German is often described as rough, ugly, or even aggressive. If you go on Youtube, you will find a lot of people shouting in German to prove this point, with the refreshing exception of this video. Other languages seem to have a much easier time. Romantic languages especially are considered soft and melodic, with French as the ultimate language of love, selling lingerie, cosmetics, jewelry, and cake, with great success.
Why is that so? When looking for explanations, people often only consider the sounds of a language, arguing that pronunciation is what makes all the difference between a soft tongue and one that strikes you as aggressive. However, this is not strictly true.
Languages are more than just the combination of their sounds. Who speaks to you and how and what beliefs you hold regarding the speaker play a huge role in how you perceive the language. So it’s not necessarily the phonetics that need to be considered but the cultural assumptions, and maybe even more so, the stereotypes surrounding the language. In other words, languages have baggage just like the rest of us.
History and Hollywood
Negative feelings about the German language may not have started with Nazi Germany, but just like the country, the language's perception definitely took a turn for the worse. The only impressions of the German language most people outside Germany experienced, were Hitler’s shouting speeches and their terrible consequences. Naturally, hate speech and ambitions to subjugate the world didn’t endear other people to the language. Let alone those who suffered directly from persecution and invasion.
Movies about World War II subsequently feature a lot of Nazi characters shouting abuse and orders in German or in a (bad) German accent. The Nazis’ peculiar way of speaking German with excessively rolled Rs and weird pathos, while standing so clearly on the wrong side of history, made them the perfect villain. Often enough, these characters weren’t given a more complex storyline but rather kept as a template for any film in need of an anti-hero.
German, however, is by no means the only language labelled as the language of the villain. With Hollywood producing movies for the world from an anglophone point of view, there is no shortage of gruesome KGB agents and Arabic shouting terrorists with murder in their eyes. A study, conducted in the nineties, found that even Disney villains frequently spoke with a foreign accent or in dialects associated with low socioeconomic status. When asked about their choices, filmmakers pointed out that this was merely a cinematic convention of portraying evil. Nevertheless, this easily creates a bias against foreign accents and people that sound different to you. And if stereotype-based cinema is your only contact with a language, you may start to dislike it. It’s not surprising that both Russian and Arabic, languages of great poetry, nevertheless get labelled as ugly and aggressive.
The Real Deal
If you are exposed to the real language and a variety of native speakers, though, you can make up your own mind. Browsing through language learning forums, one will find many people changing their opinion about any language once they start getting to know it properly. Or as the British writer, John Le Carré puts it: “The decision to learn a foreign language is to me an act of friendship.” So if you really want to understand a language’s nature, consider learning it. But whatever language you may learn to speak, one rule remains: Shouting at people isn’t a good way of getting them to like you.
