French may be famously known as the language of love, but Spanish has been recognized globally as the most positive-sounding language in the world. If you’ve always been drawn to the way Spanish sounds, science now supports your feelings.

In a study, researchers analyzed the 10,000 most commonly used words in various languages—including English, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, French, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian, Arabic, and Spanish. They then had 50 native speakers from each language rate these words on a happiness scale from 1 to 10.

Peter Dodds, the study’s co-leader, highlighted the key finding: “Every language leans toward positivity.”

However, some languages exhibit a stronger positive bias than others. Chinese ranked the lowest in terms of happiness, followed by Korean, Russian, and Arabic. Spanish, in contrast, topped the list as the happiest-sounding language. Remarkably, Spanish contains nine positive words for every negative one, whereas Chinese has just three positive words for every seven negative ones.

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