Everything Sounds Sexier in French

It's not called a Romance language for nothing^note It's Spanish, but you get the idea.

"Château Haut-Brion 1959, magnificent wine, I love French wine like I love the French language. I have sampled every language, French is my favorite — fantastic language, especially to curse with. Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperies de connard d'enculé de ta mère. It's like wiping your arse with silk, I love it."^TranslationGod's name of a whore in a brothel of shit from the filth of idiots from your sodomized mother.

— The Merovingian, The Matrix Reloaded

Notice how things take on an entirely different slant when you say them in a foreign language?

The following languages and dialects (at least to English-speakers) hold the following stereotypes:

• Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese: All sound Hotter and Sexier (See the Latin Lover trope for why) and exotic. Dialects for Spanish (such as Mexican Spanish compared to European Spanish) may carry a completely different vibe than each other depending on who you ask.
• Italian: Everything sounds delicious in Italian. Pizza, pasta, mozzarella, spaghetti, macaroni, lasagna, rigatoni, pesto, etc. if it's Italian, it will be delizioso.
• French: French sounds fashionistic, cultured and artsy, or (in the Anglosphere e.g. Britain and America) the accent of insufferable elitist snobbery — the language of douchebags. French words for food also sound délicieuse, but of the snooty fine dining variety.
• English: Received Pronunciation sounds wealthy, privileged and aristocratic. In the US, the East Coast "preppy" and "transatlantic" accents hold similar connotations. Other accents (e.g. Australian, most American and Canadian, Cockney, Northern English, Scottish, Irish, New Zealand, etc.) are down-to-earth, unpretentious and even "cool", but also unintelligent or at least uncouth. Southern US accents can go these ways: a Southern Gentleman/Belle, a Texas cowboy or an ultraconservative, stupid, racist bigot. And with a west coast/Californian accent, you either get the connotations of a a person who's being incredibly laid-back, or someone who's incredibly vapid and overuses words such as "like" or "totally"
• Japanese: Japanese usually sounds respectful and cute. Exceptions include The Idiot from Osaka, a Yakuza member, a Samurai or Imperial Japanese soldier/kamikaze pilot, or an actor in a Kurosawa movie. It is also a common sentiment that a Japanese dub of a western movie always makes everything sound more dramatic, whether intended or not.
• Russian and other Slavic languages: Can either be seductive or badass when accompanying a positive stereotype, or scary and dangerous when accompanying more negatives ones.
• Greek: Greek is the language of Science: Techno Babble, Science Fiction and STEM jargon names. Anything High-Tech will be named by the Greek suffix "-tron." The actual sound of Greek (staccato syllables with lots of obstruents) adds to the flair (this works for both Ancient and Modern Greek, by the way).
• Arabic: Mystical, confident, intimidating, and rich with history. If a given work has a European-inspired setting and features a kingdom or an empire that's not European but in close proximity to the main setting, it will likely have Arabic names, cultural dialects, and inspiration. Likely to be portrayed as a Worthy Opponent to the European-inspired setting, in the event that civilizations end up clashing.
• Hebrew (and predecessors, such as Aramaic): Generally considered to be ancient and holy-sounding, usually found for works that take inspiration from Biblical mythology or Gnosticism. Expect characters to have names taken from Hebrew or its predecessors which either don't reflect the character at all, or indicate that the character is supposed to be taken literally in terms of what they represent.
• German: German is the Black Speech, provided it's not spoken in the gentle tones of native speakers. Sounds badass, hammy, dictatorial, over-the-top angry bombastic ranting or efficiently technical. Alternatively, when spoken softly it can be used to boost the attractiveness of a character.
• Dutch: Similarly, Dutch has been described—by a Dutchman!—as a "not a language but a disease of the throat."
• Nordic languages: sound ideally suited for dark, gloomy, crime or political thrillers set in countries which popularly have too little sunlight, such as Wallander or Borgen.
• Latin: Latin sounds solemn — whether in the sense of religion or intelligence, or alternately just being pretentious. If something is related to Law or the legal profession, it will be Latin. Unless you're doing a reconstructed pronunciation, in which case it can sound like a particularly badass Italian.
• Chinese: Depends on the era. If it's Ancient, it sounds like ancient wisdom (e.g. Laozi and Confucius). But Modern? Rude and shouty. The downplayed exception is Modern Cantonese, which gives some degrees of badass gangster or kung-fu fighter from Hong Kongese Martial Arts Movie.
• Korean: Can go either smart-ass and dramatic like North Korean spy, Squid Game, and Parasite, or loveable and cutesy like Korean Pop Music.

This is, of course, subject to Values Dissonance, as the French don't necessarily think their language sounds the sexiest. They usually dub the 'sexy foreign language parts' in Italian or Spanish, and they usually perceive their own accent in English as horrible.

May overlap with Gratuitous French if there really is no reason for it to be in French. Compare Gratuitous Foreign Language, As Long as It Sounds Foreign, British Accents. See also Everyone Looks Sexier if French and French Cuisine Is Haughty.

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Examples:

Publicités

• A Dunkin' Donut commercial is a Take That! to this trend, where befuddled would-be customers of what's obviously Starbucks walk out of the line because they can't speak "Fritalian".
• An advertisement for New Zealand language month features a couple talking to each other in sultry French. The subtitles revealed there was something wrong with their car, and ended with "I dunno. I'm not a bloody mechanic."
• Some commercial exists with the premise: "French things are better", and the following examples: French kiss vs. regular kiss, French maid vs. regular maid, etc. See here.
• A lot of adverts for fragrances come with a French voiceover and a French name. Only in French could toilet water (eau de toilette) sound sexy. It meant "preparation for the day" (like when you'd put on fragrance) before it meant the potty. "Water for your morning routine" doesn't have that same sexy zing to it, does it?
• Heard many a year ago while driving via , a nearly word-for-word instance in a radio PSA featuring a cute Quebecois girl: "short summary of some reasons to recycle, in French - See? Even recycling sounds sehksee in French."
• A 2008-2009 commercial for McDonalds McCafé showed how much perkier ordinary tasks were when you said them with a French accent. A "chore" may be boring, but put an accent over that final (nominally silent) e and you get "choré" (cho-RAY), which just sounds sexier.
• A fake ad, but one of the pitch ads on The Gruen Transfer used the classiness of the French language to sell urine.
• An Irish Carlsberg advert shows two guys told to "do something Irish" by a foreign bartender before they can get their beer. Hilarity Ensues when one decides to spout off all the random simple sentences as gaeilge he can remember from school and his friend claims the gibberish is a famous poem. It makes them very popular with the ladies.
  Irish guy: Tabhair dom an cáca milis! ("Give me cake!")
  Everyone else: [reverently, in hushed tones] Caca milis...
• Stella Artois like to play up their beer's supposed sophistication by using French and making Le Film Artistique adverts. They even managed to make cider sound classy just by calling it "cidre".

