which languages have the fastest rate of speech?

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which languages have the fastest rate of speech?

Postby rdearman » Thu Apr 15, 2021 5:18 pm

I remember reading some study which said some languages are more "information dense" than others and so less dense language have a higher speaking rate, and all human language passes information at about the same speed, but a less dense language speaker has to talk faster.

This could of course be complete bollocks, but what do you think about language and the rate of speaking? Spanish speakers talk faster than Russian? Italian speakers faster than Mandarin?
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Re: which languages have the fastest rate of speech?

Postby Neurotip » Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:05 pm

There may well be a literature on this that I'm not familiar with, so apologies if I'm speaking from ignorance... but some years ago I did a bit of research that involved measuring words per minute as spoken by various volunteer subjects. All were in English and all in conversation with myself about similar subjects in a similar environment, but the speech rate in wpm of the fastest speakers was fully twice that of the slowest.

I think it would be unlikely that any systematic difference between languages would approach that degree of variation within a language. Open to empirical refutation though!
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Re: which languages have the fastest rate of speech?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:20 pm

I don't know exactly what they mean by 'less information dense'. Surely all of them have a similar information density to get the same message across, though the number of words required according the language's structure may make them more word-count dense.

French has to be in this list. It has so much 'extraneous' stuff that you can even hear and sense speakers rushing to get it all out.

I'd say there are other things to consider though. Rhythms and prosody of certain languages tend to alter the rate of speech as well. In Italian you get the elongations and stops that moderate speech much more than French's monotone deliveries with little to no individual stresses. English is very much moderated by its rhythms and stress patterns.

I suppose the idea is that some languages can contain more information in fewer words. I don't know if this is true enough to cover all cases because you find some things more concisely expressed in a given language, yet other things in the same language going around the houses to say a simple thing.
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Re: which languages have the fastest rate of speech?

Postby einzelne » Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:52 pm

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Re: which languages have the fastest rate of speech?

Postby Querneus » Fri Apr 16, 2021 1:00 am

rdearman wrote:I remember reading some study which said some languages are more "information dense" than others and so less dense language have a higher speaking rate, and all human language passes information at about the same speed, but a less dense language speaker has to talk faster.

This could of course be complete bollocks, but what do you think about language and the rate of speaking? Spanish speakers talk faster than Russian? Italian speakers faster than Mandarin?

You're thinking of this thread, I believe.

I like Neurotip's post above in this thread. I've definitely met Spanish speakers who speak surprisingly slowly, 100% of the time... And wow, the fastest speaker spoke at fully double the speed?
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Re: which languages have the fastest rate of speech?

Postby Iversen » Fri Apr 16, 2021 10:06 am

What about Danish? When we speak fast we allegedly skip past half the sounds. Apart from that, the two persons who are credited with most words per minute (a man and woman) were both Anglophones last time I saw their names.
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Re: which languages have the fastest rate of speech?

Postby Cainntear » Fri Apr 16, 2021 2:24 pm

Le Baron wrote:I don't know exactly what they mean by 'less information dense'. Surely all of them have a similar information density to get the same message across, though the number of words required according the language's structure may make them more word-count dense.

Well that's the thing... it's historically been something of a subjective idea. Until recently, the prevailing theory was that all languages evolve to be equally information dense in terms of time, which means that a language with a lot of information per syllable will be spoken slowly, and a language with little information per syllable will be spoken much quicker.

In the past, people used to define their measures in such a way as to prove their language was "superior" to others, and it was considered pseudo-science to describe any language as more information dense (it was usually used to justify racial/linguistic supremacist views), but modern technology has made it easier to measure information transfer more objectively, as in the links the other two gave above.

When we talk about information density, we're now talking about how much meaningful content in terms of time, and it still holds true that speakers of languages with information-rich syllables tend to speak slower.
I'd say there are other things to consider though. Rhythms and prosody of certain languages tend to alter the rate of speech as well. In Italian you get the elongations and stops that moderate speech much more than French's monotone deliveries with little to no individual stresses. English is very much moderated by its rhythms and stress patterns.

And in particular the difference between stress-timed and syllable-timed languages.

English is stress-timed (the rhythm follows stressed syllables, unstressed syllables are squeezed in between), Spanish is syllable-timed (every syllable gets the same time). But everything's on a continuum, and languages are generally mostly stress or syllable timed, not exclusively one or the other.
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Re: which languages have the fastest rate of speech?

Postby Le Baron » Fri Apr 16, 2021 2:39 pm

To me it still looks like pseudo-science and academic quackery. However I can only be sceptical rather than certain. I'm not conversant in all languages and even all language groups, though I know enough to know that there is a lot of correspondence between ideas/information within roughly the same structures. Where one is wordy for one thing, another language will be wordy for others and the same for concision. It's rare that one finds a core, shared human idea that doesn't exist and can't be expressed in a language.

As far as I can tell the main reason languages ever speed up is where the words required for a sentence are simply longer, with many syllables and therefore would take a long time to say slowly and might lose meaning with too much contraction and gliding. Proficient speakers accustomed to saying them just learn to roll them out faster. I realise this is the point.
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