There was once a study conducted by a popular dating site about languages and whether bilingualism is an attractive trait. What was however surprising to me, was that there was an immense amount of gender differences and how a language can be more attractive depending on who was speaking it... man or woman. The study is unfortunately limited in how it was conducted for two big reasons:
1. The gender is assumed as binary. There is only a 'female' or 'male' as gender options and depending on what each individual believes as the amount of genders, others will continue to identify as whatever they feel they are, so it cannot be generalized among the entire population.
2. The study is limiting to only heterosexuals.
According to the study, the top four attractive languages for men are Swedish, German, Norwegian and Dutch. However the other that completed the top ten were Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, French, Arabic and Russian. Interesting enough, German and Japanese top the list for the Men but do not appear on the list for women at all and women have Spanish and Hebrew unlike the men. The differences have to do with stereotyping in how a language is portrayed. In thinking of German characters in movies, how do those characters act? How are they seen?
It's not new knowledge that movies reinforce language stereotypes however the common audience may not have thought about how those stereotypes are tied to gender and other demographics such as class and age. Languages now not only have stereotypes about their speakers but also their particular subsets of speakers. This argument would probably be more compelling with examples, however writing about stereotype examples tends to reinforce them, if one is required however to get the picture then: The Arabic language is #2 for women but #9 for men. In the movie Aladdin, men who speak Arabic are portrayed as terrorists and barbarians however the women speaking Arabic are shown as belly dancers. Should this be any surprise to why people would more likely choose the women who speak Arabic to be attractive and Arabic-speaking men less so?
This article is very unique in it's study as it was not completed by any other article however it raises a number of questions for me.
Why did they choose the sample they did?
The study was heteronormative, which studied only men and women genders. Why did they choose the limit their research in this way?
The study was only accomplished with American participants.
The article wording makes it difficult to tell whether the people surveyed were a subset of those whose messages were studied or if those two groups overlapped. I'd be curious to know why is the case and why.
Why are they defining gender the way they are?
The entire site assumes that gender is binary, which would in turn have to leave out a large majority of people who identify as something different or looking for something else.
What does this actually tell us about learning a language?
Despite referring to 'second languages' in the article, odds are at least some of the profiles referenced belonged to second-language speakers of English who spoke those other languages as their first language.
This blog meets the conventions of an opinion column, as it includes a lot of Jeorgia's opinion, you also had a lot of evidence to back up your opinion and ideas which is very good, you also had a really good argument about the Aladdin movie as most of it might be true. You also had some really good questions and challenges for the readers to think about. Some improvement for your blog would be to not have so many facts and research and more of your own opinion on the matter.
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