Animés et Mangas

• In the dub of Baccano!, Chane Laforet has a french accent...as an inner monologue. Then again, the voice sure helped. YMMV on her father Huey Laforet.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers's one and only France, of course!
• In K, Kusanagi tends to bring out his polyglot skills when talking to Seri.
  • In s1e6 — "Mais Oui, mademoiselle," — flirty, then again with a cringe, in response to her... unique drink order. (he's a bartender).
  • In the movie — "Seri-chan, Guten morgen" (he just got back from a research trip to Dresden)
  • In s2e9, during their Black-Tie Infiltration — "Yes, My Honey" (he's voiced by Takahiro Sakurai).
• Hikari no Densetsu: A variant, except it's Italian instead of French - Mao sings an Italian song to show his love for Hikari in the manga's finale, breaking the rules of the Olympics to do so.
• This trope is parodied in both Ouran High School Host Club and Princess Tutu, by Tamaki (who's half French) and Femio respectively. Given that they're voiced by the same guy in the English dubs...
• In the English version of the Oh My Goddess! manga, Peorth seems to believe in this Trope; her dialogue is liberally sprinkled with French— it's even lampshaded in the opening to every issue featuring her: "Occasionally talks in French 'cause it sounds cool." (It's likely to be Gratuitous English in the original Japanese, though.)
• According to Kirche from The Familiar of Zero, this trope is inverted. From what she says, Germania (which could be that world's Germany) is the land of sexiness and passion.
• Crossing over with Gratuitous French, episode three of Arpeggio of Blue Steel takes us to a high-class restuarant in Yokosuka named "Cest [sic] un restaurant sur une colline" (literally "this is a restaurant on a hill").

Comédie

• Dave Barry lampshades this in one of his routines, saying that Ménage à trois "makes you think of three beautiful people naked on the Riviera", whereas threesome "makes you think of three mutants in a trailer park in Arkansas, and the one with the hair on his back is making pig noises".
• Victor Borge played with this in one of his routines—after Malapropering the name of the "Caro Nome" aria from Rigoletto, he refers to the composer as "Giuseppe Verdi—'Joe Green' to you."
• The English comedian John Moloney plays with this in one of his jokes. He speaks a few Italian phrases... then translates them for the audience:
  "Is there a pharmacy near here?"
  "I've got a stiffy."
• German comedian Michael Mittermeier joked about it once, saying that everything said in French, or with a French accent for that matter sounds like: "Later I'll screw you on the beach" (loosely translated).
• Although many Germans will tell you that German can sound very nice in normal conversation or singing and is not an angry language at all, most will agree that it IS a really great language for yelling, commanding, ranting and being a Large Ham: Hitler Rants is the proof.
• Behold, the official German dub of Monty Python's famous sketch "Self-defense against fresh fruits"... in German!!! Did you know that John Cleese's German voice actor Thomas Danneberg is also the official (!!!) German dub voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, Terence Hill, and many more?!? THAT is badass German angry voice.
• A diner walks into a fancy restaurant, where he is seated and handed a menu. Upon opening the menu, he is astonished to see dishes like "ham hocks boiled in maple syrup" marked at exorbitant prices. He summons the waiter and asks him what gives. The waiter apologizes, walks over to the kitchen and pushes open the door. "Hey Louie!" he yells, "the so-and-so printers forgot to translate the menus into French again!"
• After a stay in Hong Kong, Jasper Carrott built a routine around his visit. He argues that Chinese always sounds angry and violent, and speculated that the Chinese for "I love you very much and wish to have passionate sex with you" is still going to sound like "I intend to do you grievous bodily harm with this meatcleaver, and follow this up by hiting you repeatedly in the genitals with a broken bottle".
• Trevor Noah discovered on a visit to Germany exactly why his spoken German made people wince. Apparently German, spoken by anyone whose first language is Afrikaans or South African English, will always sound not just Austrian, but like one particular Austrian inciting the invasion of Poland. even if all you're doing is asking somebody to pass the salt down the table.

Bandes Dessinées

• Y: The Last Man. Yorick's fidelity to his fiancée Beth is tested when riding in the back of a pickup with Russian agent Natalya, who starts unbuttoning her shirt in the heat... "And would you mind not muttering to yourself in Russian, your accent is disturbingly sexy." (Ironically she's actually talking about finding the dead body of her husband).
• In a very early Bloom County strip, Mr. Limekiller charms an elderly woman by saying "vos lobes d'oreilles sont comme des têtes de poisson." In the last frame, he explains (correctly) to Milo that it means "something like 'your earlobes resemble fish heads'."
• A Hägar the Horrible strip plays this with food names — the Viking hero orders something like "Saucisse brûlée sur un bâton", and of course, gets a burnt sausage on a stick.
• In a Garfield strip:
  Jon: None of the girls I called want to go out with me on New Year's Eve. (beat) Maybe if I called them again and used a French accent...
• These two Dilbert comics.
• In the vintage future of Pouvoirpoint, French obviously became the universal language, so all anglicisms are frenchified to the absurd : from the title ("Pouvoirpoint" is literal translation of "Powerpoint") to the lyrics of various songs ("Daddy Cool" becomes "Papa Frais", "Welcome to the machine" becomes "Bienvenue dans la machine")...
• Doonesbury: In this strip Phred is settling in as Vietnam's ambassador to the United Nations. One of the other ambassadors suggests listening to the French translation channel:
  Phred: Oh... oh my! Do you know her?
  Eddie: Not me! But Victor snuck into her booth once....
  Victor: On business! I needed to check out some idioms!

Œuvres de fiction écrites par des enthousiastes

• Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità: Japan thinks Italy sounds especially sexy when he speaks Japanese. Germany thinks Italy sounds especially sexy when he speaks German. Italy also immensely enjoys Japan and Germany speaking Italian.
• In the Discworld fics of A.A. Pessimal, the Assassins' Guild's Swords teacher Madame Deux-Epées is a Quirmian with all the knobs turned up. She is stylish, sexy, sensual, and knows the effect a strong Quirmian accent has on susceptible male listeners. She plays on this for all she can. Her younger colleague Antoinette de Badin-Boucher is from Quirmian Aceria. She also speaks Quirmian, but with an interesting local dialect.
  • Meanwhile, a Rimwards Howondalandian colleague discovers the absolute opposite reaction to her spoken Morporkian.
• In Lost in Translation, Alphonse calls French an "attractively lyrical language". It's also decidedly foreign as literally no one but Ed and Noa can speak it.
• In Right What Is Wrong's Harry Potter fanfic "Love Potioning Gone Wrong," Dumbledore is accidentally given a love potion meant for Harry. Now in love with Ginny, he charms her hair blonde (like Gellert's hair) and asks her to speak German (like Gellert did).
  Just read the lyrics to Ode to Joy, I won't know the difference.

Cinéma d'Animation

• Compare "The World's Greatest Criminal Mind" from The Great Mouse Detective in English, French and German. French sounds more romantic, German sounds more evil. The Lyrics between English and French are much closer than in The Lion King (1994). Though the French version has even darker lyrics, with the goons mentioning how Ratigan is bloody and brutal, and how he's God's worst creature.
• Duchess from The Aristocats has a sweet French accent. She's also the only character who actually has a French accent in the film while others have American or British accents.
• This may be a common thing with French dubs of Disney movies; the French lyrics for "Hellfire", the Villain Song in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, are significantly darker than the English ones. And with this song, that's saying something.
• The French version of the song "Prince Ali" from Aladdin has a hilarious moment: the Genie spouts the line "Il y a du monde au balcon!" (roughly "there's quite some people at the balcony") just as we see three well-endowed girls swooning over Al on a balcony. And that expression is also an "elegant" way of saying that a woman has, erm, large... tracts of land.
• Toy Story 3 has Buzz Lightyear's Spanish Mode, where he becomes a Large Ham, more physically affectionate, and actively tries to woo his Love Interest Jessie.
• In Turning Red, one of the reasons why Mei is into Robaire is because he can speak French. Invoked by his name, which ought to be spelled "Robert" like its English equivalent; clearly the creative forces behind the band sought to capitalize on this trope by spelling their leading man's name in a way that made its French pronunciation immediately apparent.

