Survey: Italian Replaces French As Europe's Sexiest Language

When I was in my late twenties and had just left my first stint of Army duty, I moved to Colorado and eventually got a job with a medical manufacturer running their big, rail-car-sized sterilizer. It was a gas sterilizer and used a mix called "12-88," because it was 12 percent ethylene oxide (EtO) and 88 percent freon. Incidentally, the sterilizer's exhaust was a pipe that ran straight up to the roof; I once ran the numbers and figured we were exhausting between 10 and 12 tons of freon into the atmosphere every week. But it was the EtO that was the nasty stuff; EtO can kill you if you build up too much in your system, and once it's in your system, it never leaves; your metabolism can't get rid of it. So, when I took this job, I had to have blood drawn and a general pre-employment physical to establish what, if any, levels of this nasty stuff were in my system before my employment.

Now, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

The week before I was to start the job, I proceeded hither to the doctor's office where the pre-employment physical was to take place, there to meet the nurse who was to take my vitals and draw the blood. Bear in mind that, not only was I a young, robust man in the picture of health, but at this time there was no Mrs. Clark in the picture. The nurse was stunning; instead of scrubs she was wearing a lovely blue summer dress; she had long, jet-black hair and a lovely smile. She motioned me to a chair and said, "You can sit right there." She was, you see, from South Carolina, as I found out, and after five minutes, between her looks and that magnolia accent, I was so in love with her that I'd have done anything she asked. But before I could ask her name or phone number, I saw it - her wedding ring. I was disappointed, but things worked out all right in the end, as the year after that I met the girl who I'm still married to today.

Regional accents have long been kind of a study of mine. I grew up speaking flat, inflectionless Midwestern, and still do. My wife grew up in Baltimore and occasionally still rolls out some of the figures of speech and pronunciations that are unique to that city, along with some Appalachian twang from her college years. I've known people from all over the country and am familiar with accents from Boston Brahman to SoCal/Valspeak. Europe is somewhat different in that a continent that wouldn't give us Americans enough room to park our trucks still somehow clings to its patchwork of national languages. Now, we see that, according to a survey by an outfit appropriately called Babel, Italian has replaced French as Europe's sexiest language.

A new survey of 6,000 respondents from the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the US has found which European language is considered the most attractive.
The previous poll, which was released in 2017, named French the sexiest language - but that was displaced by this new research.
This year's survey showed that Italian is now rated as the world's most attractive language.
According to Babel, to name Italian the most attractive overall, it combined votes for which languages were perceived as ‘most sexy’, ‘most romantic’ and ‘most passionate’ from the international respondents.
When it came to what was considered the 'most direct' language, perhaps unsurprisingly, German topped that bill.

That last bit doesn't come as a surprise. I can manage conversational German if spoken slowly enough, and, yeah - it's pretty direct. Any language that comes up with a term like schadenfreude has to command a certain amount of respect, and there are other German terms it's fun to drop into conversation - for example, the flammenwerfer I use for getting rid of summer weeds.

Italian, though, I can see how that might appeal. As an example, listen to the Italian actress Claudia Cardinale in this clip from the 1966 film "The Professionals," in which she shares the screen with two American actors who have distinctive accents of their own: Lee Marvin and Burt Lancaster.

Regional accents are another thing, though, and here in the United States, it seems to me that people's increasing mobility is blurring the edges of those regional speech patterns. Still, some public figures of note manage to not only retain their distinct accents but to deliver some great bits of folksy wisdom.

Of course, other public figures can't seem to manage a coherent sentence.

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It's fun, sometimes, just to listen to folks talk. I do it a lot; I'm constantly reminded of something my grandfather told me when I was a little tad, that being that I should always remember that there's a reason I have two ears and only one mouth. Later this month I'll be attending a rather large function along with a bunch of my colleagues, and I'm sure that, modern times or not, my flat, inflectionless Midwestern will be mixed with plenty of other regional accents. It's fun to compare such things; regional accents and dialects manage somehow to mark us as to region while still showing we are all Americans. As for Europe, and Italy being their sexiest language, I will say this: I'm not sure I'd rate it number one, but after listening to Miss Cardinale in the clip above, I'm sure it's in the top five.