A couple of weeks ago we revealed that British accents are the world’s sexiest, according to our survey of thousands of city-dwellers worldwide. (Go figure.) Now we’ve got the scoop on the world’s sexiest language – and this one involves something like actual science.
Researchers working on behalf of the language learning site Preply strapped up ten volunteers to a heart-rate monitor, and played them clips of people saying chat-up lines in 13 different languages. Then they recorded how much faster each language made the participants’ hearts beat, on average.
The winner – or should we say il vincitore? – was Italian. Sweet nothings in the language of Casanova, Sophia Loren and Mario Balotelli got the volunteers’ hearts throbbing 23 percent faster on average. Non c’è male!
In at second place was Portuguese, with a 20 percent increase, followed by a four-way tie between Spanish, Russian, Greek and French. In other words, those Mediterranean stereotypes aren’t going anywhere.
Of the other languages included in the survey, Dutch performed the worst, though its chat-up lines earned a still-fairly-respectable heart-rate boost of 12 percent. The rest of the table included Korean, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, German and Hindi, which were all in the 15 to 17 percent range.
In case you were wondering, English was not part of the study. And nor were Klingon, Elvish or Dothraki – so if you want to test your geek chat-up lines, you’ll have to conduct your own experiments.
Check out the full results and brush up on your cunning linguism via Preply. And if you’re planning your trip already, check out these stunningly beautiful Italian towns and villages.
In other news, the world’s best cities for 2021 have been revealed.