Cinéma en Prises de Vue Réelles

• Le Divorce is named in reference to this trope. Though the person doing the preview's voiceover apparently couldn't be bothered to learn the proper French pronunciation, saying the first word as "lay" (which would be how one would pronounce "les", the plural article) rather than the proper "luh" (or close to it).
• A Fish Called Wanda:
  • Wanda is turned on when Otto says anything in exotic-sounding Italian. Otto just knows scattered words and phrases in Italian
  • Later Wanda discovers that she's far more turned on by Archie's Russian, though Russian is seldom seen as a sexy language. Archie is actually fluent in Russian.
• Everything Julie Delpy says as the titular character of Killing Zoe. It's all either sexy French or sexy French-accented English.
• In The Matrix Reloaded, the Merovingian provides the page quote:
  "Château Haut-Brion 1959, magnificent wine, I love French wine, like I love the French language. I have sampled every language, French is my favorite — fantastic language, especially to curse with. Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperies de connards d'enculé de ta mère. It's like wiping your ass with silk, I love it."^TranslationGod's name of a whore in a brothel of shit from the filth of idiots from your sodomized mother.
• The main plot of the Swedish movie Ciao Bella is that the protagonist, Iranian born Mustafa, is pretending to be an Italian so he can finally score with the girls.
• Forbidden Zone: Frenchy Hercules. On the surface, a chick who walks around in a bathrobe, with too much makeup. But now make her French.
• Discussed in Bananas when Fielding Mellish is in bed with his new girlfriend.
  Fielding Mellish: I love you, I love you.
  Nancy: Oh, say it in French! Please, say it in French!
  Fielding Mellish: I don't know French.
  Nancy: Oh please... please!
  Fielding Mellish: What about Hebrew?
• In Police Academy, third-generation American George Martin pretends to be Hispanic to get girls. It works.
• Used and parodied in Love Actually where Collin was certain that his British accent would make him attractive to American girls, despite his friend's misgivings. Collin was right and at the first bar he goes to, he meets three lovely American girls all very interested in him and he ended up with a gorgeous girl with a Texan drawl.
• Deployed for comedy in the Canadian film Bon Cop, Bad Cop. A man in bed with a woman uses schoolroom French drills to great effect: "Jean-Paul et Nicole aller à l'école!"^TranslationJean-Paul and Nicole to go to school? "Again!" As the woman orgasm, she screams "Vive le Québec libre", which is a famous phrase meaning "Long live free^note As in, independent from Canada Quebec!" pronounced by former French President's Charles de Gaulle.
• Played for Laughs in the movie Dinner for Schmucks, when the "idiot" Barry meets a multibillionaire Swedish industrialist, he says excitedly "I know Swedish!" then begins imitating the Swedish chef to said industrialist. The irony is, the industrialist isn't even Swedish, he's Swiss.
  "De bork bork bork, now I flip-a the pancakes."
• Played straight in French Cancan: showman Danglard has a brainstorm to revive the then-passé couple's dance known as the cancan and turn it into a highly-choreographed extravaganza. He also decides to name the revised dance the French cancan to appeal to non-French audiences.
• Inverted in French film Stolen Kisses. Antoine is quite obviously turned on when Fabienne picks up the phone and chats in English for a bit. (So turned on that he starts trying to learn it.)
• On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The SPECTRE guards at Piz Gloria (presumably recruited from the German-speaking part of Switzerland) speak untranslated German, for that extra air of menace when barking orders or alerts.
  Guard: Schnell! Der Englander ist abgehauen!
• Fingernails: Invoked. The Love Institute uses French music in its exercises to enhance the romantic mood.
• The Family Plan: Jess is quite turned on when Dan speaks to her in French, basically saying the trope name afterward. He says it's due to French being melodic.

Littérature

• In A Brother's Price, Jerin is knowledgeable about the ancient art of K'lamour, or "The Paths of Pleasure". He blushes when someone asks about it, as his knowledge is rather theoretical, and, anyway, not fit to be discussed in public. But in a world with male Gender Rarity Value, a husband has to be able to provide pleasure to his ten to thirty wives. While France is never mentioned, the word does sound rather much like French for "love".
• Used in the Daughters of the Moon book, Into the Cold Fire to justify Serena's crush on foreign exhange student, Zahi. Usually Serena avoids romantic relationships because she sometimes starts mentally responding to their thoughts whenever she gets too happy or excited, so she's quite pleased when she reads Zahi's mind and finds that his thoughts are all in French and Arabic and can't understand them.
• Discworld:
  • In Hogfather, a posh restaurant is left with no ingredients, so they make do with mud and old boots and name all the dishes in extravagant French (or rather, Quirmish). None of the diners notice. Given the extravagance of culinary French, this is not even Lost in Translation. ^note A Genius Bonus is that towards the end of the Siege of Paris in 1870-71 with hardly anything left to cook, upscale restaurants did exactly this.
  • In Making Money, Moist von Lipwig finds that the golem language (usually hell on the human tongue), "... sounded unbearably sexy when Adora Belle uttered it. It was like silver in the air."
  • In Maskerade, the operas are in "Brindisian" and, translated, are incredibly banal. One of the most romantic arias of all time is about a stuck door. More precisely, it is the heroine telling the hero why she cannot leave him.
  • In Monstrous Regiment Polly mentions that while the rest of the squad looks disheveled, the vampire Maledict had only become déshabillé. Same translation, different implication.
• In one of the only full translations of Dream of the Red Chamber into English, all the sex is in Latin.
• The Heroes of Olympus: Aphrodite apparently thinks so. Children of Aphrodite can speak and understand French. Why? Because it's the language of love, of course.
• In The Host (2008) when a Soul gets a new host, they automatically gain all of that host's communicative abilities, which leads Wanderer to often mention translated idioms from previous alien cultures that she's lived in... which leads to a running gag with her noting that "it sounds better in Bear".
• The King Is Dead: Karla is Kane's Francophone wife. She reminisces about how Kane, when he first met her, said "You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen" in "schoolboy French." She then notes how in English it sounds "corny" but in French it worked.
  Karla: There is something about the French language which gives this sort of sentiment a tone of ever-fresh glamour.
• British statesman Lord Chesterfield wrote in Letters to His Son about another example with German: "'das, der donner [sic] dich erschlage'^note That the thunder shall strike you down, must no doubt, make a tremendously fine piece of 'recitativo', when uttered by an angry hero, to the rumble of a whole orchestra, including drums, trumpets, and French horns." (letter 207) This was long before Richard Wagner started to write operas.
• Bill Bryson noted this with the descriptions on a box in Neither Here Nor There, that the Italian translation sounded pleasant and romantic, and something you might order in a restaurant, while the German text sounded "coarse and bestial", like something yelled at you in a prison camp. All the more amusing because the box in question was for a blow-up sex doll, and notes the same is often true (to his ear anyway) of more wholesome and mundane things. Ordering a coffee mit schlag may not sound particularly desirable to English speaking ears, yet is perfectly innocuous.
• Older Than Steam: Samuel Pepys used to write the more... interesting... passages of his diary in French or Spanish.
• Dave Barry, "Skivvying Up The Profits":
  "I wound up having to go elsewhere and purchase another famous designer underwear brand. A French one. Le Mart du K."
• In one of the action/adventure novels by Jerry Ahern, Dan Track asks his French girlfriend to say something in French because it's sexy. She replies: "Merde alors" ("Well, shit," although "shit" tends to be a stronger expletive than "merde" is in French).
• There is a series of translations of Latin and Greek authors known as the Loeb Classical Library. Most translations were done in the early 20th century— and it shows. In the volume devoted to the work of the Roman poet Catullus, some of the racier passages are translated into Italian — a language which innocent English schoolboys were presumed not to know. At other times, the passages were left in the original Greek or Latin, as if only "expert" scholars could be trusted with racy parts. Some of the racier works were republished in the late 20th century with entirely new translations for just this reason.
• In Addicted, Rose and Connor talk to each other in French all the time in public, and often in bed as well.
• Isabel Allende lampshades this culinary version in her book about eroticism, Aphrodite, saying that everything sounds aphrodisiac (and tastier) when said in French: "Is not the same serving mushrooms with garlic than serving champignons à la provençale, bread toast with fish egg than croque-monsieur au caviar."
• The Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte believes that the Spanish language is better for insulting than the English, French or Italian language, in his own words: "Hija de Puta" is undoubtedly a better insult than the Italian "puttana".
• In There's More Than One Way Home, Val calls Anna "Anna Banana," to her annoyance. He tries "Petite Anne Banane," which she admits sounds much better. He keeps using "Anne Banane" throughout the book.
• Aunt Jocelyn from Eye of a Fly uses lots of Gratuitous French, because "I think français is so much more élégant than a guttural tongue like English."
• Trainspotting has resident Pornomancer Sick Boy bragging to Renton about his new French girlfriend, particularly noting the appeal of her speaking her native tongue in bed. Renton (somewhat lamely) jokes she's asking if it's in yet.
• The Young Diana: When Diana goes skating, a man flirts with her by calling her "Boule de Neige," which sounds more romantic than "Snowball."

