GLASGOW is the most beautiful sounding city name in the UK, according to a new study.
Commissioned by hotel chain Premier Inn, the research concluded that Scotland’s largest city has the most beautiful name to pronounce of any in the UK.
Edinburgh also made the top ten, coming in at number nine.
Liverpool came in second for the UK, with Belfast coming in third.
On a global scale however, Glasgow was pushed into seventh place.
Instead, the Japanese capital of Tokyo topped the list, followed by India’s Mumbai and Canada’s Vancouver.
Premier Inn said that the conclusions of the study leant on the linguistic theories proposed by James Adelman and others in their 2018 paper “Emotional sound symbolism: Languages rapidly signal valence via phonemes”.
Adelman argued in the paper that “emotional sound symbolism” – the idea that human languages signal emotions via individual phonemes – was present in the five languages studied: English, Polish, Spanish, Dutch, and German.
The academic claimed to have “hypothesized and demonstrated that phonemes that are uttered most rapidly tend to convey negativity rather than positivity”.
As such, phonemes that are uttered more slowly are argued to promote positivity to a listener.
Adelman wrote that “sound symbolism was perhaps best illustrated by [Wolfgang] Köhler (1929): when shown a rounded object and an angular object, and asked which is ‘takete’ and which is ‘baluma’, the vast majority of people agree that the angular object should be called ‘takete’.
“In fact, phonemes systematically convey a range of physical properties such as size and shape … and more general syntactic categories such as nouns and verbs.”
Premier Inn said its study had attributed a “valence figure to each phoneme included in each [city] name” to draw its conclusions.
The firm said of its study: “It is no surprise that Glasgow lands firmly as the loveliest UK city name. Nestled along the banks of the River Clyde, Glasgow is a city with a rich industrial heritage and vibrant cultural scene.
“In its early history, Glasgow was known as ‘Glaschu’ in Scottish Gaelic, which derived from the Gaelic words ‘Glas’ meaning ‘green’, and ‘chu’ meaning ‘hollow’, while various translations through the centuries have awarded the city the nickname ‘Dear Green Place’.”
