland, where the accent sounds harsh and unlovely. To me, at least.
Sexiest accents? Choose from of the Latin languages.
Here’s a beautiful sequence of British and Irish accents, subtitled for our American friends.
Nope. The Welsh accent is another I find really pleasing to listen to.
When Welsh people speak Welsh, I think it’s one of the most beautiful languages. English with a Welsh accent, not so much.
An even more diverse lightning tour through a wide selection of British & Irish accents:
Riemann, thanks - those are both fun.
She really does not have the skills she claims to have. Her attempts at Glasgow and Inverness are appallingly bad and misinformed. Both these clips also get the “t’” for “the” in the north of England wrong.
Some of them aren’t perfect, but I think she’s excellent given the speed that she transitions between them.
They’re imperfect in the way that imitating someone from Georgia with a bad New York accent would be imperfect. Speed of transition doesn’t really justify the exercise if you’re going to be so bad.
German
…my dominatrix ordered me to say that.
As a purebred gringo I can’t speak to the accents’ qualities in @Riemann’s first vid of the “weather forecast”, but I can say I’m damn glad it included subtitles.