Télévision

• The Addams Family:
  • The French language has an aphrodisiac effect on Gomez Addams, no matter who (or what) said it:
    Gomez: Why Morticia, that's French!
    Gomez: Why Fester, that's French!
    Gomez: Why Gomez, that's French! And me with no-one to kiss!
  • Although one time, she had to "C'est la vie" twice for the effect to take.
  • On occasion, Morticia would say something in a different language, and immediately gets Gomez all over her (but again it's Morticia).
• There's nothing in this world that's sexier then listening to NCIS when Ziva's showing off her incredible amount of languages, especially Hebrew. Ohhhh...
• Stephen Colbert invoked this trope when interviewing Marion Cotillard. The two of them managed to make phrases like "I'm pretty sure this mayonnaise has gone bad", "Don't pet my weasel, he's rabid" and "I have an historic case of swamp ass" sound intriguing and sophisticated, by saying them in French.
• Played for laughs in The IT Crowd when Roy drops a date off at her house. He describes it as 'La maison de la femme', 'el casa de la senorita' and finally as 'das Haus der Frau' in a loud, harsh voice, illustrating that German is not generally considered a sexy-sounding language, unlike French and Spanish.
• Castle:
  • Detective Kate Beckett reveals she can speak Russian. That accent is very, very hot. Emphasised by the fact that all she's wearing is red lingerie and a black jacket.
  • Ioan Gruffudd guest-starred as Eric Vaughn, a dashing inventor and a big celebrity in "The Squab and the Quill". He's Famed In-Story and both Beckett and the coroner have a Celeb Crush on him. They briefly gush about his handsomeness, hotness, being rich, and his British accent.
• Spoofed in the Irish Soap Opera Fair City. A man says something mundane in Gaelic and his Russian wife finds it incredibly erotic, and asks him to say more. He says a few phrases that all Irish people remember from school, no matter how poorly they did.
  Leo: An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithiris.
  Translation: Can I go to the toilet?
• In the TV show My Family Roger finds out his girlfriend finds foreign languages sexy, he proceeds to woo her in Welsh! Sadly he only knows a few phrases from when he worked in a tourist information centre. He's soon caught when Alfie repeats what Roger is actually saying in english^note Caution, roadworks ahead. Alfie then tells her the romantic phrases claimed he was saying in the proper welsh. They don't have any effect on her though and asks Roger to keep telling her about the roadworks in Welsh.
• In one episode of The Wonder Years, 8th grader Kevin Arnold has a daydream in French class. In his dream, his crush speaks sexy French to him, and Kevin responds each time with the only French phrase he knows: "Would you like some butter?" Both sides of the conversation would sound equally romantic if they weren't subtitled, though!
• Mentioned in Scrubs where Elliot demonstrated the many ways she can speak German from cute to scary.
  J.D.: You speak German?
  Elliot: Yeah! I can do a sweet little milkmaid: "Guten Morgen... möchten sie die Kühe melken?" I can do an evil old hausfrau: "ISS DEIN SCHNITZEL, SONST KRIEGST DU KEIN NACHTISCH!"
  J.D.: German's such a beautiful language...

Meaning of those two sentences — "Good morning... do you want to milk the cows?" and "EAT YOUR SCHNITZEL, OR NO DESSERT FOR YOU!" respectively.

