September 19, 2025 Photo: Depositphotos.com
Researchers at Maastricht University have won one of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes, awarded for scientific achievements that first make people laugh, then make them think.
The Ig Nobel “peace prize” went to researchers in the Netherlands, Britain, and Germany for “showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.”
The research, “Dutch Courage? Effects of Acute Alcohol Consumption on Self-Ratings and Observer Ratings of Foreign Language Skills,” by Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field, and Jessica Werthmann, was actually published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in 2018.
In the study, 50 native German speakers who had recently learned Dutch were asked to take part in a short, standardised conversation in Dutch after consuming either a low dose of alcohol or a non-alcoholic drink. Their conversations were then recorded and rated by native Dutch speakers.
According to the observers, being slightly drunk improved the participants’ Dutch fluency.
This, the researchers concluded, shows that “acute alcohol consumption may have beneficial effects on the pronunciation of a foreign language in people who have recently learned that language.”
Dutch language Research Universities
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