Accents

Throughout high school and college, my friends kept telling me that British accents were "hot." According to them, a person's attractiveness can be increased two-fold by the presence of a British, Australian, or French accent.

Warning: Anecdotal evidence.

Since I don't find accents attractive, the only way I can attempt to dissect their mystery is by making venn diagrams based off of my friends' arguments on "which accent is the sexiest accent."

When my friends brought up the attractiveness of foreign accents with others, it appeared that they, too, were greatly swayed by the presence of particularly a British accent. I was beginning to think the opinion was something contagious, like a bad cough.

I had to see if everyone else in the English-speaking world really thought this. Since I don't have a linguistics laboratory at my disposal, I decided to use the internet.

These were the top five results of a Google search analysis I conducted for common regional dialects of English.

(For those of you who are confused by this graph, I will elaborate. I searched the terms on the X axis in Google using the terms indicated in the title of the graph. I charted the # of websites that appeared on the Y axis. In other words, the bigger the bar, the more websites created containing that search term.)

I wondered about foreign language accents as well, so I did an analysis for those.

The languages on the X-axis are the primary foreign and immigrant languages spoken in the USA.

If you go by the popular opinion on Google, accents really do increase attractiveness. Particularly British, or French if you prefer a foreign language accent.

I wanted to use this information to my advantage, because lately I haven't been able to get a chai tea when I want one. And my most attractive friends seem to be able to get awesome and generally free stuff all the time.

I developed a theory that if I altered my normal speaking voice, a chai tea would magically materialize. Here is the way my logic worked:

  A) Accents increase attractiveness.
  B) Attractive people get free/extra stuff.
  C) Chai tea falls into the category of "stuff"
  CONCLUSION: Using an accent will lead to chai tea.

Soon after thinking this through, though, I realized there were some holes in my plan. In real life, using an accent would probably not cause chai tea to materialize from thin air.

Thinking that perhaps the volume of one's voice was equally important in soliciting hot beverages, I checked Google to see how people liked to be spoken to.

Unsurprisingly, the best volume is a normal "talking" volume. But these results are probably skewed by websites about the 2007 movie "Talk to Me," since I don't know how to negatively filter Google search results. The most commonly found term after that is "yell at me."

This does not help me either.

So I guess my logic is faulty. Accents may increase your attractiveness, but not enough to magically cause chai tea to materialize from thin air. I later expanded my theory to include other commodities, such as food or clothing items rather than chai tea exclusively, but this didn't seem to work either. Changing my speaking voice has gotten me free stuff at times, but only when people were going to give it to me anyway, even without the accent. Oh well. I guess I can just pretend my logic is sound.