• Spoofed in Frasier, in which Roz is dating a Frenchman despite not actually speaking French, and so enlists Frasier, who does, to help her dump him. It soon transpires that the Frenchman — who doesn't speak English himself — was actually planning on dumping her himself, and he and Frasier ultimately end up discussing where a good place in Seattle to get a steak is. Roz, of course, thinks that he's saying something immensely touching and romantic.
• In My Name Is Earl, Catalina sometimes speaks bursts of Spanish, sounding as if she's insulting people — but what she's actually saying are things like "Thank you to the Spanish-speaking audience for watching this show" (obviously breaking the Fourth Wall.)
• In CSI: NY, Flack finds Angell speaking French very sexy; and Mac tells Stella everything sounds better in Greek.
• Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps
  • There's an episode where Janet reads a love letter from her ex, the decidedly English Andy. When she reads it, the voiceover is Andy's accent. When Janet's suspicious boyfriend Jonny reads it, the voiceover is a French accent.
  • Another episode has Janet attempt to make a romantic meal out of common food and drink by giving the names in faux-French (for example, "can of lager" becomes "beer a la can").
• Would-be yuppie Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses is in the habit of throwing French words into his sentences even though he doesn't know what they mean. A full list can be found here.
• Flight of the Conchords Foux de Fa Fa fa fa-ah
• An episode of Heroes required Mohinder to speak French. This decision was very much appreciated by certain segments of the fandom, and prompted countless retreats to countless bunks.
• In one episode of Red Dwarf, Lister enters a King Arthur VR simulation, equipped with a book of cheats, and attempts to seduce queen Guinevere. When he hears she speaks with a French accent, he comments:
  Lister: I just love that accent! Rawr!
• A variation from an episode of M*A*S*H:
  Winchester: This could be pleasant, dining al fresco.
  Houlihan: "Picnic" sounds sexy in French.
  Winchester: That's Italian.
  Houlihan: That's even better!
• Friends:
  • In the episode "The One Where Joey Speaks French", when Phoebe uses French, Rachel finds it sexy and even tells her: "Seriously stop it, or I'm gonna jump on ya."
  • This was a large portion of the attraction of Paolo in the first season. That and he was a tall, beautiful Italiano.
    Phoebe: What did he say?
    Rachel: I have no idea! Isn't he great?
• When Carter learns that Allison speaks Dutch in the third season of Eureka, he's momentarily stunned and distracted.
• Subverted in Time Gentlemen Please:
  Marcel: But do you not find my accent, how you say, sexy?
  Connie: No, how you say, you prat!
• In an episode of Designing Women, Julia has been taking a cooking class. When Charlene asks her what she made, she rattles of something very fancy-sounding. When Charlene says it sounds good, she says "Thanks, it's macaroni and cheese, it just tastes better in French."
• In an episode of A Different World, Whitley offers to make Dwayne's mother something to eat. She used the French term, but after describing it, Dwayne's mother said, "that's just a good old-fashioned ham and cheese sandwich".
• An episode of Walker, Texas Ranger has the guys picking up their tuxedos for Walker's wedding. After one of the guys complements the tailor on his skills and asks if he learned them in Italy (where he claims to be from), an amused Walker reveals that the man's name is something wholly dull and American and that he learned his skills in prison. Upon being released and determined to turn his life around, the man opened a store and used the Italian translation of his name, correctly surmising that this would make people flock to his store.
• During one exchange in Criminal Minds between Derek Morgan and Penelope Garcia, Garcia signs off in French, to which Morgan tells her that it "drives (him) crazy with (her) French talk."
• In one episode of How I Met Your Mother, Robin has a dinner date with a British doctor. She decides not to shave her legs as it would force her to behave and not have sex right away on their first date. However, he's really hot, and a doctor, and with British accent. This combination proves lethally charming and Robin spends her date trying to shave her legs.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • Penny's new friend from her college class is British, and it freaks Leonard (her boyfriend) out to no ends. They discuss the trope and Penny tries to argue that British accent is not necessarily the sexiest, trying to calm him down, but ultimately she concludes that British accent is indeed the best for guys to have.
  • When Rajesh's sister first showed up, the guys talked about how her Indian accent is sexy. Raj was uncomfortable with any one of them trying to hit on her and said that she spoke exactly like he did.
• Horatio Hornblower:
  • In "The Frogs and the Lobsters", there is Mariette the peasant-girl-turned-school-teacher whose English is tinged with French, which is supposed to be appealing. She and Horatio have almost a thing together, though not quite because he's too innocent and she's too vapid. It's not explained in-universe how she mastered the English language.
  • Senora Ortega speaks English, but when she tries to seduce an unfortunate soldier who guards the imprisoned Spanish ladies, she chooses to speak Spanish, a language the soldier doesn't understand. It works on him.
• Mad Men reveals that Megan, who's French-Canadian, managed to get the most tips when she worked as a waitress because she knew how to work the accent. Later, her idea of a birthday present for Don is a performance of "Zou Bisou Bisou" using her native French.
• While My Kitchen Rules's French judge Manu Fieldel rarely, if ever, speaks in his native language, more than one contestant consider his accent "divine".
• For a clip on World's Dumbest... that takes place in Germany, Kevin McCaffrey comments that you could say "I love you; here are these flowers" in German and he would soil himself.
• Stephen Fry is fluent in German and in an episode of QI read the real first verse of the German national anthem, with unintended consequences:
  Stephen: "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland! Danach lasst uns alle streben brüderlich mit Herz und Hand!"
  Phill Jupitus: I have an erection.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): From "In Throes of Increasing Wonder...":
  Lestat: Seul l'impossible peut faire l'impossible. ^TranslationOnly the impossible can do the impossible.
  Lily: I don't know much what you're saying. But it sure sounds nice.
• On an episode of Sesame Street, Gordon says something similar abut Spanish, and Luis and Maria break into a song making fun of it.
• In the House: Tiffany meets a cute boy with a Caribbean accent. She fakes one of her own, but eventually confesses. Then he drops his fake accent and sounds like a normal Californian. He's quite glad to stop frontin'.

