I disagree, although of course me being Finnish probably has some effect on it and kind of excludes me from having a valid point in the sense that I can't really speak for Western Europeans, but for example, Mongolian is "harsh" even though no one ever perceives there to be anything negative about Mongolians except for white supremacists and other racists, but those are people whose opinion doesn't really matter in 99% of contexts, and at least I don't perceive Kazakhs, Armenians or Georgians negatively but still consider their languages "harsh". Hell, even Turkish and Hungarian are often pretty "harsh", yet Turks and Hungarians are viewed as nice people... they're even seen as family by some, but those same people can go on about how their languages are ugly because they're "harsh".cntrational wrote:The only common feature between "harsh" languages is /x/ and how the speakers are/were viewed.
Personally, I feel like the perceived harshness in languages has more to do with a combination of consonant clusters, vowel harmony and the ratio of voiced/voiceless consonants. If a language has more voiced consonants than voiceless consonants, it's more likely to sound "harsh". Same goes for consonant clusters, especially those of voiced consonants. Vowel harmony can also enharshen (if that's a word) a language if the ratio of back vowels is high.