Famous names such as Declan Rice, Barack Obama and Nigel Farage were part of a Twitter karaoke party on Monday evening after Twitter’s new Space feature went viral.
Users tune into the event titled Sing Your Dialect, with TV personality Rylan Clarke-Neal performing, and West Ham player Declan Rice requesting to rap Vanilla Ice classic Ice Ice Baby.
18-year-old Jacob McLaughlin from Manchester has been credited with starting the event, which saw audiences of up to 150,000.
The new feature allows users to start a virtual chat room. Spaces are also public, meaning anyone can join or listen to an event.
The popularity of Sing Your Dialect meant that users across the world could showcase their own dialects to thousands through music in their local accent, with some hilarious results.
With that being said, the team at Preply have researched which accents are the sexiest, by combining a variety of chat-up lines in different languages and working with participants willing to get their hearts racing for the sake of science.
Participants were fitted with heart rate monitors and asked to listen to the different flirtatious clips whilst having their pulse analysed. Preply then compared participants resting heart rate, at an average of 65 bpm, with their heart rate whilst listening to the chat-up lines to determine the increase in bpm.
The language that came out on top was Italian; with participants experiencing a 23% uplift in heart rates from 65 bpm to 80 bpm. This was followed by Portuguese (20% increase from 65 bpm to 78 bpm) and French (18% increase from 65 bpm to 77 bpm). Russian and Greek made up the top five.
But what makes a language sound so sensual? Aleksandra Stevanovic, linguist and translator with a BA in Swedish Language and Scandinavian Literatures explains: “The languages perceived to be easy for singing like Italian follow the pattern of one-vowel-one-consonant, so every syllable ends in a vowel. These sound musical to human ears, which can be perceived as more ‘attractive’.”
Dutch revealed as the language least likely to get us hot under the collar Dutch was the language that got participants least excited, with heart rates increasing by a mere 12%, followed by German and Japanese, at 15% each. Aleksandra comments: “languages with lots of consonants stacked together in so-called consonant groups are perceived as non-musical. These types of languages – which include Slavic languages and German, are often perceived as less ‘attractive’.”
Daniele Saccardi of online language learning platform Preply said: “Humans are naturally intrigued with different accents and dialects, especially ones of those that are different to their own.
“Accents help us form our identity and we can create cultural connections with people through our accents.
“The popularity of the Sign Your Dialect event on Twitter Space demonstrates that people are proud of their accents, and want to showcase them to the world.”