Musique

• French death metal band Eths subverts this trope pretty damn hard.
• A substantial part of the oeuvre of Slovenian industrial band Laibach consists of deconstructions of pop songs. Many of them translate the lyrics to German to accentuate the militaristic undertones of them ("Laibach" is the German name for "Ljubljana", Slovenia's capital). The best example is Geburt einer Nation, (which in itself references The Birth of a Nation (1915), D. W. Griffith's cinematical masterpiece glorifying the birth of the Ku Klux Klan... yes, despicable, but one of the most important movies in cinema's history); their take on Queen's "One Vision" in which lyrics like "One man, one goal, one mission/ One heart, one soul, just one solution" end up as "Ein Mensch, ein Ziel, und eine Weisung./ Ein Herz, ein Geist, nur eine Lösung", are sung in a totally creepy way and accompained by ominous quasi-militaristic para-fascist imagery. It's also worth mentioning that a common Nazi slogan was "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer" (One People, One Realm, One Leader), and 'solution' recalls the 'Endlösung', the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (The Holocaust).
• The entire point behind the Bilingual Bonus of tool's "Die Eier von Satan". When added to the Lyrical Dissonance, the entire song's angry German vocals sound like it's a lot meaner than what it really is: a recipe for hash cookies. Specifically - WITH NO EGGS
• Two of Tom Waits' albums — Alice and The Black Rider — use frequent German words and fake accents to creepy effect. This reaches its logical conclusion with "Kommeineszuspadt", whose lack of any real meaning cleverly allows the listener to imagine something far nastier than anyone could ever write. It should be noted the last song's title is misspelled (in a way that makes it literally mean "Come one too late"). Written properly makes "Komm nie zu spät", which translates to "Never be too late" or "Never come too late". (The latter does indeed carry the same Double Entendre as it does in English.) Both albums are based on stage musicals produced in Germany in collaboration with Robert Wilson (Black Rider also with Lou Reed), which in the original productions were in German with frequent English. The latter deliberately pronounced with a strong German accent by the performing actors.
• Spoofed in "That French Song" by Tripod. The song sounds romantic to the girl listening to it, but the subtitles reveal that the song is really the most unromantic things you could think of, such as "I have a cluster of pimples on my back shaped like the Man on the Moon."
• The Flight of the Conchords song "Foux du Fafa" parodies this, with the two band members using basic French (including naming French celebrities) to impress a French woman. They succeed... until she asks them where the pool is.
• The Killing Joke song "$.0.3.6" from their debut album makes use of a sample playing in the background of some guy speaking rather conversationally in German. I have no idea what is being said (in all likelihood, the band didn't either) but the fact that it's being spoken in German, coupled with Gaz's repeated references to "experiments" of some kind, makes it difficult not to think of Josef Mengele.
• Alestorm, a "Scottish pirate folk metal" band did a foreign language cover of their song "Wenches and Mead" for their latest EP. Their only non-English song, and what is it in? German, what else?
• Sum 41's song "Ma Poubelle" is often cooed at by teenage American girls as being romantic, sexy and wonderful. The idea of Googling what Ma Poubelle means in French is beyond them, and so they get quite confused by the loud laughter that occurs when French speakers are shown the video of the lead singer singing the song to a girl while grinning maniacally.
• Finntroll is a Finnish metal band that sings about in Swedish because the language sounds "more trollish".
• There's a song by The Beatles, Michelle, whose chorus goes "Michelle, ma belle, these are words that go together well, ma Michelle / Michelle, ma belle, sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble, très bien ensemble". The lines in italics mean exactly the same. Which one do you like better? And in case somebody cares, ma belle is "my beautiful one" (female, french nouns are gender-sensitive). The song itself, of course, is about a guy who wants to tell a French girl he loves her, but he can't because that's the only French he actually knows.
• German metal band Rammstein practically exploit the "angry sounding language" stereotype almost to the point of parody. Their use of German intentionally makes all their songs sound militaristic and hard. Notable exceptions include "Ohne dich" and "Sonne". In truth, most Germans think that Rammstein is overdoing it - Till's rolling R's and hard T sounds are much more the result of his dramatic deep baritone range. The weirdest thing is that most of the time, they sing about very dirty, brutal, or downright evil taboo subjects such as cannibalism ("Mein Teil"), incest ("Weiner Blut", "Tier", "Spiel mit mir"), rape ("Du riescht so gut"), necrophilia ("Heirate mich"), sadism ("Ich tu dir Weh"), anal sex, sodomy, murder, and others, yet they never use dirty words (few exceptions exist). This leads to a very poetic language, that still sounds evil or fascistic to non-German speakers.
• Yoko Kanno is known for having compositions that have lyrics sung in what appears to be a very distinct European language, but is in fact just a bunch of gibberish. It is claimed that she has a philosophy in writing the lyrics to the sound of the song itself, finding a focus on the music rather than words.
• Subverted by Megadeth in "À Tout le Monde". The chorus is in French, and the narrator is dying and he's telling his friends he loves them before he goes.
  À tout le monde
  À tous mes amis
  Je vous aime
  Je dois partir
• "Voulez-vous coucher av-" * SMACK *. That's about as far as you'll get if you try using this trope on a French woman. It means "Do you want to sleep with me tonight?" There's a reason why many French speakers severely object to underage artists singing these lines. There's also a hidden meaning — voulez-vous is a very formal way to speak. There is no toi here, so you're inviting somebody you don't know well enough to use the familiar with. Such nuances likely missed on said underage artists.
• Played for drama/horror in the Evelyn Evelyn song "Sandy Fishnets". The title character is French Canadian, and is the most popular girl at the brothel where she lives. The horror/drama is because of her age (she's murdered on "the day she turned thirteen").
• Gabi Delgado-Lopez, lead singer of the German NDW band D.A.F., has such a deep, rich, sexy voice that he doesn't sing, he seductively growls his German lyrics. It's enough to create "I'll be in my bunk" moments in any New Wave afficionado.
• The Kenneth Williams song "Ma Crepe Suzette" is a parody of this. It's described as a love song, but the lyrics are just random French or French-sounding words strung together.
• Much like Kenneth Williams, Songs to Wear Pants To parodied the concept with "Crepes Et Baguettes", a rap made from random French words and food names.
• Calexico's song "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" plays up the woman's seductive status by having almost all of her lyrics in French.
• Julien-K's song "Systeme De Sexe": a blatantly sexual song, with one of the verses being a woman speaking/moaning in French. See also: the title.
• Girls Aloud can't speak French, so they'll let the funky music talking. Of course, the song was later translated into "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais".
• Tocotronic claim that "Über Sex kann man nur auf Englisch singen". This probably does not mean "only in English you can sing about sex" but rather "not in German".
• French Progressive Rock/Zeuhl band Magma's frontman Christian Vader felt that French wasn't expressive enough "either for the story or the sound of the music" and so he created an entire new language called Kobaïan, mostly based in Germanic and Slavic phonemes. Some critics have felt Kobaïan enabled Magma's singers to express emotions more deeply than traditional lyrics would have allowed, so he may have been correct. Today using a conlang is a staple of the Zeuhl genre.
• Parodied in 10cc's epic rocker "Une Nuit en Paris", which makes it sound like the official language of Paris is "sexy broken English."
• Sonny & Cher demonstrated this on their Variety Show by having Cher sing "Hit the Road, Jack" in French. It came out sounding like a romantic serenade.
• Alcazar's song Mènage A Trois is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. The song and music video are about members of the group seducing the same guy and stalking him everywhere in the hotel. Please remind that the group at the time was Gender-Equal Ensemble.

Flippers

• Word of God is that Cirqus Voltaire was expressly set in a French circus as a tribute to the French for inventing bagatelle, the precursor to Pinball.

Marionettes

• An episode of The Muppet Show featured a guest, French singer Charles Aznavour, who demonstrated to Kermit how easy it is to seduce women by saying anything, anything in French to them.
  Kermit: Wow, what did you just say? [meanwhile, Piggy is swooning]
  Charles: I said, "Your oil filter has a leak and your transmission is sagging." — Now watch this, I'm going to tell her the phone number of the Paris garbage dump.

Radio

• Kenny Everett's character Marcel Wave was a Gallic charmer with an overinflated ego. On one occasion he pronounced "EEC" as "Ehh! Ehh! Sehhh!" and commented that "Ze French letters are so much more exciting."
• The National Lampoon radio show/lp records had a mock ad for the Indianapolis Academy of the French Accent, promising a better life from speaking in a sexy cool accent.

Jeux de Plateau

• The 7th Sea RPG has various knacks and Advantages that influence a character's social ability, one of which is "Dangerous Beauty". One of the accents found in Montaigne (an Expy of Louis-XIV-era France) grants Dangerous Beauty for free because that accent is just so alluring.

Théâtre

• In Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen has a quartet of characters representing national stereotypes of the English, German, French and Swedish. When the Frenchman makes a comment in his native tongue, the German comments (Ibsen being sarcastic), "Oh! French is such a stiff language."
• In the finale of the 10th-anniversary concert for Les Misérables, of the seventeen international Jean Valjean actors, France-representative Robert Marien is easily the sexiest. Compare the performances of all seventeen singers, all singing lines from the same song.
• In Tanz Der Vampire Herbert calls Alfred "mon chéri" while flirting with him.

