People often joke that a drink loosens the tongue in a foreign language. A small experiment found that native listeners agreed, at least about how the speakers sounded. The speakers themselves noticed no difference.
In the study, 50 native German speakers who had recently learned Dutch were randomly assigned to drink a small dose of alcohol or water before chatting in Dutch. Two native Dutch speakers who did not know who had been drinking rated the alcohol group's Dutch better overall. The work, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, won the 2025 Ig Nobel Peace Prize.
