When learning a new language, it’s easy to get the impression that native speakers can churn out sentences far faster than your brain can process. Surely you don’t speak this rapidly in your mother tongue? Rest assured, this isn’t necessarily your poor language skills or linguistic relativism – some languages may indeed be “faster” than others.
Of course, the speed of speech can vary from person to person. Some folks just speak slowly, while others spit out words like a machine gun. Likewise, most individuals will change the tempo of their speech depending on the setting, their mood, and so on.
However, one of the most widely accepted ways to study a language’s speed is the number of syllables per second. Numerous linguistics studies have looked into this metric and many come to the same conclusion: Japanese is the fastest language.
A 2011 study by researchers at the University of Lyon looked at seven different languages and ranked them on their syllables per second. Japan came out on top with 7.84 syllables per second, followed by Spanish (7.82 syllables per second), French (7.18), Italian (6.99), English (6.19), German (5.97), and Mandarin (5.18).
Interestingly, the perceived speed of a language might also have something to do with how much information it can encode.
Another study from the University of Lyon in 2019 looked at 17 different languages across Europe and Asia in terms of information per syllable. Although Japanese is apparently spoken quickly, it does not pack in much information with each syllable. Perhaps, the researchers ponder, the language is spoken quicker in a bid to fill the sentences with more meaning.
“We find robust evidence that some languages are spoken faster than others (for example, Japanese and Spanish speakers produce about 50 percent more syllables per second than Vietnamese and Thai speakers). Also, some languages ‘pack’ more information per syllable due to their phonology and grammar (for example, English has about 11 times more types of syllable than are possible in Japanese),” Dan Dediu, co-author of the 2019 study, said in a statement.
“However, more importantly, there is a trade‐off between the two such that ‘information‐light’ languages are spoken faster than the ‘information‐dense’ ones, balancing out at a rate of about 39 bits/second in all languages in our sample. Crazy, isn’t it?” added Dr François Pellegrino, lead author of the study.
You should take all these findings with a pinch of salt, however. Many disagree that solid data backs up the claim that there are significant tempo differences between different languages and dialects.
An older study from the 1960s compared the speech rate of six Japanese speakers and six American-English speakers, concluding there were no significant differences in speech rate between the two groups.
It’s also noteworthy that many of these linguistic studies have focused on European and East Asian languages, neglecting the thousands of other diverse languages that exist in the world. While it’s true that almost half of the world’s population speaks one of only ten languages as their mother tongue, there’s a wealth of curious and wonderful languages out there that are likely to defy all assumptions.