Jeux Vidéo

• In The Curse of Monkey Island, we have a few instances where something is referred to in Spanish to make it seem cool and dangerous, such as El Pollo Diablo ("The Devil Chicken"). To further drive home the fact, you have four conversation choices in a dialogue on the subject: "What?", pretending to be El Pollo Diablo and the translations in Spanish of the first two options.
  • There's also an option to have Guybrush say "ouch!" in a (fictional) foreign language — "Papapichu!" — every time he gets hurt.
• Guess what language the most academically, mentally, and physically developed female character in Persona 3 (and Expansion Pack FES), Mitsuru Kirijo, knows (and occasionally drops a line in)? (This is an example of Keep It Foreign: in the Japanese, she's using Gratuitous English.)
• Backyard Sports: "Soy Pablo. ¿Quieres jugar?" But he really speaks English.
• Dawn of War: Check the difference between English-voiced Chaos Space Marines (For the unfamiliar with WH40k, they're the bad guys) and German-voiced Chaos Space Marines here. Notice something?
• Team Fortress 2. The Spy's vaguely French accent, plus the RED Spy's canonical relationship with the BLU Scout's mother. Of course, the fandom ran with it, making the Spy The Pornomancer.
• During Hideo Kojima's self-deprecating talk to the Game Development Conference in 2009 about Metal Gear and the things each installment accomplished as a piece of game design, he lampshaded this when showing clips of Metal Gear Solid in the languages it was dubbed into. He showed the opening conversation between Snake and the Colonel in various languages, saying after each one how it made him crave an appropriate Regional Speciality (hamburgers, German sausage, paella...), except for the French dub, which he said "just sounds romantic".
• In the X-rated MMORPG Red Light Center, the automatic female sex responses in English have a noticeable French accent. This is not a bad thing. At all.
• Leliana in Dragon Age: Origins is from Orlais, where everyone speaks with French accents. She's also the resident bard and sports red hair, probably a necessary combination for her to compete with Morrigan.
  • On the opposite end of the spectrum is Qunlat, the language of the Qunari. Of the words we've heard, many seem to contain Rs and long As for the simple fact that it makes it extremely easy to growl the words or turn them into a guttural roar.
• Night Trap has Mr. Martin, who tries to come off as a charming gentleman.
• In Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days Larxene's weapons all have French names.
• Waka in Ōkami speaks with a French Funetik Aksent, even though the game doesn't have any recorded voices.
• Yuuya of Hatoful Boyfriend likes to start every conversation with "Salut!" (Salutations, in the official English translation), ends it with "Adieu!", and calls the protagonist "Mon amie". He lived in France for a while, but it seems to be an affectation since in a bad moment he swears in Japanese (or translated English).
• This even applies to names as well. In Sonic Adventure 2, Rouge the Bat has been considered to have a sexy name to compliment her attractive appearance. Given that Rouge is the French word for red, this trope definitely applies.
• The Otome Game Ristorante Amore, which takes place in a fancy Italian restaurant. Or rather, the Game Within a Game does.
• Summertime Saga has the schoolteacher Miss Bissett, who teaches French and has a unique way of offering incentives for fast and advanced learners.
• Played for Laughs in Disco Elysium, where a failed Conceptualization check causes the Detective (who has forgotten his name) to name himself "Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau". Even The Detective's own mind starts to rebels against such an impossibly cool name, and powering through repeated instances of both your brain, recovering memories and mounting physical evidence pointing to your name being the much less cool Harry Du Bois unlocks an internalized thought that boosts two of your most french-sounding skills (Espirit de Corps and Savoir Faire), because they sound fancy and like the kind of cool things "Raphaël Ambrosius Costeau" would be good at.

Romans Visuels

• Queen of Thieves:
  • On Remy's route, the heroine quickly discovers how much she enjoys hearing Remy speak to her in French.
  • A heart scene in Vivienne's second season has her teasing the heroine with various Italian pet names, plus hinting at the possibilities for French. The flustered heroine responds by joking about the Romance languages not being called that for nothing.

Animation sur Internet

• Homestar Runner: One of the endings to the Halloween toon "Halloween Potion-Ma-Jig" has Marzipan's potion turn Homestar into a suave French version of himself, whereupon he instantaneously seduces a delighted Marzipan.
  Marzipan: Oh, goody goody gumdrops!
  French Homestar: (in a bad French accent) A-say, Mahzipan, let us away to mah romantic chateau in ze Fantastique Mountahns!
  Marzipan: I'll go pack my pashmina.

Bandes Dessinées en Ligne

• In Troy, the title character's mother (from Ohio) calls and his Hispanic roommate answers the phone. When she's intrigued by his accent and asks him to say something in Spanish, he says several things such as "My garbage can is overflowing and stinking up the kitchen." She swoons nonetheless.
• In Commander Kitty, CK gets the wrong idea when he's led into a room marked "abbatoir"^note slaughterhouse.
• Serafine Savoy from Lackadaisy is a variation; she speaks Cajun French.
• A partial subversion occurs in Niels regarding Agent 300's thick Glaswegian brogue (that he only slips into when drunk}. His boyfriend Agent 250 is extremely turned on by it every time it happens.
• In Elftor:
  Even if [Germans] are just talking about the weather, it sounds like they want to kill all the Jews and invade Czechoslovakia.[1]

Originaux de l'Internet

• Inverted in Ilivais X. Mille Chanteau has a blatantly French name and happens to speak French, but she doesn't have an accent and hardly ever says anything in French. She gets around regardless.

Vidéos sur Internet

• Used in Benzaie's "Working at Channel Awesome" sitcom, where what he's saying both is and sounds violent... but it's in French, so at least one of the girls still swoons over it. His entire character seems to be based on this.
• German version in Demo Reel. Carl Copenhagan has a foursome with some sexy cosplayers, and his advice to the other guy who wants in is to grow an accent.
• The One Semester of Spanish Love Song provides a hilarious parody of this trope as a man sings basic Spanish phrases in the form of a tender ballad.
• Parodied in this video comparing languages, which feature the same word spoken by five different languages, four of them sounding beautiful but the German one always sounding horrific.^note They do exaggerate, though. For instance, most Germans use "sex" to say "sex"; "geschlechtsverkehr" is "sexual intercourse", which sounds too complicated in any language.
  French: Papillon.
  English: Butterfly.
  Italian: Farfalla.
  Spanish: Mariposa.
  German: SCHMETTERLING!!!
• In this case, "Everything Sounds More Dramatic in French": Sandra Boyton's "Chanson Profonde".

