Welsh is UK’s most relaxing accent, study finds

The UK’s most relaxing accent has been revealed in a study.

The survey asked a group of 1,502 nationally representative people to rank 15 UK accents from most to least relaxing.

The Welsh accent came out on top, while the Essex accent finished in 15th.

Yorkshire and Cornish were joint second, with Northern Irish and received pronunciation (RP) accents rounding off the top five.

The research was conducted by Spa Seekers, in collaboration with an expert from the University of Sheffield.

Dr Chris Montgomery, a senior lecturer in dialectology at the university, told Sky News that no accents “have inherent parts that makes them relaxing”.

“It’s the connotations that they have that people learn over time,” he said.

“With the Welsh accent, people probably go to Wales, they might go on holiday. They come to Wales to the countryside, associate it with being in that place, going to the beach, perhaps being in Snowdonia or the other national parks.”

Survey respondents were given several accent “labels” to choose from.

“Essentially, what you’ve got is a number of different accent names, you’ve got a number of different scales and then people rate on those scales. And then we looked at what the rank ordering was,” Dr Montgomery explained.

But while there are variations within the UK’s nations and regions, the list of accents included in the study is not exhaustive.

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“We just used the label ‘Welsh accent’. Obviously, there’s a lot of variation in Wales,” Dr Montgomery added.

“They say north and south are quite important in Wales in terms of Welsh and in terms of Welsh English.

“But then there’ll be variation in different cities as well. So we just used that one label, and that was really for convenience.”

The survey also found Italian to be the most relaxing accent in the world.