IS THE FRENCH LANGUAGE BEAUTIFUL?

One of the European kings said : If I have to speak to God, I'll speak in Spanish, as it's a noble language, if I have to speak to a friend I will speak Italian, as this language is full of familiarity, if I have to speak to a woman I'll speak in French, as this language has the power to charm, and if I have to speak to an enemy, I'll speak in German, as this language is very belligerent.

Whether a language is beautiful or not depends on the person speaking it.

"Street French" doesn't sound very beautiful to me.

The right speaker can make any language sound beautiful.

Much of what we consider beautiful or not has been formed by media in films and tv shows - the seducing and womanizing Frenchman or Italian, the sadistic German, and so on. French has been marketed as "the" language of love for ages, so of course most people make that association even today. Other languages have been marketed quite negatively in the media and therefore has a negative association in most people - German, Arabic (in the West at least), etc.

I think French is a much more beautiful language than English when spoken well. It can be very soft and fluent and the words are much nicer than English words to read and to say.

However I prefer Spanish to French as it sounds more alive and is to me quite dynamic.

Beauty is in the ear of the beholder.

French is a rather harsh language with a lot of nasal sounds. The spoken language is not musical - they have to use a different scheme of pronunciation for singing and poetry. It actually developed from a load of warriors from Norway attempting to speak Latin. The English have been speaking French since 1066 whereas most French people have only been doing so since the nineteenth century. No wonder the French get touchy about the way we speak their language.

Italian is a melodic and poetic language. It is actually a large group of Latin dialects. My grandfather came from the Apuan Alps and couldn't (or wouldn't) understand people from Naples. "Official" Italian is the Florentine dialect developed from Low Latin. Latin poetry is all about rhythm - more like rap than poetry. Dante Aligheri, a writer of the 13th/14th century, was so impressed by the musicality of the language spoken by the agricultural workers of Florence, that he used it to write his epic poem cycle, the Divine Comedy. To do so, he had to expand the language by applying rules to Latin so it sounded like Florentine. So basically we have a language made up by a poet. Italian has remained virtually unchanged and anyone who can speak Italian can understand the Divine Comedy. Compare that to the more recent Canterbury Tales by Chaucer.

To be honest I don't think it's romantic, but I love the way it just flows whenever people say it properly. Also it just sounds nice; soft consonants, and nothing's ever too stressed. Compare it to something like English with lots of stops and clicking consonants that just cut the sentence up in to shards of glass, or Russian which sounds really heavy, especially with the "L" sound.

Most of the Romance languages sound nice to the ear. Spanish also; I think it sounds cool with the ridiculous amount of vowels and the rolled "R". Italian is similar, but it is lacking in the same way as English, it has stops and clicky consonants that don't let it flow like in French or Spanish.

Some of the Germanic languages like Swedish sound nice. I like Swedish. But not German itself, it sounds either too masculine or too feminine, and the combination of "EI", "EU", "AU", and "CH" just make it sound really nasty.

It is categorically a "Romance language" as in derived from Latin, as seen in the expression "Romanice Loqui" to speak in Roman; not to be confused with French as the "language of Romance" named more due to France's image as the country of Romance than due to the language itself. Italian is not a more beautiful language, neither is French, their beauty is subjective. One of the main reasons French has a pretty sound, though, is due to the practice of something called "Euphony" which is Greek for "Good-sounding". English lacks this practice and is hence quite a gutteral-sounding language. French, though, tends to employ certain techniques, for example:

There is = il y a

Thus, "Is there?" should be = y a il?

Instead, a t is inserted to avoid the clumsiness of several consecutive vowels as follows:

"y a-t-il?"

Italian is another lovely sounding language, though my knowledge on why it sounds so nice is very limited; I could only mention the clarity the language's syllables have; a trait to which the accent lends itself to very well.

Hope this helps!

It's stilted and irrational. It, like the rest of the romantic languages, puts the cart before the horse and uses too damn many allegories and euphemisms to make its points.

Yes, french is a beautiful language. It is because it has very soft pronunciation of words.

French is just lovable (:

I prefer Pig Latin. Can't get much prettier than that. Oday ouyay greeaay? Iay ovelay tiay!!!!!