Animation Occidentale

• The Simpsons:
  • In an episode, the Simpsons are stranded in a jungle, making their way downstream on a raft. They pass natives staring ominously at them. We see the natives discussing something in low, scary voices. According to the subtitles they're discussing helping the travellers, possibly offering them some food.
  • In one episode, Lisa is lost and asks a Russian man for directions. He proceeds to spew angry proclamations and she runs for her life, but the subtitles indicate that he was giving her the directions. "What's her problem?" Taking it an extra step, the man resumes and is beaten in a game of chess by his companion. After flipping over the chessboard, he yells "Good game, how about another?!"
• In Dexter's Laboratory, the title genius attempts to study for a French test by listening to tapes while he sleeps. The tape skips, and he wakes up unable to say anything except "omelette du fromage" (literaly, "cheese omelette").^note (Which, in proper French, would be "omelette au fromage". Here is an explanation of this error.) Turns out this, among other things, drives the girls wild. However, his inability to say anything else leads to his lab self-destructing. A reference to Steve Martin's stand-up routine about speaking French in France, perhaps?
• An episode of Animaniacs is set in a Drive-In Theater showing a French movie. The implication given by most of the audience is that the movie is supposed to be romantic (or maybe just artsy), but whenever the movie is visible, the only dialogue is a dramatic-sounding recitation of children's songs (such as "Allouette, je te plumerai." and "Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?").
• On The Proud Family, Sugarmama lusts after Lacienega's grandfather, and it became a Running Gag where he would berate her en español. She doesn't know Spanish and would swoon at his every word while his bilingual family watches uncomfortably. However, it's implied that they do start dating at some point.
• In the Mickey Mouse Works short "Mickey Tries To Cook", the limit of Mickey's cooking skills is a ham-cheese-cheese-tomato-ham-cheese-ham-tomato-and-cheese sandwich... with cheese. Minnie, wanting something fancier, asks José Carioca to make them a romantic gourmet dinner, but the "gourmet dinner" turns out to be a ''presunto-queijo-queijo-tomate-presunto-queijo-presunto-tomate-e-queijo sanduíche... e queijo."
• In the episode "Ro-becca", Antoine of Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) gets a very aggressive femmebot to fall in love with him with his French accent. After a few minutes of trying to elude her in vain, he finally repels her with a surprisingly convincing Ahnold impression. Then he accidentally attracts her again by relapsing back to his French accent. Sonic later unintentionally attracts Robecca's attention with a little French of his own...
• Looney Tunes:
  • Three words: Pepe Le Pew. (And it still sounds sexier even if the French is mangled and mostly consists of puns). An early Le Pew cartoon, before the formula was nailed down, has him revealed as an American married-man fraud.
  • Pepe Le Pew's spiritual successor, Fifi La Fume, to the agreement of furries, who obviously didn't exist back in Pepe's days.
  • Daffy Duck tried this in the short "A Coy Decoy".
  • Bugs Bunny in "Hare Trimmed" when he pretended to court Granny in order to protect her from the avarice of Yosemite Sam.
    Ehh ... vhat is opp, Monsieur Le Physician?
• The Twi'lek in Star Wars: The Clone Wars are given French accents. The entire female half of their species has basically been Ms. Fanservice ever since their first appearance four decades ago.
• In an episode of Totally Spies!, Clover and Alex find (who knows from where) a Bishōnen pool cleaner who only speaks French. They get wooed by everything he says just because - even though he's only talking about pool water quality all the time, as Jerry tells them by the end of the episode when they see him cleaning Mandy's pool and she reacts similarly.
• An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes has Heloise having a Dream Sequence where Jimmy sings for her with a (slight) Spanish accent, complete with maracas.
• Fashion designer Hoity Toity of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: "Would you do me... the GREAT honor of allowing me to feature your couture in my best-of-the-best boutique in Canterlot?"
• In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Run Away Runway", French fashion designer Gaston la Mode gets Candace to model a new outfit with a ridiculously high collar, and he flatters her by calling her his "cou de crayon". It's not until the end of the episode that Ferb tells her it translates to "pencil neck".
• The Popeye short portraying Bluto as an etiquette teacher had him introducing himself as "Prof. Bluteau".
• One episode of W.I.T.C.H. has a Swiss Foreign Exchange Student with a French accent. All the boys were gaga for her. It turned out her accent was fake and she was really American though.
• As Told by Ginger had an episode that featured a foreign exchange student with a French accent named John Pierre. He was popular with girls.
• In the Bump in the Night episode "Gum Crazy", to play with the idea that the heart represents love and that French is regarded as a romantic language, the personification of Mr. Bumpy's heart appears as Mr. Bumpy with a mustache and a French accent.

La Vraie Vie

• The English language using French-derived words for cuisine is a tradition dating back to the Norman conquest of England, and it's continued because it still makes food sound better. "Café au lait" sounds tastier than "coffee with milk," and "hors d'oeuvre" sounds classier than "starter" or "appetizer."
  • It has been pointed out this began happening after 1066. The reason why Anglo-Saxon words are used for the food animals, while French terms are used for the meat dishes made from them, is very simple. The peasants who tended the animals but rarely got to eat the meat were Saxon peasants; the people who had nothing to do with the livestock but got to eat the carcasses were the ruling Norman-French.
• The Citroën Traction Avant car translates as Citroen "Front Wheel Drive."
• Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor is said to have said, "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." This is suspected not to be from Charles V at all, but rather an invention of one of his biographers. The best evidence for this is the fact that Charles was born in Ghent (now in the Flanders region of Belgium), considered himself Dutch, and grew up speaking Dutch, which the Dutch themselves have called "not a language, but a disease of the throat." On the other hand, the distinction between Low (northern) German and Dutch was not as clear then as it is now, so he may have been referring to Dutch. Furthermore, it is very possible that he was actually insulting God (or at least the Church), women, and men: circumstances at the time would have forced him to speak the languages he mentioned to the people he mentioned, as the Spanish Church was unusually powerful, custom dictated you speak to women in the "nicest" language you knew (i.e. Italian, if you knew it, which he did), and French was the language of politics and diplomacy (which at the time were the exclusive province of men and probably Charles's main conversation subject), leaving him able to speak only to his horse in his native tongue.
• This applies to Spaniards and Argentinians, the former for the distinción or "lisp" which defines the Castilian accent,^note The full "lisp", or ceceo is a feature of Andalusian Spanish, which is seen as a bit backcountry by Spaniards. Distinción is defined as only lisping (pronouncing as a soft "th", as in "thin") "c" and "z" and pronouncing "s" as "s"; ceceo is pronouncing even "s" with the "lisp", as well. and the latter for their Italian-influenced accent. There is a warning that Argentinians "will seduce you with their accents."
• To the uninitiated, all Cantonese conversations, like German, sound like arguments or fighting. The perceived harshness of the language could be attributed to speaking loudly in casual speech, the presence of unreleased final consonants (making certain words sound short and abrupt) and low tones (making the speech sound guttural).
• In many non-English speaking countries, everything sounds cooler in English; it's one of the main reasons why Gratuitous English is so widespread, after all. This leads to this trope being an inversion in French-speaking countries (France, Québec province, Switzerland, Belgium, etc.).
• Actor Jamie Bamber is fluent in French and Italian. There are numerous clips on YouTube of him speaking both languages and after one bit, a forum moderator is heard teasingly telling him, "That sound you hear is of ovaries exploding."
• Chantal Poullain is a French-Czech actress who married a Czech actor Boleslav Polivka. When asked how Czech sounded to her ears when she first heard it, she said that very deep and quite sexy but said that it was because she was in love. Her own Czech is strongly tinged with a French accent and she flatly refuses to study and use some grammatical rules, but her speeches always sound very seductively, no matter what she talks about. She's very devoted to charity work, and one would assume it helps her to gain sponsors.
• During a Nerd HQ panel, Tom Hiddleston answered a question by repeating a saying in French ("On a deux vies. La deuxième commence le jour où on réalise qu'on n'en a qu'une." Exact translation: "We have two lives. The second starts on the day we realize that we only have one.") Tom, being from London, didn't see what the big deal was, since France had always been just a short trip away. The audience, being mostly American females, started giggling hysterically.
• James McAvoy takes part in a French comedy skit (although his role is in English), and the comments section underneath the video is full of French fangirls who are swooning over the actor's Scottish brogue.
• Pedro Pascal recites the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene... specifically, "a beautiful Spanish translation" written by Pablo Neruda, another Chilean-American entertainer. When he finishes, he even gives a flirtatious wink to the viewers, some of whom commented below that his reading impregnated them.

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